My family and I are going briefly to the Netherlands soon. In preparation, I reviewed Svetlana Alpers’ The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (1983), which has helped me to think about pictures since I first encountered this book in the 1990s.

Alpers’ theory is subtler than my summary, but a good way to introduce it might be to consider two paintings (neither of them discussed by Alpers).

First, an Annunciation by Fra Angelico from 15th-century Florence:

This image conveys a story (Luke 1:26-38). The important questions for the viewer are what is happening and what that signifies. (In this case, the significance is cosmic, since the the Incarnation is underway.) The characters are central; other objects function like scenery and props for these protagonists.

The frame is like a window or a proscenium arch that allows us to look into a defined space. We are assumed to stand or kneel in front of the frame, looking toward the vanishing point right above Mary’s head. Each object is clearly outlined–probably first drawn, then colored in. The artist has analyzed reality in terms of these outlines. For instance, the building is a perfect rectangle; the arches are half-circles. And the bodies of the angel and woman are meaningful shapes, since humans were created in the image of God. By showing the true shape of important objects and people, the artist conveys truths of theology, geometry, and other worthy subjects.

Now compare a View of Egmond aan Zee by Salomon van Ruisdael.

This work also shows a few people in a context. But now we might imagine that we always have a visual field that changes as we move our eyes, our heads, and our locations in space. We can’t even tell the shape of our current visual field because it moves as we try to look at the edges. This picture is like a finite rectangle that has been snipped out of the whole field at a certain moment and hung on the wall. It is formed not of outlines but of brushstrokes. It was probably not drawn but composed with paint.

Van Ruisdael surely had aesthetic reasons for what he included and where he placed these objects, enjoying the location of the bluff, the darker cloud, and the church tower. But he hid his own contrivance by allowing the frame to interrupt the landscape and clouds. We do not imagine that the frame is something real, like a window, but just the edge of the image.

It is not clear where the viewer is located, partly because there are hardly any objects with sharp edges that would allow us to infer a vanishing point. We might be looking gently down on the scene, or we might not occupy any single location. Similarly, a map presents the earth as it would be seen from no particular point, without foreshortening. The Dutch were fascinated by maps and excellent at mapmaking.

All the objects are interesting; the eye does not necessarily settle on anything in particular but moves across the canvas. Everything is bathed in the same light and air. Something is happening–a group moves toward the town–but the painting is not a meaningful story, and the best question is not “What does their activity signify?”

Alpers thinks the purpose of this second work is to describe the reality that the viewer already knows, because the viewer delights both in the physical world and in the art of description. Other critics have supposed that appreciation of the natural world is spiritual, based on the idea of a creator.

Here, “art” has its original, Latin sense, which encompasses what we would call science as well as painting. A Dutch person would buy a van Ruisdael for the same reason that he would look through van Leeuwenhoek’s microscope, Christiaan Huygens’ telescope, a lens ground by Spinoza, or at a map. He wanted to learn more about how things look.

Alpers identifies the first model with Italy and the second with the North, especially the Netherlands, but she resists a simple dichotomy. The two “schools” were in close contact from the 1400s on. Major artists intuitively understood the differences, and some (such as Michelangelo) wrote explicitly about them. Unsurprisingly, some of the most interesting artists disrupted the dichotomy in original ways. Alpers discusses Rembrandt as an example and mentions some Southern cases that are beyond the scope of her book about Dutch art: Titian, Caravaggio, and Velazquez.

The two models are heuristics for understanding a wide range of European painting, but great artists have challenged it.

See also: three great paintings in dialogue;  Velazquez, The Spinners; an accelerating cascade of pearls (on Galileo and Tintoretto); the Dutch secret; Manet’s “Old Musician” (from 2004); and trying to look at Las Meninas (from 2005).