INTRODUCTION
Samuel van Hoogstraten’s Inleyding tot de Hooge Schoole der Schilderkonst: Anders de Zichtbaere Werelt (‘Introduction to the Academy of the Art of Painting: Otherwise known as the Visible World’, hereafter referred to as the Visible World) is neither much read nor much loved. In part that is our fault – we cannot read seventeenth-century Dutch, or if we can, we do not love to read Hoogstraten’s book. There has never been a scholarly Dutch edition. This edition was first put online in 2011, since then Celeste Brusati has edited an English version, translated by Jaap Jacobs, and I commend it to you wholeheartedly. Previous to that the only recent scholarly presentation of the entire text was in French, translated and edited by Jan Blanc. [see note 1, below] Nevertheless, over the last quarter of a century, there has been an increase in interest in Hoogstraten as a writer, as a painter and as a citizen. [see note 2, below]
Hoogstraten is one of those so-called Minor Masters whose reputation has benefitted from changes in Dutch art historical scholarship, especially scholarship on the Great Masters. In order to ‘fix’ Rembrandt’s catalogue, the frangible edges of his oeuvre has been distributed among his students. [see note 3, below] Hoogstraten was a student of Rembrandt and, although his already well-established oeuvre was not changed by the redistribution, a lot of previously Great Paintings have now been attributed to previously minor masters, named and anonymous. There had in any case been an increased interest in lesser-known Dutch painters during the 1980s when research focussed upon iconographical interpretation. This was a decade during which connoisseurial enquiry, if it did not decline in scholarly prestige, certainly seemed less appealing to many younger scholars. It is fair to say that a generation of art historians has matured during the last thirty-years who do not feel it necessary to work on great masters in order to make Big Statements. Furthermore, Hoogstraten’s extraordinary painted objects, his peepshows and trompe l’oeil, speak to a discipline that is also busy seeking to develop a notion of ‘visual culture’ in history, the relations of sensory perception, cognition and identity in the past. In this context, his emergence is also the result to the general shift in the humanities caused by the rise of cultural studies and theoretical innovation. In her book Artifice and Illusion [see note 2], Celeste Brusati presented the English-speaking world with a characterisation of Hoogstraten the artist which was amenable to a sophisticated reading of baroque ‘self-fashioning’. The picture she describes is compelling. Without devaluing one’s experience of the sensation of the artwork, one is offered tools (a specific historical context, for example) to demystify and desublimate the work of art by setting Hoogstraten’s working life into a precise place in Dordrecht citizen life.
Hoogstraten devoted his last years to writing. In addition to writing the volume we have here, he also wrote a second volume, the ‘Invisible World’. Arnold Houbraken’s Life of Hoogstraten (see my translation here) mentions that he was in possession of the manuscript of the Invisible World – but sadly Houbraken died during the publication of his own three-volume opus, the De Groote Schouburgh der Nederlantsche Konstschilders en Schilderessen, and never got around to publishing his master’s other work. Since then it has never been seen. So we are left with the one book and its invisible other.
The Inleyding tot de hooge schoole der schilderkonst was beautifully produced by Hoogstraten’s brother, Frans, to the highest standards of the very high Dutch standards of those days. It ‘sits well in the hand’ as the Dutch say. There is a nice copy in the British Museum, which is unfortunately tearing itself apart because the vellum binding has been allowed to warp. You can download a scan of the original edition from various websites. When you open it you will see that it is divided into nine chapters, each named after one of the Muses. An allegorical ‘portrait’ of each Muse is placed at the beginning of their respective chapters. The title pages were etched by Hoogstraten. When viewed all together they provide a heroic pictorial treatise on their own. They are supported by explanatory poems. There are also numerous other prints scattered throughout the book, each designed and etched by one or another of Hoogstraten’s pupils. As a visible manifestation of the Visible World, the book is an appealing object.
We give to our pupil in the Art of Painting […] nine mistresses who themselves since long ago have been set above all the planets and stars in heaven and their orbits […] One single spirit rules over all the liberal arts, the same spirit which inspires the poet to poetry drives painters to the depiction of visible things; things which by poets are represented only with words
It was a witty piece of thinking on Hoogstraten’s part to employ the Muses to structure his book. In classical times there had been no Muse of painting – the Muses (the companions of Apollo on Mount Parnassus) were concerned solely with the verbal, musical and performing arts. By conscripting all the Muses, rather than adapting one to the role of a Muse of painting, or even inventing a new Muse, Hoogstraten makes all the other arts work for painting. [see note 4, below] With the category ‘the visible world’, all of nature is made subordinate to sight, since nature is defined as the visible. So all of the Muses are subordinated to Painting, which is the art of sight in a system where sight is co-extensive with worldly knowledge, “for everything that in nature is visible, provides the objects of Painting and the Art of Drawing.” Thus from the beginning of the book there is an ambition that painting be considered not only an art, but also a science (by this I mean a branch of human knowledge in the broadest sense, along the lines of the German word Wissenschaft). To be worthy of this responsibility, a painter required a comprehensive set of abilities and skills. And the painter also required, or deserved, a certain social prestige. We are told of the status accorded painters in antiquity, as in the widely quoted story from Pliny, known via Van Mander or Junius, that in ancient Rome only citizens (and not slaves) could become painters. We are told that people of the highest social distinction learn how to draw – Fredrik Hendrik, Prince of Orange, takes it for granted that a prince should be able to describe the layout of his troops with pen and paper. We are also told how esteemed painters were, how they came into the circle of the greatest men – Apelles, Alexander’s court painter, is mentioned frequently, often as the friend of his world-conquering patron. So the business of painting is as good as, if not better than, any other branch of applied knowledge. At one point a painter at work is compared to a classical description of Archimedes at work, since both appear to produce miracles. So in this organisation, where all the Muses serve painting, Painting becomes the paradigm of worldly knowledge, and the painter becomes a paragon of human skill and understanding, a ‘schilderheld‘ (a ‘painter hero’, dressed in armour in the prints).
There were nine ancient muses: in alphabetical order, Calliope (Epic Poetry), Clio (History), Erato (Love Poetry), Euterpe (Song and Elegiac Poetry), Melpomene (Tragedy), Polyhymnia (Hymns/Sacred Poetry), Terpsichore (Dance), Thalis (Comedy) and Urania (Astronomy). In Hoogstraten’s book they are adapted to the various aspects of artistic knowledge. He calls each chapter a ‘classroom’ (carrying through the reference in the title of the book to a High School, or as we might say, academy), and distributes the various elements of art between them. The chapters are not abruptly separated according to topic, however. Topics often appear under the tutelage of more than one ruling goddess, and overlap and recur in different contexts according the particular character the Muse. Hoogstraten begins with Euterpe, who (like the others) is a different character from her ancient namesake on Parnassus. He describes her as the charmer who attracts young men to her (and therefore to Painting), and uses the chapter to discuss the necessary qualifications for anyone seeking to become a painter. Here we encounter Hoogstraten’s central beliefs (and anxieties) concerning his project. Firstly that painting is a liberal art, or even something like a science. Painting is based on proper rules (regelen) which are organised in a structure. The structure must be learned in correct order, and a description of the correct order of the structure produces a coherent taxonomy of its parts, which reveals a coherent theory. On the other hand, painting requires an innate talent (gheest: spirit). I have usually left occurrences of this word as ‘spirit’ in the translation, since other meanings can also be implicit; it can mean, among other things, ‘wit’, ‘mind’, ‘genius’ or ‘imagination’, as well as having a theological or demonological significance, as in the English cognate ‘ghost’. The painter also needs a strong ambition or inclination (neiging), or love of painting. Desire and love are active players in Hoogstraten’s world; they are one of the means by which providence reveals itself. To those who have the talent painting can be taught, but becoming a painter is not reducible to grasping the theory (becoming a ‘painter in the mouth’), for like a craft, ultimately it requires practise (oeffening) which links the mind to the hand (the Dutch word ‘handeling‘, like the Italian word ‘maniera‘, both refer to the hand) producing art. So on the one hand painting is a structured body of knowledge amenable to rational analysis, and on the other it is a mysterious accumulation of intuitions and rule-bound truths perceptible only to those who have judgement (oordeel), honed by experience (ervaring).
Euterpe attracts youth to art. The second Muse, Polyhymnia, considers the rules and measurements for the representation of the beautiful human body which also debates the notion of beauty. This chapter also includes observations on portraiture. As is the case in several other chapters, it closes with a humorous section – here on ugliness, where Hoogstraten draws on the writing of Cervantes and refers to the painting of Adriaen Brouwer. Clio, the Muse of History, is the vehicle for Hoogstraten’s analysis of the highest form of art, History Painting. The chapter begins with a general statement of painting as a universal art (art as a natural history), but also describes the different levels of art by subject matter, from still life to history. This hierarchy of subject matter provides a hierarchy of painters, who are likened to the ranks in an army. The principles of composition are broken down: we should consider the persons involved, the moment in the action depicted, and the time and place of the event. Erato, the Poetess of Love, as well as addressing erotic topics, also encompasses the topic of nature – necessary, too, for the depiction of pastoral and landscape. The figure of Erato holds a cornucopia in the illustration, and Hoogstraten urges us to add abundant detail drawn from nature’s infinite resources. The discussion of nature covers not only fruitful landscape, but animals too. Thalia, the Farceuse or Comic Muse, contains Hoogstraten’s advice on invention and composition (ordineeren). Having urged the painter to imitate nature (‘naar ‘t leven‘, i.e., after life) Hoogstraten now commends composition from memory or imagination (‘uyt den geest‘). Here the lessons learned in Polyhymnia and Thalia can be brought together. He commends Rembrandt’s invention and composition in a celebrated reference to the Night Watch. The image of Terpsichore takes us directly to the painter’s studio, where she sits surrounded by apprentices, masters at work, and visiting patrons. We return here to the notion of handeling, and with that we turn to the topic of paint, to colour itself. Colours, like words for the poet, are the medium of and for painterly representation. Hoogstraten especially commends illusionism, which is the visual equivalent of persuasion, the rhetorical power of words. Just as a rhetorical manual might, he describes the various styles of painting (rough or smooth) both as being suitable for certain purposes and as the index of an individual style. Another famous passage here describes the painting competition between Porcellis, Knippbergen and Van Goyen. In Melpomene, the Tragic Muse, Hoogstraten addresses a subject we might have thought required investigation earlier in the book, given its sub-title – that of sight itself. But this is not a physiological analysis, rather a metaphorical one. The Muse of Tragedy tells her stories though the alternation of light and dark, the play of fate, a succession of visibility and invisibility which is used by Hoogstraten to tell a history of the emergences and disappearances of painting in the world. Calliope is the Muse of Epic, and this offers Hoogstraten the framework for a history of schilderhelden, painting heroes, a history of art which enables him to deal not only with the lives of painters, but also with their careers, both of which are always dictated by circumstances of time and place. Urania is the Muse of Astronomy. Astronomy is profoundly bound up with the notion of fate, already a topic in the chapter on tragedy, and illustrated by the diverse fortunes recounted in the chapter on the schilderhelden. In the final book, Hoogstraten addresses the success and failure of artists in the world thematised through fame (glory), profit (winst en rijkdom) and personal satisfaction (een groot vermaek): ‘There are three drives which spur one on to learn the arts: Love, profit and in order to be honoured by all’ (Drie driften prikkels zijn, waerom men konsten leert: Uit liefde, om ‘t loon, en om by elk te zijn geërt). These drives are the theme of one of Hoogstraten’s most famous works, the Perspective Box in the National Gallery London [see note 5, below] where the exterior faces are devoted to the ’causes’ of art. Hoogstraten, as contemporary readers might have have recognised, was paraphrasing the Stoic philosopher Seneca on the characteristics of the happy life. The final book tells us that it is the task of Urania to choose the best, and we should not fail to appreciate that Hoogstraten himself is one candidate for this honour.
The Visible World is a wonderful and extraordinary book. It is highly literate, even though it is not as learned as its references imply. Hoogstraten relies substantially on materials already circulating in Dutch, and his library, although large by the standards of the time, can be narrowed down to a medium-long shelf of handbooks and compendia. Two centuries of the printing press and translation had created an accessible body of ‘classical’ wisdom and knowledge, and had found, enabled or produced a class of writers and readers who felt that they needed to communicate through it. In this Hoogstraten is very conventional. But he makes something which is absolutely his own. There is a wittiness in his associative play of concepts and words that is unique. For example, the engineering of the book around the Muses is a wonderful conceit. He finds a way of matching his intellectual project to an uncomplicated set of categories, and then plays in and out of them to produce an object of extraordinary complexity, like a dance or the knotting of embroidery. He is what we now call a lateral thinker, and you need to pay attention if you wish to follow him. His mind is fertile and inventive, just like his paintings. You think you have it, but you may be wrong, and being wrong is as much fun as being right. The shared, standard cultural references of a grammar school education are shot through with the personal – we read of his own experiences, and of stories he has picked up on his travels in Rome, Vienna and London. He is an amusing raconteur and an engaging and lively versifier; the anecdotal and digressive material adds enormously to our pleasure in reading. Although the reader’s pleasure is certainly one intended outcome of the book, these anecdotal elements are not a surplus: they are part of his project and draw our attention to the lessons we must learn if we wish to become a painter. But they also mollify the process of learning. When relating some potentially tedious details of the measurement of the human body, and being polite about Dürer’s obsessive metrification of beauty, he thinks to turn from the material on a number of occasions and directly address his reader (putatively a young painter) in a lively manner. It is a pity that the writings of Hoogstraten, like those of Van Mander, have not been read as complete wholes. They have been chopped up into exportable bits; and although this means that we obtain from them ‘what we need to know’, we lose the voice and the sense of an author in a place at a time.
This is not a book by ‘an intellectual’, although it is richly informed by the intellectual culture of its time as experienced by an aspiring Dutch citizen. It is not an ‘important’ book, inasmuch as it does not introduce or inaugurate new directions in its discipline. It is a book like many other books. But it is the only book of its kind, and it offers to the careful reader an object for intellectual engagement, and pleasure.
A FOOTNOTE ON METHOD
As a footnote, I add here what I wrote as an apology, or explanation of method, when I first started publishing the Visible World on the web in 2011. I have not changed my mind much since although I have reduced my ambitions vis-à-vis producing an annotated version – life is too short, someone else can do it.
What I am trying to do with this translation will be achieved in stages. Book by book I will put the translation online. The online version is the one you will see when you click on the column of the names of the Muses (the titles of the books) on the left-hand side of this page. I am also preparing an annotated version, which will be available as a downloadable PDF. The downloadable version will be more ‘like’ the original in that it will preserve the page turnings, and there will be footnotes providing a commentary on the work in the conventional scholarly fashion, so it will also be more ‘like’ an academic textbook. Each PDF will be upgraded as my research develops. Thus there will be a fluid and continuous process of updating. Likewise, the text on the webpage will be continuously upgraded, but the work here will be to add enhancement for a more general reader, linking the text to materials available on the web (linking to images and museum/gallery websites, and to other sites for general knowledge, and references to persons and places mentioned in Hoogstraten’s text, etc.).
There are and will be mistakes. Every translator gets things wrong. But I am confident that anyone reading this can trust it, and I am certain you can trust my good faith, which is why I am happy to put it out on the web. Think of this as a beta version; I am using you, the reader, as my editor. Translation is also a matter of interpretation and opinion. As well as getting something wrong, I may also be failing to see and read the text in the way that you see it, and so may be producing something with which you do not agree. Translations can be improved. The advantage of the online form of publication is that improvement can be achieved continuously and seamlessly. If you find an error, or if you cannot make sense of my interpretation, or if some reference is wrong, or if you disagree with my reading, then you should email me at the address on the homepage and I will put whatever is wrong, right. It may be that I do not agree with your ‘improvement’, but I promise (trolling apart!) to address any issue that is presented to me, and I will give you all credit. Bear in mind that Hoogstraten has an errata segment at the back of the Inleyding (as was common in books at the time); maybe a translation of his errata will be the last section added to this website.
I have not tried to produce a fluent, modern English version of Hoogstraten’s prose. Jan Blanc did this with some success in his French version, and I am full of admiration and respect for him. What I have done here is to produce something more like a ‘crib’. By that I mean that I have ‘Englished’ the words, at the same time retaining the seventeenth-century Dutchness of the syntax. You will therefore experience a great deal of period and cultural difference. The reading will not quite be comfortable, and that is what is intended. Take punctuation. We have a finely tuned and conventionalised use of punctuation in modern English. We know the statistics relating sentence length to levels of anticipated ‘reader skill’ and ‘levels of attention’ (word processors can analyse any text you write and ‘correct’ you as you write using statistical models; they can even learn your style as you write). With us, punctuation is altered for different writing genres. Popular fiction uses shorter sentences than academic writing. Seventeenth-century authors tended to employ punctuation more as a representation of the speaking voice. Conventions existed, but they vary widely from author to author, rather than from genre to genre, or market to market, following the voice rather than any conventions or sets of rules. The word ‘punctuation’ comes from the same root as the word ‘point’, and refers to the practice of marking texts for reading, for chanting and/or for singing aloud, (thus: ‘pointed Psalms’). I ask you to trust me on this, and thereby to trust Hoogstraten. By re-using his sentence structure, word order and punctuation, much of his way of thinking and engaging his public is carried through to the modern reader. He writes ridiculously (to us) long sentences, but that is how he was able to say the things he was trying to say. That is how people thought, or that is how he thought then, and in that place, and for that purpose, addressing that readership. He wraps topics together, links ideas in series, and runs parallel analyses which is closer to what we would accept in spoken language than we are used to in written language. For him, there seems to be little difference between a comma, a colon and a semi-colon. Full stops have pretty much the same function as they do for us. So trust him. Read the text aloud in your head (hearing his voice); think of commas as separating statements, and colons as pulling separate things together, leading you on to something; semi-colons, meanwhile, have the job of keep things apart without separating them too completely. Full stops very often, though not always, start you off again, and invite you to pause before you do so.
English and Dutch are very similar to each other, and early-modern Dutch was even more similar to its contemporary English, especially the dialects of seafaring Dutch and English dialects along the east coast. Thousands of English-speaking people travelled to and lived in the Netherlands, and thousands of Dutch speakers travelled to and lived in the British Isles. Dutch ships were full of Dutch, German and French speakers (not to mention Bretons, Welsh, Scots, Irish, Scandinavians and Baltic peoples), as were English and Scots ships. The great city ports such as Amsterdam and London exchanged goods and knowledge employing a street and trading language which was even audible in polite circles (mercantile English was richly inflected by Dutch terms at this time – as of course was the language of art appreciation). Hoogstraten was one of those transplanted people, he lived in England for a number of years in the 1660s. His Dutch is not identical to that of any other Dutch speaker or writer of his period (nor their’s to each other). He was anyway a Dordtenaar whose parents had arrived in Dordrecht from Brabant, any contemporary Dutch person would have heard in his accent and vocabulary a number of regional features. There was a brisk circulation of Dutch humorous and critical texts which played on such identifications. He was also an importer of English terms into Dutch (and no doubt, invisibly to us, an importer in the other direction). Most of our borrowings from Dutch occurred in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which is no surprise since we had a history in common through trade, through (and despite) rivalry, through a shared Reformation and through a King we made of their Prince of Orange. We share a basic set of words with the Dutch. Wherever possible I have tried to use the ‘similar’ English word, or turn of phrase, even at the cost of sounding folksy. I cannot always do this, because sometimes words and phrases have travelled in different directions over the years coming to mean quite different things. Failing to notice that will be the source of some of my mistakes. I have therefore left the structure of the original pretty much unaltered, even at the cost of awkwardness, except where it seems absurdly tortuous to me.
I have used modern English standard spellings of real names, and spelled out abbreviated references to persons, places and texts. I use {frilly} parentheses to indicate editorial additions (for example, to draw your attention to a particular word in the original), and [square] parentheses to mark marginalia; (conventional) parentheses are Hoogstraten’s own. Layout is something of a problem in the online version as presenting pages, even with the few letter-press effects employed by Hoogstraten, is not possible. These will be ‘corrected’ in the PDFs which will be much more ‘mimetic’.
NOTES
note 1. Inleyding tot de hooge schoole der schilderkonst (Introduction à la haute école de l’art de peinture, Rotterdam, 1678), Librairie Droz, (coll. Travaux du Grand Siècle), Geneva, 2006; see the review by T. Weststein, Simiolus: Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art, Vol. 32, No. 2/3 (2006), pp. 218-222. Samuel van Hoogstraten’s Introduction to the Academy of Painting; or, The Visible World, Getty Research Institute, 2020. There has been a modern facsimile printing of the original edition of the Inleyding, first published in 1969 by Davaco Publishers, Rotterdam.
note 2. I list here just the most significant monographs/books (there have been numerous scholarly articles): M. Roscam Abbing, De schilder en schrijver Samuel van Hoogstraten 1627-1678, Primavera Pers, Leiden 1993; P.G.B. Thissen, Werk, netwerk en letterwerk van de familie Van Hoogstraten in de zeventiende eeuw, APA-Holland Universiteits Pers, Amsterdam 1994; A.C. Brusati, Artifice and illusion: the art and writing of Samuel van Hoogstraten, University Of Chicago Press, Chicago 1995. Hans-Jorg Czech, Im Geleit der Musen. Studien zu Samuel van Hoogstratens Malereitraktat Inleyding tot de Hooge Schoole der Schilderkonst: Anders de Zicht-baere Werelt (Rotterdam 1678), Waxmann, Munster, 2002; T. Weststijn, The Visible World. Samuel van Hoogstraten’s Art Theory and the Legitimation of Painting in the Dutch Golden Age , transl. B. Jackson & L. Richards, Amsterdam University Press, distributed by The University of Chicago Press, 2008; J. Blanc, Peindre et penser la peinture au XVIIe siècle. La théorie de l’art de Samuel van Hoogstraten, Peter Lang, Berne, 2008; T. Weststijn, ed., The Universal Art of Samuel van Hoogstraten (1627-1678), Painter, Writer, and Courtier, Amsterdam University Press, distributed by The University of Chicago Press, 2013.
note 3. The Rembrandt Research Project, set up in 1968 by an agency of the Dutch government, produced five volumes of the Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings between 1982 and 2011, when the as yet incomplete project was (it seems permanently) abandoned.
note 4. An example would be the character/personification ‘Pictura’. She appears as a the figure equipped with painting tools, and with a perspectival painting at her feet, in the frontispiece of Philips Angel’s Lof de Schilder-Konst of 1642 (in this case a strange combination of the The Holland Maid and Artemis of Ephesus).
note 5. see http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/samuel-van-hoogstraten-a-peepshow-with-views-of-the-interior-of-a-dutch-house) where the exterior faces are devoted to these ’causes’ of art. The National Gallery Technical Bulleting, Volume 11, 1987 (by Christopher Brown, David Bomford, Joyce Plesters and John Mills) gives a comprehensive material analysis of the Perspective Box. A PDF of the Technical Bulletin is available for download at: http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/technical-bulletin/brown_bomford_plesters_mills1987.