Taking Pictures Seriously A Reply to Hessel MiedemaPictures Seriously a Reply to Hessel Miedema

8/18/2019 Taking Pictures Seriously A Reply to Hessel MiedemaPictures Seriously a Reply to Hessel Miedema

1/6

Taking Pictures Seriously: A Reply to Hessel Miedema

Author(s): Svetlana Alpers

Source: Simiolus: Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art , Vol. 10, No. 1 (1978 -

1979), pp. 46-50

Published by: Stichting Nederlandse Kunsthistorische PublicatiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3780562

Accessed: 11-04-2016 15:40 UTC

R F R N S

Linked references are available on JSTOR for this article:http://www.jstor.org/stable/3780562?seq=1&cid=pdf-reference#references_tab_contents

You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references.

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at

http://about.jstor.org/terms

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted

digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information abo

JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

Stichting Nederlandse Kunsthistorische Publicaties is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserveand extend access to Simiolus: Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art

This content downloaded from 196 21 61 166 on Mon 11 Apr 2016 15:40:15 UTC


2/6

6

Taking pictures seriously: a reply to Hessel Miedema

Svetlana Alpers

It was in 1973, when I initiated an exchange of letters

with Hessel Miedema on the subject of the represen-

tation of the peasant in northern art, that I first discov-

ered his disagreement with my work. At the time I

thought he must be kidding when he wrote me, "I am

quite certain that a real Haarlem gentleman did not

laugh; not really, not with his mouth open and his

tongue and teeth showing and making ugly noises. He

did not have to; his self-command was too stoically

conditioned." But Miedema does not kid. (Could this

perhaps explain, despite his claim to objectivity, Mie-

dema's way of reading Dutch images?) And Miedema's

published work since then like his recent attack on my

work (Simiolus 6 [I977], pp. 205-I9) has made clear that

the disagreement between us goes beyond laughter to

the very nature of our study of art and its history and in

particular the art of the Netherlands.

I do not recognize the description of the field of art

history today-nor of my own place in it-set forth in

Miedema's opening paragraphs. It seems to me-and I

have written about this on another occasion-that the

place of style and iconography has been overtaken today

by a consideration of images and their circumstances.1

Younger art historians, and some of the older generation

as well, are newly aware of and alert to the range of

contexts-social, economic, educational, literary, even

technological-in which images function in a society.

Miedema's declared belief that the visual arts are a

phenomenon which has developed historically" (p. 206)

is common currency in this kind of study, which has

seen a new burst of collaborative efforts between art

historians, social and cultural historians, and even an-

thropologists. At issue is not historical significance versus

I Svetlana Alpers, "Is art history?," Daedalus 06 (1977), nr. 3, pp. i-

I3.

2 The article by Miedema to which I am responding addresses itself

mainly to the second of my two articles on the representation of the

peasant in Netherlandish art. Since the two articles are closely related

emotional response but precisely the kinds of circum-

stances which are relevant in a given society to an

understanding of its images (or artifacts). It is this kind

of project which I engaged in when studying festive

peasants in Netherlandish sixteenth- and seventeenth-

century art. I found the relevant circumstances here to

be a) interest in and relationship to the peasant as

documented in his economic and social interplay with

other members of society and b) the great flowering of a

particular kind of comic literature.

Faced by the variety of evidence I adduce to demon-

strate attitudes towards the peasant in the society and in

its images, Miedema is dismissive, belittling or both.2

Let me simply quote from his footnote 15 where he dubs

"absolute nonsense" the argument that peasants at

Bruegel's time were enjoying a period of prosperity

envied by city dwellers. My argument about the pea-

sants' situation, supported as it is not only by my

readings but also by the verbal opinions of two leading

economic historians of the period, Hermann Van der

Wee of the Catholic University of Leuven and Jan de

Vries of the University of California, Berkeley, is hardly

contradicted by Miedema's reference to his reading

about contemporary French history. Miedema's brief

section OTHER MATTERS manages to dismiss as "irre-

levant" or "meaningless" (or simply ignores) a) the

number of pictorial and verbal renderings of meetings or

exchanges between peasants and other members of the

society (works by Bol, Mostaert, and Vinckboons) and

b) a number of engaged and uncritical references to the

kermis. What are we to make of the expected appearance

of the Prince Regent at the Hague kermis, or Esaias van

de Velde's depiction of the Princes Maurice and Frede-

and since Miedema's quarrel is clearly with both of them, I shall

respond with reference to them both: "Bruegel's festive peasants,"

Simiolus 6 (I972-73), pp. 163-76, and "Realism as a comic mode: low-

life painting seen through Bredero's eyes, "Simiolus 8 (I975-76), pp.

I 15-44.

This content downloaded from 196.21.61.166 on Mon, 11 Apr 2016 15:40:15 UTCAll use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms


3/6

4 7

rik Hendrik at the fair at Rijswijk, or of the desire of

burghers to be portrayed with peasants at the center of a

kermis, not to mention peasants later in the century

being featured at court entertainments? Miedema

misses the point when he speaks of much of this material

as being "irrelevant if not contradictory to my thesis."

Although the festive peasant is at the center of my

examples, my aim was to give an account of the great

range of this society's preoccupation with the peasant.

(Historically, as my first article documented, the six-

teenth century witnessed a great surge of curiosity about

the peasant, his language, dress and behavior. This

clearly informs Bruegel's paintings, though it is only

part of the story.) If I have a thesis it is to suggest how

seldom, if ever, the peasant is specifically labelled in any

of the sources-verbal or pictorial-as an example of

sin. And in particular vomiting, fighting, love-making

and so forth, which are sinful in other contexts, were

seen in a different light when they took place at the

festive holiday that was a kermis or wedding. To quote

my text, "The concern is always with how the rest of

society comes to terms with such behavior; and the

common counsel is to accept" ("Realism as a comic

mode," p. 132).3

3 Miedema's article in effect recapitulates much of the source

material I included in my articles. In spite of his corrective tone there

are few instances in which a point of fact is actually disputed. But

Miedema's misunderstanding and/or misrepresentation of both the

material and the framework in which I presented it is pervasive. It

would take another article the length of his to straighten out all these

errors. The simplest thing is to ask any really devoted reader to go back

to my articles and compare them with Miedema's text for himself.

However to save us all time and energy let me give just a sample of

some errors. In his section entitled OTHER MATERIAL Miedema as-

sembles a number of things he considers to be irrelevant or con-

tradictory in my articles.

I discuss van Mander's Beelt van Haarlem because since his repre-

sentation of festive peasants served me as a central example, I felt I

should be careful to consider all references to the kermis in his writings

and art. Miedema argues that the poem, written in praise of Haarlem,

in which the outings of the town-dwellers are described, has nothing to

do with peasants. My point exactly-but what is interesting is that the

comparison van Mander employs to explain the need for such outings

is that of the kermis: "It is just like a kermis, people like clothing must

sometimes be aired." The fact that the peasant comparison used is not

from the life of the townsman (artist or viewer)-what on earth does

Miedema mean when he says that "not every kermis is a peasant

kermis" ?-is at the heart of the entire enterprise and mode of festive

comedy. Let us recall the outsider at Bruegel's Wedding dance, or at

van Mander's Peasant kermis, or in Bredero's Boerengeselschap. So

when Miedema accuses me of "leaving the problem hanging in mid-

It is with this that Miedema takes violent issue. But

although he is sure that the peasants are invoked as

moral exempla, he adduces no new evidence to prove

this point. The medieval Dutch narrative poem (Mie-

dema, p. 209) is surely not historically relevant. But

then history-in the large and yet specific sense here of

giving an account of the varied concerns with the pea-

sant evidenced in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century

sources-hardly seems Miedema's concern. He essen-

tially dismisses or disputes all the societal (and even

pictorial) evidence in order to concentrate on certain

texts. Here is where he is sure we can find the key which

will enable us to decipher the content of the images. It

turns out, not surprisingly, that Miedema and I also

disagree on our understanding of texts and their re-

lationship to images.

For all his condemnation of the nineteenth-century

preference for "direct emotional experience" (p. 206)

Miedema is himself caught up in another dialectically

related nineteenth-century notion: his claim for the

certainty and priority of the intellectual comprehension

offered by contemporary texts is simply an application

of the generally rejected Rankean notion of historical

objectivity. Here, as in his monumental commentary on

air" because van Mander's poem does not "encourage people to

indulge in feasting" he is deeply misunderstanding the case. As my

text clearly argued, it is, one might say, just this "hanging in mid-air,"

the uncertainty of the relationship between high and low, between our

ordinary lives and the festivity of the peasants that is at the heart of the

issue.

This in turn explains my inclusion of works which, though not

specifically kermises, represent the relationship of the non-peasant to

the peasant in a festive atmosphere. Hence the inclusion of the

stadholder at the horse fair, of the archduke and duchess of Flanders at

peasant affairs. I have no dispute with Miedema's claim that Jan van

de Velde's print ["Bruegel's festive peasants," fig. 9] is not a southern

Netherlandish kermis. But I would nevertheless claim its direct

relevance to this issue as it is engaged by the festive comic mode. The

particularly humane manner in which both the image and its caption

deal with the peasants' rest and their pleasure at drink-not noted as

such by Miedema-is, further, an example of that positive viewing of

the peasants at their pleasures that seems to have gone on even in the

Calvinist Republic of the United Netherlands. A similar humanity is

to be found in Jan van de Velde's almost le Nain-like Great village

festival ["Realism as a comic mode," fig. 14]. I fail to see what makes

the caption "highly critical" (perhaps the reference to vomiting?). But

this image I particularly distinguished as perhaps being best con-

sidered as in a georgic mode. It is for the reader to decide, adding this

note onto the extensive argumentation of my articles, whether as

Miedema claims, "the remaining examples are meaningless, or even

unequivocally negative."



4/6

SVETL N LPERS

van Mander's Grondt, Miedema not only treats texts as

the basis for our understanding of images (deciphering is

his term), but assumes that they are themselves capable

of being finally and unambiguously understood. Both of

these views have serious implications for our looking at

and understanding of pictures. Let me take the last point

f irst

Miedema's reading of the various texts relevant to the

peasant in Dutch art makes one wonder about the

soundness and appropriateness of such unambiguous

reading. How, for example, can one claim that van

Mander's report of Bruegel's disguising himself as a

peasant to attend peasant weddings and kermises is the

same topos as Lomazzo's account of Leonardo's party

when he invited peasants to his house to study their

facial expressions? Are these not indeed contrasting

rather than identical accounts of the relationship be-

tween non-peasant and peasant, artist and his subject?

(The contrast by the way is powerfully borne out in the

works of the two artists.) Or more central to my second

article, what is the purpose of Miedema's corrective

rereading of my reading of Bredero's Voorrede? With

care and detailed analysis I placed this text in the genre

of comic prefaces, considering it also in the history of

Dutch language and literature. Miedema-without

acknowledging, even to dispute it, the argument about

its comic genre and its relationship to a host of other such

prefaces, including ones by Rabelais, Ben Jonson and

others-simply links it to contemporary didactic prin-

ciples, narrowly conceived. Such a sense of literature

and of literary history seems as exclusive, and as tone

deaf one might say, as Miedema's sense of social history

and art. Of course education was one of the stated aims

of comedy, but the thrust of my discussion of sixteenth-

century comedy is that it entails what I, following a

notable group of scholars (Miedema might take a look at

Bakhtin, Lefebvre or C.L. Barber, all cited in my foot-

note i8), treat as festive comedy. The issue is not

pedantry versus pleasure (on the part of the modern

interpreter) any more than it is moral uplift versus

4 Miedema's paraphrase of Bredero's Boerengeselschap (p. 2I3)

could not begin to give any English-speaking reader a sense of the

spirit or the tone of the poet's voice in the original language. While

Miedema is satisfied to trust to such a reductive prose summary of this

poem, he is offended at my use of modern Dutch spelling in reproduc-

ing the Voorrede [The editors ofSimiolus, not Miedema, were responsi-

ble for this decision, taken in view of the difficulty of translating the

entire poem. THE EDITORS]

amusement (on the part of the seventeenth-century view-

er or reader). To put it this way is to reveal a serious

misunderstanding of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century

literature. For the very nature of this comic mode was to

engage and consider the conditions of human festivity-

and born as it was out of the combined strains of

humanist wit and the medieval folk carnival tradition it

did this by drawing on the voices and a cast of characters

taken from all levels of the society. It was deeply moral

but without preaching, without providing rigid morali-

ties or certain answers. This is as much a "principle"

(Miedema's term, p. 216) of the times-the times of

Erasmus, Rabelais, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Ben Jonson

and yes, Bruegel and Bredero-as the moral exempla of

Miedema. (See my reading of two of Bredero's poems to

explicate just this aspect of their moral purpose. ["Real-

ism as a comic mode," pp. I2I-22]).4 But since we are

dealing with literature I would prefer not to call it a

principle but rather a matter of mode which, pace Mie-

dema, is a term that refers to both subject and tone. It it

this context that accounts for a number-though hardly,

as I am careful to point out ("Realism as a comic mode,"

p. 138), all-of the images we have of the peasant from

this time. Miedema has not shown otherwise.

Let us finally turn from the texts to images and the

issue of realism. It is engaging in a naive view of art to

assume, as Miedema does here and in other writings,5

that the alternative before us is pure genre or l'art pour

l'art on the one hand and art as the expression of ideas on

the other: in this view art which is realistic, for its own

sake, is opposed to art as a realized abstraction, to quote

a phrase once used by E. de Jongh.6 This point is not

new in the study of Dutch art, it has in fact become

rather an obsession with some Dutch scholars. While it

perhaps supported the recovery of the emblematic na-

ture of certain images, here, as elsewhere, it seems to me

now to be a view which is significantly distorting our

understanding of northern images.

Few if any students of art history today would deny

the role played by convention in any representation.

5 See Hessel Miedema, "Over het realisme in de Nederlandsche

schilderkunst van de zeventiende eeuw," Oud Holland 89 (1975), pp.

2-18.

6 The phrase "een gerealiseerde abstractie" is found in E. de Jongh,

"Realisme en schijnrealisme in de hollandse schilderkunst van de

zeventiende eeuw," exhib. cat. Rembrandt en zijn tod, Brussels (Paleis

voor Schone Kunsten) 1971, p. 143.

8



5/6

Taking pictures seriously: a reply to Hessel Miedema

This has been as much a point of the twentieth-century

study of art (see Gombrich) as it has been of literature,

psychology or philosophy, to which one might even add

the physical sciences. It is our version of one of the

fundamental insights of twentieth-century thought.

Miedema's coupling of a naive realism with its dialectic

opposite, art as ideas, like his opposing of self-expres-

sion to Rankean objectivity, is a relic of the nineteenth

century. It has essentially been refuted, at least in these

terms.

The interesting question is why Dutch art historians

should still be embattled about these terms. The answer

I suspect is to be found in the nature of Dutch images

and their attitudes towards them. I am not as bothered

as Miedema is by the spectre of realism, perhaps because

I am not as bothered as he is by the images. It does not

involve a naive view of realism to see that seventeenth-

century Dutch images, for example (paintings as well as

prints), like a number of earlier northern images, are

more concerned with describing people, places and

some ordinary activities in a society-often indeed con-

cerned with recording the surface of the seen world-

than, shall we say pictures by artists working in the

Italian tradition. Landscapes, maps, city views, insects

or a drop of water seen through a lens, house interiors,

burghers' families or the peasants with which I was

concerned, all this and more comes within the purview

of the image-maker in the Netherlands. At issue is not

are they or are they not real-the question in this form

hardly makes sense-but how such images were made,

functioned, served, were valued and perceived in the

society. It is just this that I dealt with, for example, in

defining the ethnographic engagement of Bruegel's pea-

sant descriptions-for in one respect his paintings are

that. Miedema seems so bothered by the spectre of a

naive realism that his answer to these questions is re-

peatedly that images function as ideas do, or specifically

like the moralistic texts he takes all Renaissance writing

7 The defiance with which Miedema refuses to look at pictures is

astonishing. "To date," he writes (p. 21 I), "not a scrap of evidence has

been produced to show that they [Bruegel and Leonardo] felt any

sympathy or identification with their subjects." Miedema further

proclaims that the question of sympathy (of the artist for his subject)

could not have been an issue before the nineteenth century. Sympathy

and identification are Miedema's terms, not mine. My articles con-

sidered rather the kind of relationship that was established between

the artist (or the putative viewer) and the pictorial world. To argue

that this was not a recognized fact and a central issue in Renaissance art

and theory is indeed not to know one's historv. And to assume that the

to be. One could not deny that images are informed by

texts. My linking of peasant depictions and a particular

comic literary mode (thus realism as a comic mode) is

itself a version of this relationship. But I do not recom-

mend, as Miedema does, that we look right through the

surface or even do not look at pictures at all-a strange

posture for an historian of art Miedema says (p. 209),

"We will therefore have to pass over his [Brueghel's]

paintings for the moment, since it is impossible to assess

their connotative value for the I6th-century viewer. We

are on safer ground with the prints, since they generally

embody a text." But in my view, to give the example of

Brueghel's Wedding dance, the quality of the rendering,

the description and characterization of the peasants,

their gestures, and the organization of the painting

played a part in the sixteenth-century viewer's under-

standing as surely as they do in ours.7

In the case of Netherlandish images in particular to

dispense with surface-by which I mean what is de-

picted as well as how-seems to me to dispense with

what was of great concern to the craftsman/artist and

what has always been the source of pleasure to viewers of

the works. As a result of my recent research on Dutch

art, I would suggest reversing the current formula of

hidden meanings under a real surface to argue that far

from hiding meanings, the art of the Dutch is engaged

with making meaning visible, and with a belief, not

unknown in the seventeenth century, that meaning lies

in the visible. The peculiar possibilities, but also the

entailments implicit in such a view-of knowledge, but

also of images-has much to do with the nature and look

of Dutch art. (If, by the way, you wonder where the

surface has gone in the current study of Dutch art one

answer is that you will find it in the laboratory in-

vestigation of the physical condition and materials of

works. This is a literal, rather than a metaphoric, seeing

through the surface.)

We are in the funny position today of finding that at a

working out of this relationship is not visible in the works-in Brue-

gel's depiction of the peasants at the Wedding dance even as it is in

Leonardo's Last supper-strains credulity. I leave aside the dismaying

human implications of the view that no Renaissance man was capable

of recognizing the humanity that he shared even with peasants. We can

in short distinguish Bruegel's peasants from those by other artists. As I

wrote, "To view peasant festivities in art as a form of comedy is not to

make all artists into Pieter Bruegel, for what in his hands is a subtle,

problematic artistic mode, can also be a simple one, making peasants

into objects of fun" ("Bruegel's festive peasants," p. 176). But such

crude jesting is also part of a comic mode.

4 9



6/6

SVETL N LPERS

time when students of German, French, Italian, even

Indian and Chinese art are at work investigating the role

of the image in society, a number of Dutch art his-

torians, working on an art which is so rich and in-

novative in just this respect, deny such issues in the

name of texts. (And if you wonder where the circum-

stances of the art have gone, you will find them con-

sidered in the publications and exhibitions of the Am-

sterdam Historical Museum.)

I hope that it is clear by now what are the basic and

essential disagreements that exist between me and Mie-

dema about the nature and study of art. I think that I in

fact dealt with most of Miedema's specific points in my

articles, which I hope the interested reader will consult.

I also hope that the interested reader is an interested

viewer, and that he will look at the pictures which are,

after all, the initial spur and the continuing pleasure of

an art historian's work. The joylessness and cultural

self-hatred of Miedema's attack-it seems out of sorts

both with its own time and with the Dutch seventeenth

century-call for our sympathy, but cannot, I think,

command our intellectual assent.

5 0

This content downloaded from 196 21 61 166 on Mon 11 Apr 2016 15:40:15 UTCAll use subject to http://about jstor org/terms

Taking Pictures Seriously A Reply to Hessel MiedemaPictures Seriously a Reply to Hessel Miedema

Documents

Transcript of Taking Pictures Seriously A Reply to Hessel MiedemaPictures Seriously a Reply to Hessel Miedema