A unique seventeenth-century account of painting as it was practiced, taught, and discussed during a period of extraordinary artistic and intellectual ferment in the Netherlands.
The only comprehensive work on painting written by a Dutch artist in the later seventeenth century, Samuel van Hoogstratennsquo;s Inleyding tot de hooge schoole der schilderkonst, anders de zichtbaere werelt (Introduction to the Academy of Painting; or, The Visible World, 1678) has long served as a source of valuable insights on a range of topics, from firsthand reports of training in Rembrandtusquo;s studio to contemporary engagements with perspective, optics, experimental philosophy, the economics of art, and more.
Van Hoogstratentsquo;s magnum opusodash;here available in an English print edition for the first timepdash;brings textual sources into dialogue with the authorssquo;s own experience garnered during a multifaceted career. Presenting novel twists on traditional topics, he makes a distinctive case for the status of painting as a universal discipline basic to all the liberal arts. Van Hoogstraten squo;s arguments for the authority of what painters know about nature and art speak to contemporary notions of expertise and to the unsettled relations between theory and practice, making this book a valuable document of the intertwined histories of art and knowledge in the seventeenth century.
