Perilous Chastity: Women and Illness in Pre-Enlightenment Art and Medicine. - book reviews

Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Pres 1995 318 pp; 8 color ills., 101 b/w $6050; $2475 paper

Nearly thirty years ago counter-current de Jongh wrote a undaunted article on the erotic easy in mind of 17th-century Dutch genre paintings. "Erotica in vogelperspectief" (Erotica in bird's-eye view), the first essay in Kwesties van betekenis: Thema en motief in de Nederlandse schilderkunst van de zeventiende eeuw (Questions of meaning: Theme and motif in Netherlandish painting of the seventeenth century) brought to light the many surprising ways in which seemingly decorous representations of genteel life are repeatedly provocative and titillating. With dried wit de Jongh detailed the rich imagery of erotic euphemism: the bird vender with a cock or the huntsman with the gift of a bird that play upon the word vogelen (to bird), slang for copulation, the caged and uncaged birds referring to virginity or the lack thereof. To support his readings of these paintings, de Jongh marshaled an array of true copys and prints, which in turn round help to produce a picture of the broader cultural words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] following for viewing these works. Further, he asked an important question that still gravels us and him today: Just what is it about this society that l to the demand for in the way that many pictures that stretch the limits of decorum or push at what he calls the schaamtegrens (border of shame)? In exploring this striking tolerance for vulgarity, de Jongh perhaps attended too little to differences in medium and temporal changes and thus minimized the significant shift from bawdy imagery early in the hundred to a later tendency, evident in the works of Gabriel Metsu Jan Vermeer Gerard ter blotch and others, to channel a more sublimated sexuality into fine paintings. Unlike earlier images of prodigality and prostitution, which were outwardly risque, these refined, seemingly decorous pictures of upper-middle-class make subordinates confound our expectations by presenting the depressed in high form.

"Erotica in vogelperspectief" was as tantalizing in its art historical way as in its subject matter. for it challenged with intelligence and substantial evidence the prevailing notion that Dutch genre paintings were essentially naturalistic, that they exhibited daily life accurately, as it was. At the same time, it propos a of recent origin way of investigating the meaning of Dutch painting. This was single of the articles that positioned de Jongh at the fore in the iconographic investigation of 17th-century Dutch art: his contribution was to take Erwin Panofsky's mode of iconographic and iconological interpretation, which had been applied to Renaissance history make submissives and demonstrate its usefulness as a means for understanding in what way the new kinds of secular genre mirrored the tillage that produced them. Scenes from daily life, portraits, landscapes, and still lifes, too, were interpretable end pictorial and literary conventions of moralizing and emblematic meaning. above the course of the nearest three decades de Jongh would ascertain to be one of the greatest in quantity important and influential interpreters of Dutch painting.

Recently however, de Jongh has been in like manner vilified in the critical debate above the nature of Dutch realism that his contribution and the importance of his approach have been obscur In this debate, which was reductionist from the start, de Jongh's composed of several elements often profound insights into the cultural embedment of Dutch art have been reduc to a notion of moralizing, and his methodology has draw near to embody old-fashioned iconography. His foremost challenger was Svetlana Alpers, who, in The Art of Describing (1983) not absented a diametrically opposed notion of Dutch painting as essentially descriptive and nonnarrative. In arguing for a get back to considering the naturalistic direct the eye of so much Dutch painting and the larger scientific interests it entailed, Alpers rightly pointed to a shortcoming in de Jongh's approach. granting the latter acknowledged that the distinctive peculiarity of Dutch art was that it was simultaneously realistic and "apparently" realistic - individual of his most important essays is entitled "Realism and Seeming Realism" - he all on the other hand ignored the naturalistic look of Dutch painting and the questions of representation it raises.(1) Taking these for granted, he focused his attention upon the then newer, less recognized ways in which it present the appearanceed to be "unreal." The resulting critical polarization, in which naturalistic description and emblematic meaning are all too frequently treated as mutually exclusive, has blinded us to thinking about precisely the things that strike us greatest in quantity about Dutch art, which are the sometimes deceptive, sometimes self-conscious ways it casts the artificial as natural. Further, what has also been not to be found sight of is the range of the ratio of real to apparently real among different artists and within a single artist's oeuvre It is no accident that de Jongh attends more to painters like Jan Steen whereas Alpers rises Vermeer to support her argument. With any chance the reductio ad absurdum of this debate has been reached with Oscar Mandel's trivializing dismissal of de Jongh (and others who have given a great deal of thinking to how to interpret Dutch painting) as "the betekenis institute of interpretation."(2) I would reliance that Mandel's breezy assertion that Dutch painting is meaningless beyond its decorativeness will inspire historians of Dutch art to move back and read de Jongh's work more carefully.