Chairman : William Marx
In his " Inleyding tot de hooge schoole der schilderkonst " (Introduction to the High School of the Art of Painting, 1678), the Dutch painter and art theorist Samuel van Hoogstraten proposes to defend the liberal status of painting by emphasizing that it is structured like a language. He notes that it possesses " a grammar ", that insofar as " the dialectic " and " the rhetoric ", it " falls [...] under the understanding " and, above all, that, " même dit muet ", the art of painting speaks " nonetheless abundantly, in a hieroglyphic way " (p. 346). The discourse conveyed by the image does not, in fact, present the same clarity and distinction as the discourse conveyed by the text.
Like Egyptian hieroglyphs, the signs presented by an image convey their meaning only in a veiled way, through the intermediary of a code - often mysterious, if not mystical - that the painter has the task of constituting, and the viewer of deciphering. Van Hoogstraten writes: "To decorate a simple work in the most estimable way, the best thing is to add - and this can be done in various ways - an accessory part that explains things in a veiled way. A symbol made up of figures or animals will then serve to reveal passions and emotions, in the manner of a known and legible text " (p. 90). He goes on to write that " the Egyptians, Chinese, Japanese and Mexicans wrote their books with symbols instead of letters. And this way of representing has also reached us with the art of painting " (p. 90).
The centrality of the ideogrammatic model and, in particular, of the hieroglyphic language, gradually asserted itself in Dutch art, from the end of the Middle Ages onwards, to become an essential element in the allegorical imaginary of 17th-century Dutch painters, but also - and this is a very important point - in the art of painting but also - and this will be the subject of this presentation - of their symbolic practices : the aim is, as " the Egyptians, Chinese, Japanese and Mexicans ", to make the image the site of a discourse closed enough to remain secret and open enough to be the subject of possible interpretations. Among the artists who have most regularly emphasized their attachment to this type of visual discourse, akin to that of the enigma, is Johannes Vermeer, who may well have known Van Hoogstraten - owned two of his paintings - and whose " hieroglyphic "language can be described by studying some of his works.
Jan Blanc is a specialist in artistic theories and practices in Northern Europe (Netherlands, France and Great Britain), particularly during the 17th and 18th centuries. He is currently working on the birth of artistic literature in French between the late 16th and mid 17th centuries, and is preparing a book on Rembrandt.
