"The art historian after Erwin Panofsky and Ernst Gombrich is not only participating in an activity of great intellectual excitement; he is raising and exploring issues which lie very much at the centre of psychology, of the sciences and of history itself. Svetlana Alpers's study of 17th-century Dut[...]

Reconsiders the concensus on Rubens as a successful, prolific, and facile court painter who is dwarfed by the achievements of his near-contemporary Rembrandt. This book scrutinizes the assumptions upon which this image is built, and discovers an artist involved with ambivalence and ambiguity.[...]