6. In northern European art (before Rubens) the
renewal of the arts during the Renaissance took the
form of the new study of nature and the elaboration
of the most convincing means of representing the ma-
terial world in an illusionistic way; traditional medieval
symbolism was transformed in a specific way, produc-
ing what E. Panofsky called in 1953 “disguised sym-
bolism.” The symbolic meaning connected with objects
and qualities persisted, but a new mastery reproduced
these symbolical objects with such a degree of realism
that they did not differ any longer from other objects
not charged with any metaphorical meaning. Some-
times the symbolical meaning of represented objects
results from the traditional iconography in an unmistak-
able way, sometimes the meaning is hinted at by the
inscriptions placed in the picture or on its frame. But
in many cases the modern viewer remains perplexed
without any sufficient clue to decide whether, in the
picture he observes, he has to do with the beginnings
of the representation of reality for its own sake, or
whether the search for specific metaphorical meaning
is justified. It is still always a matter of discussion to
decide at which moment the representation of some
objects or some scene in life without any symbolical
(or “historical”) implications became possible (Gilbert,
1952). Observers of the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries to whom the meaning of old symbols was
wholly forgotten took many images of the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries for simple representations of life:
Bruegel, for example, was considered as simply a
painter of joking or working peasants. Recent studies
in iconography have shown that these pictures are
saturated with disguised meaning and that it is ex-
tremely rare before about 1550 to meet simple repre-
sentations of nature in painting. In graphic arts the
direct depiction of life and landscape began earlier,
as in the works of Lombard draughtsmen or in the
incredibly fresh, convincing drawings and prints by the
Master of the Housebook. There are also early excep-
tions in painting like Albrecht Altdorfer's landscape
without any human figures. But in general it was only
during the second half of the sixteenth century that
landscape, genre, and still-life painting began to ac-
quire equal rights with religious and humanistic history
and allegory, predominantly in Venice and in Antwerp.
Even then, however, the representations of people
working in fields (Jacopo or Francesco Bassano) fol-
lowed the old traditions of Calendar-pictures and in
the background of genre scenes, as in Pieter Aertsen's
pictures, a biblical motif may be found, which trans-
forms the whole composition into a
storia, however
unorthodox.
With the development of realistic painting in the
seventeenth century there appeared specific iconogra-
phic problems. New subjects slowly found convenient
form. They entered the scene patterned after the ven-
erable stories of sacred or of profane iconography.
H. van de Waal described (1952) the process of the for-
mation of national historical iconography in Holland.
Scenes depicting recent happenings from a long strug-
gle for national independence appeared first in forms
assimilated to well-known religious or mythical scenes.
This was not only an expedient facilitating their com-
position, for by this means the new subjects gained the
decorum inherent in the adopted patterns formed to
express traditional stories. Similar procedures may be
seen in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when
more and more sections of reality became interesting
enough to be represented in art.
The transfer of decorum from the sacred or allegori-
cal figures to the humans represented is a means used
in what modern iconographers call “allegorical por-
traiture.” Renaissance painters had represented real
people under mythological or even sacred disguise;
they gave actual faces of living people to the figures
represented with all the attributes and characteristics
of their mythical, sacred, or even allegorical qualities.
Later it was only the pattern which remained: still in
the eighteenth century English portraitists patterned
the effigies of contemporary aristocrats after Michel-
angelo's Sybils or after allegories like the Caritas
(Wind, 1937). J. B. Oudry represented the Polish King
in exile, Stanisław Leszczyński, with all the attributes
of the allegory of exile, taken from Ripa, identifying
him in this way with personification of his most promi-
nent quality (Białostocki, 1969).
Dutch realistic painting of the seventeenth century
is a document of an important iconographic conquest.
Landscapes, seascapes, moonlit night scenes, snapshots
of people skating in winter landscapes, views of market
places, church interiors, backyards, fishermen, old
women preparing food, fashionable dishes ready for
lunch, merchants and artisans, elegant gentlemen pay-
ing visits and folk-surgeons performing sensational
street-operations: all this became subject matter for
representation and continued to be considered worthy
of depiction until the end of the nineteenth century.
It was first considered as such in Holland only, then
slowly everyday subject matter was recognized also by
art-theorists in other countries, although it was re-
garded as much less dignified than religious, mytholog-
ical, or allegorical subjects. Only in the nineteenth
century did the vogue of realistic representation of
everyday subjects become widespread. In Dutch pic-
tures of the seventeenth century we are often con-
fronted with nothing else than representations of pic-
turesque reality. Sometimes however these genre
pictures appear to be illustrations of proverbs, expres-
sing moralistic folk-wisdom; sometimes they recall
scenes from the popular threater of the rederijkers or
rhetoricians, especially pictures by Jan Steen (Gud-
laugsson, 1945); they contain allusions to emblems.
Sometimes the elegant scenes from bourgeois life in-
clude quite indecent erotic allusions (de Jongh, 1967;
1969). The ambiguity of these pictures was certainly
a source of specific pleasure for those who knew the
key to their true meaning.
