[1] For much of the twentieth century, scholars regarded seventeenth-century Dutch genre painting—its kitchen interiors, domestic vignettes, and market scenes—as a mirror of ordinary life, prized precisely for the fidelity with which it recorded the textures of a prosperous mercantile society. [2] This documentary reading treated the paintings as windows: transparent, if selective, transcriptions of what a burgher might have seen. [3] Beginning in the 1960s, however, an iconographic school challenged the assumption of transparency, arguing that many seemingly casual scenes were freighted with emblematic meaning drawn from contemporary proverb collections and emblem books. [4] A woman sweeping, on this account, was not merely a woman sweeping but an admonition to domestic vigilance; a rendered lemon, its rind curling, encoded the bitterness concealed within superficial sweetness.
[5] The emblematic interpretation quickly acquired the authority of orthodoxy, and for two decades few art historians published a reading of a genre picture without decoding its putative moral. [6] Yet the approach rested on a methodological wager that its practitioners rarely examined: that a motif appearing in a printed emblem must carry the same signification when it recurs in a painting. [7] Critics of the school noted that emblem books were compilations of commonplaces, capacious enough to supply a moralizing gloss for nearly any object; the mere availability of an emblematic reading did not establish that painter or public had one in mind. [8] Moreover, inventories of the period record that such pictures hung in the same rooms as landscapes and still lifes valued chiefly for their execution, suggesting that contemporaries may have prized manual virtuosity as much as any concealed lesson.
[9] Recent scholarship has sought a middle position, holding that the documentary and emblematic readings are not exhaustive alternatives but poles of a spectrum along which individual works fall. [10] A picture might reward a viewer's recognition of a proverb while also gratifying an appetite for descriptive brilliance, and the balance between these satisfactions would have varied with the sophistication of the buyer. [11] What this reconciliation concedes, and what the emblematic school was reluctant to admit, is that the meaning of a genre scene is not a property fixed by the artist and awaiting recovery, but a variable outcome of the encounter between a painting and a historically situated eye. [12] The task of the historian, on this view, is less to decode a stable message than to reconstruct the range of responses a work could once have elicited.
