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In her landmark study of painting in the 17th century Dutch Republic[i], art historian Svetlana Alpers argued that this was fundamentally an art of description, in contrast to the Italian tendency towards narrative. Dutch artists “present their pictures as describing the world seen rather than as imitations of significant human actions”; in their hands, an emphasis on painting as craft fuses with a broader cultural fascination with the observation of the natural world, aided by advances in the science and technology of optics. To paint the world was to know the world—and also to reflect on …