Reading the Art of Painting

Art historians produce words, so they tend to "read" paintings.
Thus, Hessel Miedema, the great authority on Karel van Mander, who wrote The Lives of the Illustrious Netherlandish and German Painters (1603), looks at The Art of Painting (1666) as if it were a matter of iconography, an exemplum of the ars rhetorica...

and he apparently doesn't see the light that emanates from the canvas the artist is just beginning to work on, a bluish-gray light that shoots across toward the model—

and which you can't see in reproduction, but which smites you if you've approached on a counterclockwise tour of the outer galleries of the Kunsthistorishes Museum (skirting the central ones that contain Rubens and Breughel),

and made your way past the two stunning works by Geertgen tot Sint Jans (and this one),

and come at The Art from the far right.

The painting, in a far dark corner, needs to be seen from a distance, at least at first, precisely so you don't read the iconography and don't read from lower left to right (like a book, the way Miedema says we're trained to do), 

but you see the whole painting as a whole.


And then you see that the art of painting is "about" the light from the model that the artist captures on the canvas.


The best image I can find is this, but it falls way short of what I saw. (This is also some indication.)

Daniel Arasse got it: If in the Art of Painting, the painter's "demonstrated knowledge" is that of light..."