A Greek working in Spain; a Spaniard who spent most of his career in Madrid; a Dutchman who never left the Netherlands; this is a disparate group of painters indeed. What joins them together is a new self-consciousness with respect to the artistic traditions of different parts of Europe. In particular, I am interested in looking at their varied responses to the authority of Italian Renaissance art and art writing. By the seventeenth century, arguably, the European art world had become more international than it had been since antiquity. At the center of the international conception of art was the idea that what happened in sixteenth-century Italy, especially in the works of Michelangelo, Raphael, and Titian, established a standard against which other art, including later, contemporary art, should be judged. These artists’ skill and innovation are unquestioned. But their continued renown also stemmed from something beyond the high quality of their work: the advent and subsequent wide dissemination of published art writing from Italy. Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Artists was the first to tell the story of art in a compelling way, and he focused almost exclusively on Italy. As his words came to be known outside of Italy it was Vasari's story, with the priority it gave to the heavyweights of the Italian High Renaissance, that set the pattern. The internationalism of the seventeenth century, from the perspective of art writing at least, placed Italy at the center, partially eclipsing traditions that had developed independently elsewhere, especially in the north of Europe.

Scholars who study seventeenth-century art do so mostly in separate, nationally determined communities. One defines oneself, for example, as a scholar of Spanish art, or of Dutch art. These boundaries are rarely crossed. This is mostly a product of nineteenth-century nationalism, but it is also a reaction to how Vasari stole the story and thereby unfairly made it an Italian story. His prejudices set the tone for the development of academic art history. As Svetlana Alpers put it in her polemical book, The Art of Describing, “Since the institutionalization of art history as an academic discipline, the major analytic strategies by which we have been taught to look at and to interpret images – style as proposed by Wölfflin and iconography by Panofsky – were developed in reference to the Italian tradition.”