It is probably true to say that the lines of Hoogstraten's Inleyding which have been quoted most often in the literature on Dutch art are those which discuss Rembrandt's Night Watch [Fig. 31 and 32]. These lines appear in an absorbing passage, which treats of pictorial composition and the balance of imitation and invention within the artwork. Hoogstraten tells us that the painter should not line up figures in rows, as has happened in too many Dutch militia portraits. True masters, he tells us, manage to make their whole work into a compositional unity. He goes on:

One could probably write a short book on this passage, but this paper will focus on a single phrase, a phrase translated into English above, inadequately, as ‘sinuous of step’. The Dutch is ‘zwierich van sprong’, and it is an unusual expression; I do not know of any other Dutch author who uses this particular triplet of words. Recent attempts to translate the phrase have been far from uniform, suggesting a certain amount of disagreement and confusion. To give just two examples of English renderings: Seymour Slive suggested ‘dashing in movement’, while Gary Schwartz has proposed ‘graceful in the placing of the figures’. It seems to me that both translations, different as they are from one another, and from the one put forward above, are perfectly good. The truth is that these words cannot be put into twenty-first-century English, or French or German or even Dutch, with simple one-to-one equivalents. The phrase is an allusive one, and it can only be understood once the various connotations it probably had for its author have been patiently teased out.