Chapter 5 Summary and Analysis

The preceding pictorial chapter is comprised of various reproductions from many times and forms of manner and dress. Chapter five begins with an oil painting showing several items contemporaneous with the Dutch school in 1665. This still life includes musical instruments, a globe, fruit, vases and faces, and assorted other objects. The authors assert the purchase of a painting includes acquiring the appearance of the things it characterizes. The anthropologist Levi-Strauss, ironically neither an art expert nor historian, is the first to notice that possessing and a way of seeing merge in oil painting. Specifically, objects in an oil painting are in a sense owned by the owner of the painting.

Oil painting is an art form developed in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to present a view that other existing methods are not able to do. This new method itself is...