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| Peter Lely Portrait of a boy as a shepherd ca. 1658-60 oil on canvas Dulwich Picture Gallery, London |
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| Peter Lely Portrait of Lady Elizabeth Strickland née Pile 1659 oil on canvas Savannah College of Art and Design |
"A viable model for thinking about some aspects of art and culture is precisely as a market in attention itself, an exchange of attentions valuable to the other. We and the artist collude in a socially institutionalized assignation to barter our respective attentions. He values our attention for many reasons, and not only because it may be associated with whatever sort of material reward the culture offers: his social identity and his sense of his own humanity are complexly involved in the transaction. We, on the other hand, attend to the deposit or representation of his attention to life and the world because we find it enjoyable or profitable, sometimes even improving. The transaction is not symmetrical: he values the attention we direct at him and his; we value the attention he directs at life and the world. He values us as representatives of a general humanity: we value him for a specialized faculty, even if perhaps articulating a general human quality. But the pattern is still that of a market, with choice on both sides and reciprocal agency."
– Michael Baxandall, from Shadows and Enlightenment (Yale University Press, 1995)
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| attributed to Hendrick Munnichhoven Portrait of Beata Elisabeth von Königsmarck ca. 1654 oil on canvas Skokloster Castle, Sweden |
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| Pierre Mignard Portrait of Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, called Molière ca. 1658 oil on canvas Musée Condé, Chantilly |
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| Gerrit Dou Head of a youth ca. 1650 oil on panel Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide |
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| attributed to Jan Weesop Portrait of Esmé Stuart, 5th Duke of Lennox and 2nd Duke of Richmond ca. 1652-53 oil on canvas Museum of Fine Arts, Houston |
"The Scottish philosopher Thomas Reid in An Inquiry into the Human Mind (1764) reflects on the faculty of sight, the product of an organ, consisting of a ball and socket of an inch diameter, with which we may within an instant perceive prospects (the peak of Tenerife, or St. Peter's church in Rome) it would take the sightless a lifetime to perceive by touch:
If we attend duly to the operation of our mind in the use of this faculty, we shall perceive that the visible appearance of objects is hardly ever regarded by us. It is not at all made an object of thought or reflection, but serves only as a sign to introduce to the mind something else, which may be distinctly conceived by those who never saw it.
Thus, the visible appearance of things in my room varies almost every hour, according as the day is clear or cloudy, as the sun is in the east, or south, or west, and as my eye is in one part of the room or another: but I never think of these variations, otherwise than as signs of morning, noon, or night, of a clear or cloudy sky.
. . . A thousand such instances might be produced, in order to show that the visible appearance of objects are intended by nature only as signs or indications; and that the mind passes instantly to the things signified, without making the least reflection upon the sign, or even perceiving that there is any such thing. It is in a way somewhat similar that the sounds of a language, after it is become familiar, are overlooked, and we attend only to the things signified by them.
– quoted by Michael Baxandall in Shadows and Enlightenment (Yale University Press, 1995)
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| David Klöcker Ehrenstrahl Equestrian portrait of Carl Gustaf Wrangel 1652 oil on canvas Skokloster Castle, Sweden |
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| Gerard Soest Portrait of a man, called Aubrey de Vere, 20th Earl of Oxford ca. 1656-57 canvas Dulwich Picture Gallery, London |
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| Willem Drost Portrait of a young man 1654 oil on canvas Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya, Barcelona |
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| Ferdinand Bol Portrait of a lady 1652 oil on canvas Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam |
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| Diego Velázquez Portrait of Infanta Margarita Teresa in a blue dress 1659 oil on canvas Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna |
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| Bartholomeus van der Helst Portrait of Captain Gideon de Wildt 1657 oil on canvas Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest |
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| Gerard ter Borch Officer writing a letter with soldier waiting ca. 1658-59 oil on canvas Philadelphia Museum of Art |
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| Johannes Vermeer Girl reading a letter by an open window ca. 1659 oil on canvas Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden |
"Unvarying laws as ancient as the world itself make the light of one body spring back on to another body, and from this successively on to a third, and then continuously on others, like as many cascades; though always with progressive reductions in strength, from one stage of falling to another. Without the aid of these wise laws, all that is not immediately and without obstruction under the sun would be in total night. To pass from the illuminated side of objects to the side the sun does not reach would be like passing beyond the surface of the earth into the interior of caves and caverns. But, by an operation of the powerful springiness that God puts into every portion of this nimble substance, light, it pushes against every body upon which it arrives and is pushed back again, as much by its own bounce as by the resistance it meets."
– Privé Formey, writing on the topic SHADOW in the Encylcopédie (completed in 1765), as quoted in translation by Michael Baxandall in Shadows and Enlightenment (Yale University Press, 1995)