Reading Comprehension

PT23 · S4 · P1 · Q1 Book About Rembrandt

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It has recently been discovered that many attributions of paintings to the seventeenth-century Dutch artist Rembrandt may be false.

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Topic

Rembrandt's approach to art and recent debates regarding the attribution and motivation behind his paintings

Framework

Challenge Position

Main Point

While Svetlana Alpers argues that Rembrandt's uniqueness lay in his entrepreneurial, market-driven approach to painting—including the marketing of his own persona—this interpretation places too much emphasis on economics and does not fully account for the profound artistic quality and aesthetic innovation that define Rembrandt’s work. The Most Valuable Sentence appears at the end of the third paragraph:

P1: Introduction—Disputed Rembrandt Attributions & Alpers’s Approach

Recent scholarship has called into question the attribution of many central Rembrandt paintings. Svetlana Alpers uses this controversy as a springboard to discuss how Rembrandt's style and approach to painting set him apart.

P2: Alpers’s View—Rembrandt as Entrepreneur

Alpers claims Rembrandt exerted strong control over his art and career, separating himself from traditional patronage and guilds. She argues that he operated like an entrepreneur and marketed not just his paintings, but his name and persona, motivated largely by economics.

1.

Which one of the following best summarizes the main conclusion of the author of the passage?

  1. Rembrandt differed from other artists

    Wrong Emphasis

    This answer seems hard to get rid of because it feels like our author would probably sign off on the ideas that Rembrandt was both different in terms of his market savviness and different in terms of his aesthetic techniques. But the main point of this passage should have more of a Challenge Position feel, because the author didn't sit down to write a passage about Rembrandt. He sat down to counter Alpers' rendering of Rembrandt's legacy. To fit the author's agenda better, this answer would need to feel more like, "Although Rembrandt differed from other artists in terms of his desire to meet the demands of the marketplace, we should not let that attribute outshine his aesthetic brilliance." This is a good example of a trap answer that says "a true thing about the Central Topic" but doesn't capture the Purpose / Framework of why the author wrote the passage.

    13% picked this

  2. The aesthetic qualities of Rembrandt’s

    Too Strong

    Too Strong: cannot / without Opposite, if anything This is a very harsh statement that sounds more like how Alpers would view Rembrandt's legacy, not like how the author would view it. Our author is acknowledging that Rembrandt did have some awareness of economic motives and was influenced by them somewhat, but he thinks that we shouldn't be exaggerating the degree to which it impacted his work or the degree to which we should consider it an important part of Rembrandt's legacy.

    13% picked this

  3. Rembrandt was one of the

    Wrong Emphasis Too Strong

    Wrong Emphasis Too Strong: one of the first Neither Alpers nor the author gets into specific language like whether Rembrandt was "one of the first" to see art as a commodity. Alpers stresses that Rembrandt was different from other Dutch painters of his time in this regard, but even she never says "he was one of the first ever to do it". Regardless of all that, this is also the opposite of what the author would want to stress. His whole mission in writing this passage was to say, "Sure, Alpers, we can accept that Rembrandt let economic concerns influence some of his decisions, but don't bury the lede -- Rembrandt should be primarily discussed for the aesthetic qualities that make his work unique."

    1% picked this

  4. Correct

    Rembrandt’s artistic achievement cannot be

    Why this is right

    This actually sounds like a pretty tight match for the final sentence of the passage, which we identified as our #1 Most Valuable Sentence. The author is Challenging a Position (Alpers' position in her book) and trying to downplay how important Alpers seemed to think economic motives were in understanding Rembrandt. The author says in that final line that "Rembrandt's artistic enterprise is not reducible to marketing practices", which is synonymous with saying "You can't understand Rembrandt's artistic enterprise solely in terms of decisions he made regarding the marketplace".

    Skill tested: Main Point · how this choice captures the passage's function is the move to repeat next time.

    64% picked this

  5. Rembrandt was an entrepreneur whose

    Wrong Emphasis

    This answer also resembles language in the final sentence of the passage, our Most Valuable Sentence. But this answer matches the concession of that final sentence, not the main clause. If an author says, "The trouble is that while [X may be true], [Y is also true]", then Y is the important thought. X is just conceding a point to the opposition. This answer choice might represent the main point of Alpers' book, but it doesn't represent the main point of the author who wrote this passage, who is trying to stress that "Rembrandt's artistic enterprise is not reducible to marketing practices".

    9% picked this

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