ABSTRACT
its appeal to all the people may have been the major impetus toward the humanization of art that brought into being a new vocabulary of images in Dutch painting in the seventeenth century. Painting was to reflect common human experience. The main currents of this art shunned the grandiose, the fantastic, and the supernatural. It generously embraced the thoughts and feelings that mean something to everyone. Protestantism doubtless played a part in shaping this down-to-earth quality, but Catholic Dutch artists also contributed to the trend, which seems to have been national rather than sectarian.
