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240 Appendix: Detail and Panthe distinctive feature of the detail answers, here, to a plurality offunctions: it falls short of any univocal dichiarazione.Panofsky’s knife and corkscrew example indeed indicates his limits:it presupposes not only (by contrast with the indeterminacy of thematerial constituent of painting) that the pictorial signifiers are discrete,let themselves be cut away, isolated, like the letters of a word,the words of a sentence. But further, and by contrast with the overdeterminationentailed by the notions of subject and meaning, it presupposesthat all pictorial signifiers represent a ‘‘subject’’—a motif, asignified—for itself, as if every picture functioned like a text, and as ifevery text were legible, wholly decipherable. In sum, the notion ofthe detail in painting is meaningful, for a history of art based on thiskind of iconography, only if the mimetic transparency of the iconic sign ispresupposed.Now this transparency is always running up against the opaque materialityof paint. There is something other than iconic details in paintings,even figurative ones, even Flemish and Dutch ones. In a bookreceived as both thought-provoking, the latest thing in art historicalmethodology, and as an implementation of precepts nonetheless oldand redolent of the mastery and paternity of Ernst Gombrich, 21 SvetlanaAlpers relativized the import of iconographic analysis insofar asit is connected to the Panofskian inheritance and, specifically, to thestudy of Italian art. Alpers called into question the notion that paintingis based, universally, on semantic and narrative reflection: there arepaintings that tell no story, she declares—quite rightly. And it couldbe said that the whole force of the book’s conviction comes from thissingle proposition.These paintings that don’t tell a story are Dutch paintings of theseventeenth century. For example the View of Delft by Vermeer: it’snot the iconography or the emblem of anything; it refers to no narrativeprogram, no preexisting text whose supposed historical or anecdotalor mythological or metaphorical value the image was chargedto compose visually . . . None of that. The View of Delft is just aview. The pertinence of Alpers’s argument here is that she forcefullydemonstrates the limits of the ut pictura poesis tradition: there is more