On the other hand, Jay also notes theories offered in opposition to Cartesian perspectivalism. Most notably, he discusses Svetlana Alpers' focus on seventeenth century Dutch artists who produced "narrative" and "descriptive" art, rather than the perspectival art of their Northern peers. The primary difference was the Dutch artists' suggestion of a world beyond the paintings' frames and a privileging of the visual experience: "it casts its attentive eye on the fragmentary, detailed, and richly articulated surface of a world it is content to describe rather than explain" (Jay, 13). This "descriptive art" sought not to explain the image as perspectivalism did, but rather to describe it, with its meaning or explanation left to the viewer. Thus, Jay notes that a parallel has often been drawn between this seventeenth century Dutch art and photography (Jay, 15).
Jay's third scopic regime is the baroque, which he classifies as "the most significant alternative to the hegemonic visual style" of Cartesian perspectivalism (Jay, 16). The baroque style rejects the "monocular geometicalization" of Cartesianism in favor of a fascination with "opacity, unreadability, and the indecipherability of the reality it depicts" (Jay, 17). The baroque seeks to depict the multiplicity of visual planes and spaces and offers up a distorting rather than reflexive mirror. The baroque style understands very clearly that it is a refracted reflection of its viewer: "Baroque vision . . . sought to represent the unrepresentable and, necessarily failing, produced the melancholy that Walter Benjamin in particular saw as characteristic of baroque sensibility" (Jay, 17-18
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