Describe Or Narrate: Studies On Svetlana Alpers And Dutch Art In The Seventeenth Century

The seventeenth-century in the history of Dutch art is a golden age, in which emerged many famed artists, including Rembrandt, Vermeer, Rubens and Jan van Eyck and so on. Compared with the artistic style of Italian Renaissance painters, new changes took place in the artistic style of these eminent artists, which leads to different interpretations of the seventeenth-century Dutch art.This essay attempts to analysis what Svetlana Alpers so-called Dutch"Visual Culture"on the basis of her controversial book, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century, then poses the question about the interpretation of Dutch art through two contractive poles: describe or narrate, realism or disguised symbolism. The third part of this essay is mainly about my review of Alpers'book, focused on two points: how to define the word"descriptive"and the validity of the proofs which Alpers used to prove her idea.