The Embarrassment of Riches

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• "What other people", wrote the nineteenth-century critic-politician Théophile Thoré, "has written its history in its art?" Unlike the art of Renaissance Italy, Dutch art, he thought, was so much the record of the here and now, of "la vie vivante," anchored in a specific time and place. It was the record of "the men and the matter, the sentiments and habits, the deeds and gestures of a whole nation." And the quality of social document inherent in much of Dutch art does indeed make it an irresistible source for the cultural historian. Treating art as a kind of historical evidence, though, has dangers for the unwary. Thoré also supposed it to be "a sort of photography of their great seventeenth century," a phrase that has been used time and again to suggest the kind of descriptive literalism... (查看原文)

  天然卷 ி 2011-04-22 21:37:11

• Surprisingly, then, the Dutch art invites the cultural historian to probe below the surface of appearances. By illuminating an interior world as much as illustrating an exterior one, it moves back and forth between morals and matter, between the durable and the ephemeral, the concrete and the imaginary, in a way that was peculiarly Netherlandish...Thoré thought nature morte absurdly inappropriate a term for the heaps of fruit, flowers, or fishh that in some Dutch pictures sat carefully on white linen, on others tumbled over silver and glass. Still life was a misnomer, he wrote, for these things still live; they respire. Life in death; animation in immobility; the illusion of vitality and the reality of inertia: all these polarities seemed deliberately made to rebound off each other. Even a... (查看原文)

  天然卷 ி 4 回复 2011-04-22 22:03:47

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