Return To The Surface:Art Historical Perspective And Its Methods Of Svetlana Alpers

For a long time,the paintings of Italian Renaissance depicting sublime themes have dominated the academic research.This decisive position has not only shaped the artistic tradition of Western artists,but also the writing tradition of art historians.Among them,the most typical is iconology proposed by Erwin Panofsky based on the Italian painting tradition.However,as a distinctive art historian,Svetlana Alpers put up with a new approach which is different from the traditional iconological interpretation mode.However,the academia has always focused on the “opposition” between Alpers’ methods and those of Panofsky and others,emphasizing the errors and omissions in her articles,or analyzing Alpers’ The Art of Describing in isolation,without fully grasping the formation and evolution of her art historical thinking.Therefore,this article aims to take Alpers’ The Art of Describing as a starting point,combining her early case study and recently published works,to sort out her consistent view of art history,and to explain the concept of “descriptive painting” proposed by Alpers and its specific features in certain paintings.When studying Dutch art,Alpers did not follow the method of iconology,establishing cultural implications behind images related to history,nor did she turn to pure abstract aesthetics.Instead,she focused on the uniqueness of paintings themselves,different from text,and then explored the pictorial features and historical context of the works.What she really wanted was not to raise objection to iconology,but to shift the academic attention from the textual meaning to the picture itself through her research of Dutch art,namely descriptive painting.When other scholars were trapped in the interpretation of meaning,she returned to the surface of a picture to engage in the “looking” process,which is essentially a discussion of art history research methods.