La vita statica. Romanzo e pittura

In an article published in 1936, G. Lukacs claimed that the «realism» of novel, in the second half of the 19th century, was due to a waiver of the historical action. Obviously, the main exemple of this is the fiction of Flaubert. Thirty years later, an Art Historian, S. Alpers, makes use of the same choice between narrate and describe, in order to characterize the novelty of the Dutch pictorial realism compared to narrative style of the Italian Renaissance painting. The aim of this essay is to make explicit the political and philosophical reasons for this choice.