Vermeer and the Invention of Seeing

Bryan Jay Wolf

ISBN 10: 0226905047 / ISBN 13: 9780226905044

Published by University of Chicago Press, 2001

Missing dust jacket; Pages can have notes/highlighting. Spine may show signs of wear. ~ ThriftBooks: Read More, Spend Less. Seller Inventory # G0226905047I3N01

Synopsis:

This book begins with a single premise: that Vermeer painted images not only of extraordinary beauty, but of extraordinary strangeness. To understand that strangeness, Bryan Jay Wolf turns to the history of early modernism and to ways of seeing that first developed in the seventeenth century. In a series of provocative readings, Wolf presents Vermeer in bracing new ways, arguing for the painter's immersion in—rather than withdrawal from—the intellectual concerns of his day.

The result is a Vermeer we have not seen before: a painter whose serene spaces and calm subjects incorporate within themselves, however obliquely, the world's troubles. Vermeer abandons what his predecessors had labored so carefully to achieve: legible spaces, a world of moral clarity defined by the pressure of a hand against a table, or the scatter of light across a bare wall. Instead Vermeer complicated Dutch domestic art and invented what has puzzled and captivated his admirers ever since: the odd daubs of white pigment, scattered across the plane of the canvas; patches of blurred surface, contradicting the painting's illusionism without explanation; and the querulous silence that endows his women with secrets they dare not reveal.

This beautifully illustrated book situates Vermeer in relation to his predecessors and contemporaries, and it demonstrates how powerfully he wrestled with questions of gender, class, and representation. By rethinking Vermeer's achievement in relation to the early modern world that gave him birth, Wolf takes northern Renaissance and early modern studies in new directions.

About the Author: Bryan Jay Wolf is a professor of American Studies and English at Yale University. He is the author of Romantic Re-vision: Culture and Consciousness in Nineteenth-Century American Painting and Literature, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

Bibliographic Details

Title: Vermeer and the Invention of Seeing
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Publication Date: 2001
Binding: Hardcover
Condition: Good
Dust Jacket Condition: No Jacket