Vermeer and the Invention of Seeing
Category: Books,Arts & Photography,History & Criticism
Vermeer and the Invention of Seeing Details
From the Inside Flap 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 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, dancing 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. Read more 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. Read more
Reviews
I was surprised when I saw how long ago I had read this study because it has stayed fresh in my mind. Of all the Museums I have gone through and all the paintings there, one of my strongest memories is seeing my first Vermeer. I was frozen by the relatively small paintings. No reproduction of the painting that I have seen has ever come close to doing it justice. I stayed there mesmerized by the light and the quiet event in a narrative. I stayed there, and then kept circling back to see it again and again. Every Vermeer I have seen since then has had the same effect. And there are so few, and you have to travel so far to see them. Bryan Wolf's study argues that Vermeer found a way of seeing that is uniquely Vermeer's and also uniquely modern. Of course the handsome volume contains many color reproductions of Vermeer and other artists. Wolf follows his idea to explore and compare ways of seeing from different time periods in history, medieval as well as modern. There is a more recent film of Tim Jenison using a visual device based on the camera obscura to reproduce a Vermeer. He was partially driven by the fact that when x-rayed no preliminary drawings appear under Vemeer's paintings, as with all other paintings. It took him years, including permission to see a Vermeer the British Royalty will not allow to be photographed or even seen without permission. He also showed all his work to David Hockney, who comments positively on it. Jenison had to become obsessive and seemed to nearly lose his mind in a film, "Tim's Vermeer", on the process. The film does not mention it, but there is a drawing by Durer of a man using a similar visual device. Back to this book, in which Wolf's purpose is to explore the special quiet and kind of "strangeness" of Vermeer's paintings. There does seem to be a kind of captivating mystery there, and this study helps to journey into it.