Vermeer and the Invention of Seeing

Download or read book Vermeer and the Invention of Seeing written by Bryan Jay Wolf and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2001-12 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "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.".