Eye of the Beholder: Johannes Vermeer, Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, and the Reinvention of Seeing
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4.0 • 3 Ratings
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
The remarkable story of how an artist and a scientist in seventeenth-century Holland transformed the way we see the world.
On a summer day in 1674, in the small Dutch city of Delft, Antoni van Leeuwenhoek—a cloth salesman, local bureaucrat, and self-taught natural philosopher—gazed through a tiny lens set into a brass holder and discovered a never-before imagined world of microscopic life. At the same time, in a nearby attic, the painter Johannes Vermeer was using another optical device, a camera obscura, to experiment with light and create the most luminous pictures ever beheld.
“See for yourself!” was the clarion call of the 1600s. Scientists peered at nature through microscopes and telescopes, making the discoveries in astronomy, physics, chemistry, and anatomy that ignited the Scientific Revolution. Artists investigated nature with lenses, mirrors, and camera obscuras, creating extraordinarily detailed paintings of flowers and insects, and scenes filled with realistic effects of light, shadow, and color. By extending the reach of sight the new optical instruments prompted the realization that there is more than meets the eye. But they also raised questions about how we see and what it means to see. In answering these questions, scientists and artists in Delft changed how we perceive the world.
In Eye of the Beholder, Laura J. Snyder transports us to the streets, inns, and guildhalls of seventeenth-century Holland, where artists and scientists gathered, and to their studios and laboratories, where they mixed paints and prepared canvases, ground and polished lenses, examined and dissected insects and other animals, and invented the modern notion of seeing. With charm and narrative flair Snyder brings Vermeer and Van Leeuwenhoek—and the men and women around them—vividly to life. The story of these two geniuses and the transformation they engendered shows us why we see the world—and our place within it—as we do today.
Eye of the Beholder was named "A Best Art Book of the Year" by Christie's and "A Best Read of the Year" by New Scientist in 2015.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Snyder (The Philosophical Breakfast Club) transports readers to the small Dutch city of Delft during the height of the scientific revolution to examine the lives of artists Johannes Vermeer and Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, and the changing notions of "seeing" in both art and science in 17th-century Europe. Though Snyder makes a convincing case that optics and natural philosophy changed the way people saw, why she chose to focus on Vermeer and Leeuwenhoek is less clear. Their narratives are given historical context, which sometimes relies on speculation. But many of the historical facts included are irrelevant to understanding the topic at hand. For example, Snyder gives descriptions of a single receipt from Leeuwenhoek's fabric store, and the details of Vermeer's marriage certificate. Numerous tangents about their contemporaries in the fields of optics and painting serve to illuminate the environment in which these men worked, but often seem to paint these other artists and scientists more vividly than Vermeer and Leeuwenhoek.
Customer Reviews
Brilliant Study of Light
Science and art in 17th century Delft, Netherlands paved new roads into the unseen worlds of things unseen before of this time.
The author does a brilliant on of gathering, researching and beautifully telling the stories of how two contemporary men changed the way we see things we never perceive until they used light and optics to teach us to learn to see.
The clever use of how parallel disciplines exposed the same conclusions is fascinating and enlightening. Well worth the read. I read it twice, something I never do.