Download or read book Vermeer s Camera written by Philip Steadman and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Art historians have long speculated on how Vermeer achieved the uncanny mixture of detached precision, compositional repose, and perspective accuracy that have drawn many to describe his work as "photographic." Indeed, many wonder if Vermeer employed a camera obscura, a primitive form of camera, to enhance his realistic effects? In Vermeer's Camera, Philip Steadman traces the development of the camera obscura--first described by Leonaro da Vinci--weighs the arguments that scholars have made for and against Vermeer's use of the camera, and offers a fascinating examination of the paintings themselves and what they alone can tell us of Vermeer's technique. Vermeer left no record of his method and indeed we know almost nothing of the man nor of how he worked. But by a close and illuminating study of the paintings Steadman concludes that Vermeer did use the camera obscura and shows how the inherent defects in this primitive device enabled Vermeer to achieve some remarkable effects--the slight blurring of image, the absence of sharp lines, the peculiar illusion not of closeness but of distance in the domestic scenes. Steadman argues that the use of the camera also explains some previously unexplainable qualities of Vermeer's art, such as the absence of conventional drawing, the pattern of underpainting in areas of pure tone, the pervasive feeling of reticence that suffuses his canvases, and the almost magical sense that Vermeer is painting not objects but light itself. Drawing on a wealth of Vermeer research and displaying an extraordinary sensitivity to the subtleties of the work itself, Philip Steadman offers in Vermeer's Camera a fresh perspective on some of the most enchanting paintings ever created.
Download or read book Johannes Vermeer written by Stephan Koja and published by . This book was released on 2021-09-10 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window by Johannes Vermeer is one of the most famous works of seventeenth-century Dutch art. Preserved at the Gemaldegalerie Alte Meister in Dresden, the painting has been restored, in an elaborate process lasting from 2017 to 2021. The removal of a large section of overpainting dating from a later period has profoundly altered the work's appearance and revealed the original composition. To showcase the discovery, the Dresden Gemaldegalerie is now presenting the Girl Reading a Letter along with other masterpieces by Vermeer and a selection of exceptional Dutch genre paintings that reveal parallels and reciprocities between the art of Vermeer and that of his peers. This catalog brings together texts by renowned scholars as they explore not only the restoration of this pivotal work but also fundamental questions on the visual vernacular and essence of Vermeer's painting, his optical realism, his iconography of love, and the lived realities of women in the Dutch Golden Age.
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.".
Download or read book ArtCurious written by Jennifer Dasal and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2020-09-15 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A wildly entertaining and surprisingly educational dive into art history as you've never seen it before, from the host of the beloved ArtCurious podcast We're all familiar with the works of Claude Monet, thanks in no small part to the ubiquitous reproductions of his water lilies on umbrellas, handbags, scarves, and dorm-room posters. But did you also know that Monet and his cohort were trailblazing rebels whose works were originally deemed unbelievably ugly and vulgar? And while you probably know the tale of Vincent van Gogh's suicide, you may not be aware that there's pretty compelling evidence that the artist didn't die by his own hand but was accidentally killed--or even murdered. Or how about the fact that one of Andy Warhol's most enduring legacies involves Caroline Kennedy's moldy birthday cake and a collection of toenail clippings? ArtCurious is a colorful look at the world of art history, revealing some of the strangest, funniest, and most fascinating stories behind the world's great artists and masterpieces. Through these and other incredible, weird, and wonderful tales, ArtCurious presents an engaging look at why art history is, and continues to be, a riveting and relevant world to explore.
Download or read book Vermeer s Hat written by Timothy Brook and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2010-08-01 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this critical darling Vermeer's captivating and enigmatic paintings become windows that reveal how daily life and thought-from Delft to Beijing--were transformed in the 17th century, when the world first became global. A Vermeer painting shows a military officer in a Dutch sitting room, talking to a laughing girl. In another canvas, fruit spills from a blue-and-white porcelain bowl. Familiar images that captivate us with their beauty--but as Timothy Brook shows us, these intimate pictures actually give us a remarkable view of an expanding world. The officer's dashing hat is made of beaver fur from North America, and it was beaver pelts from America that financed the voyages of explorers seeking routes to China-prized for the porcelains so often shown in Dutch paintings of this time, including Vermeer's. In this dazzling history, Timothy Brook uses Vermeer's works, and other contemporary images from Europe, Asia, and the Americas to trace the rapidly growing web of global trade, and the explosive, transforming, and sometimes destructive changes it wrought in the age when globalization really began.
Download or read book Vermeer and Painting in Delft written by Axel Rüger and published by National Gallery Publications Limited. This book was released on 2001 with total page 72 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the first seventy years of the seventeenth century the Dutch town of Delft emerged as one of the most important artistic centers in the Netherlands. Although famous as the birthplace of the painter Johannes Vermeer, Delft was also home to an extended community of masters that included among many others Pieter de Hooch and Carel Fabritius. In this introduction to the key Delft artists, Axel Rüger places Vermeer’s masterpieces within their historical and artistic context. This book, accompanying a major loan exhibition at the National Gallery, London, reveals how artistic and cultural developments of the early seventeenth century paved the way for the flowering of art in the city, culminating in the master works of the 1650s and 1660s. Investigating the artistic production of the city genre by genre, the author builds a picture of the so-called Delft School and its influences. Although painting from this time is probably best known for Vermeer’s serene scenes of everyday life, his contemporaries chose many different subjects. From Vermeer's world-famous masterpieces to the less familiar works of the period, all these refined paintings reflect a powerful sensibility to the visual aspects of the world as their makers perceived it.
Download or read book Vermeer written by Anthony Bailey and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2002-04 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents a portrait of Vermeer's life and character.
Download or read book Proust s Imaginary Museum written by Gabrielle Townsend and published by Peter Lang. This book was released on 2008 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study of Marcel Proust's creative imagination examines an aspect of the novel that has hitherto been largely overlooked: the author's dependence on secondary visual sources. Gabrielle Townsend argues that reproductions play a key role in the work's complex, multi-layered structure.
Download or read book Vermeer s Women written by Marjorie E. Wieseman and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A visually stunning and seductive book that celebrates the mysterious and enigmatic world created by Vermeer in some of the best-loved and most characteristic works from late in his career.
Download or read book Vermeer written by Renzo Villa and published by Silvana Editoriale. This book was released on 2012 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This volume--the new standard Vermeer monograph--reproduces all 34 paintings, augmenting each with close-ups that lay bare the loving care Vermeer lavished upon each painstaking work." from publisher's website
Download or read book Traces of Vermeer written by Jane Jelley and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-07-14 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Johannes Vermeer's luminous paintings are loved and admired around the world, yet we do not understand how they were made. We see sunlit spaces; the glimmer of satin, silver, and linen; we see the softness of a hand on a lute string or letter. We recognise the distilled impression of a moment of time; and we feel it to be real. We might hope for some answers from the experts, but they are confounded too. Even with the modern technology available, they do not know why there is no evidence of any preliminary drawing; why there are shifts in focus; and why his pictures are unusually blurred. Some wonder if he might possibly have used a camera obscura to capture what he saw before him. The few traces Vermeer has left behind tell us little: there are no letters or diaries; and no reports of him at work. Jane Jelley has taken a new path in this detective story. A painter herself, she has worked with the materials of his time: the cochineal insect and lapis lazuli; the sheep bones, soot, earth, and rust. She shows us how painters made their pictures layer by layer; she investigates old secrets; and hears travellers' tales. She explores how Vermeer could have used a lens in the creation of his masterpieces. The clues were there all along. After all this time, now we can unlock the studio door, and catch a glimpse of Vermeer inside, painting light.
Download or read book Vermeer the Art of Painting written by Arthur K. Wheelock and published by . This book was released on 1995-01-01 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the creative process and technical means by which the great Dutch seventeenth-century painter achieved his remarkable pictorial effects. Arthur Wheelock begins by placing Vermeer's art in historical perspective, with emphasis on the artistic environment in his home city of Delft and the importance of history painting in the mid-1600s. He then closely examines seventeen of the thirty-six extant paintings in Vermeer's oeuvre, works that span the range of the artist's career. Using the results of x-rays, pigment analysis, and infrared reflectography, some of the secrets of Vermeer's wonderfully elusive artistry are revealed. For example, Vermeer was able to simulate reality, simplify and highlight meaning, establish a sense of time and permanence, and enhance the mood he wished to create through inventive use of brushwork, color, and compositional refinements. Lavishly illustrated with color reproductions of Vermeer's paintings, the book is certain to appeal to all devotees of Dutch art.
Download or read book Eye of the Beholder Johannes Vermeer Antoni van Leeuwenhoek and the Reinvention of Seeing written by Laura J. Snyder and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2015-03-16 with total page 563 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Masters of the Everyday written by Desmond Shawe-Taylor and published by Royal Collection Editions. This book was released on 2015 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the seventeenth century, Dutch artists were unparalleled in their dedication to depicting ordinary people doing everyday things. Genre painting was the preeminent expression of this dedication, offering candid glimpses into the peasant cottages and village courtyards of the Dutch Golden Age, each painting lit with the period's vibrant color palette and rich with radiant natural light. This superb collection by the curators of an accompanying exhibition focuses on a selection of works of Dutch genre painting from the Royal Collection's holdings. Johannes Vermeer, Jan Steen, Gerrit Dou, Gabriel Metsu, and Pieter de Hooch are among the masters whose works are finely reproduced here. While the subject matter may be ordinary--the preparation of food, the bustle of a busy market, the enjoyment of taverns and town festivities--the meticulously documented details often allude to a work's deeper meaning or to moral messages that would have been familiar to the contemporary viewer. The book explores these hidden moral messages, as well as the artists' penchant for clever visual puns. Readers interested in the Dutch Golden Age or seventeenth-century art will welcome this volume. Individual essays on each painting, close-up photography showing important details, and a selection of comparative images add to the book's richness and provide valuable context.
Download or read book Vermeer and the Masters of Genre Painting written by Eddy Schavemaker and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A landmark exploration of the engaging network of relationships among genre painters of the Dutch Golden Age The genre painting of the Dutch Golden Age between 1650 and 1675 ranks among the highest pinnacles of Western European art. The virtuosity of these works, as this book demonstrates, was achieved in part thanks to a vibrant artistic rivalry among numerous first-rate genre painters working in different cities across the Dutch Republic. They drew inspiration from each other's painting, and then tried to surpass each other in technical prowess and aesthetic appeal. The Delft master Johannes Vermeer (1632-1675) is now the most renowned of these painters of everyday life. Though he is frequently portrayed as an enigmatic figure who worked largely in isolation, the essays here reveal that Vermeer's subjects, compositions, and figure types in fact owe much to works by artists from other Dutch cities. Enlivened with 180 superb illustrations, Vermeer and the Masters of Genre Painting highlights the relationships - comparative and competitive - among Vermeer and his contemporaries, including Gerrit Dou, Gerard ter Borch, Jan Steen, Pieter de Hooch, Gabriel Metsu, and Frans van Mieris. Published in association with the National Gallery of Ireland Exhibition Schedule: Musee du Louvre 02/20/17--05/22/17 National Gallery of Ireland 06/17/17--09/17/17 National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. (10/22/17--01/21/18)
Download or read book Vermeer s Family Secrets written by Benjamin Binstock and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-03-07 with total page 459 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Johannes Vermeer, one of the greatest Dutch painters and for some the single greatest painter of all, produced a remarkably small corpus of work. In Vermeer's Family Secrets, Benjamin Binstock revolutionizes how we think about Vermeer's work and life. Vermeer, The Sphinx of Delft, is famously a mystery in art: despite the common claim that little is known of his biography, there is actually an abundance of fascinating information about Vermeer’s life that Binstock brings to bear on Vermeer’s art for the first time; he also offers new interpretations of several key documents pertaining to Vermeer that have been misunderstood. Lavishly illustrated with more than 180 black and white images and more than sixty color plates, the book also includes a remarkable color two-page spread that presents the entirety of Vermeer's oeuvre arranged in chronological order in 1/20 scale, demonstrating his gradual formal and conceptual development. No book on Vermeer has ever done this kind of visual comparison of his complete output. Like Poe's purloined letter, Vermeer's secrets are sometimes out in the open where everyone can see them. Benjamin Binstock shows us where to look. Piecing together evidence, the tools of art history, and his own intuitive skills, he gives us for the first time a history of Vermeer's work in light of Vermeer's life. On almost every page of Vermeer's Family Secrets, there is a perception or an adjustment that rethinks what we know about Vermeer, his oeuvre, Dutch painting, and Western Art. Perhaps the most arresting revelation of Vermeer's Family Secrets is the final one: in response to inconsistencies in technique, materials, and artistic level, Binstock posits that several of the paintings accepted as canonical works by Vermeer, are in fact not by Vermeer at all but by his eldest daughter, Maria. How he argues this is one of the book's many pleasures.
Download or read book The Forger s Spell written by Edward Dolnick and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2009-10-13 with total page 543 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New York Times Bestseller “Dolnick brilliantly re-creates the circumstances that made possible one of the most audacious frauds of the 20th century. And in doing so Dolnick plumbs the nature of fraud itself . . . an incomparable page turner.” —Boston Globe As riveting as a World War II thriller, The Forger’s Spell is the true story of Johannes Vermeer and the small-time Dutch painter who dared to impersonate him centuries later. For seven years a no-account painter named Han van Meegeren managed to pass off his paintings as those of one of the most beloved and admired artists who ever lived. As Edward Dolnick reveals, his true genius lay in psychological manipulation, and he came within inches of fooling the world. Instead, he landed in an Amsterdam court on trial for his life. The Forger’s Spell is the gripping, true tale of this almost perfect crime.
