{"product_id":"vermeer-and-the-invention-of-seeing","title":"Vermeer and the Invention of Seeing","description":"\u003cp\u003eThis 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 painters immersion inrather than withdrawal fromthe 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 worlds 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 paintings 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 Vermeers achievement in relation to the early modern world that gave him birth  Wolf takes northern Renaissance and early modern studies in new directions.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"My Store","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":44945721950261,"sku":"ByrdShop_0226905047","price":49.66,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0627\/8139\/0901\/files\/9780226905044.jpg?v=1769907840","url":"https:\/\/atxbooks.com\/products\/vermeer-and-the-invention-of-seeing","provider":"ATX Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}