Description
Book SynopsisThe end of the eighteenth century saw the start of a new craze in Europe: tiny portraits of single eyes that were exchanged by lovers or family members. Unearthing these portraits, the author proposes that the rage for eye miniatures - and their abrupt disappearance - reveals a knot in the unfolding of the history of vision.
Trade Review"Hanneke Grootenboer has fixed her art-historical gaze on a largely overlooked category of visual representation: the late eighteenth-century miniature eye portrait. Precious gifts of love and mementos of loss, the tiny portraits of individual eyes open onto a cultural archive of affective behaviors and practices of seeing that would otherwise remain largely invisible. Treasuring the Gaze stands as a revelatory new chapter in the history of visuality and visual culture." (Lisa Saltzman, Bryn Mawr College)"
