Description
Book SynopsisVermeer and the Art of Love is about the emotions evoked in those elegant interiors in which a young woman may be writing a letter to her absent beloved or playing a virginal in the presence of an admirer. But it is also about the love we sense in the painter’s attentiveness to every detail within those rooms, which lends even the most mundane of objects the quality of something extraordinary.
In this engaging and beautifully illustrated book, Georgievska-Shine uncovers the ways in which Vermeer challenges the dichotomies between 'good' and 'bad' love, the sensual and the spiritual, placing him within the context of his contemporaries to give the reader a fascinating insight into his unique understanding and interpretation of the subject.
Trade ReviewFeatured in ‘Best new art books for 2022' –
Christie's 'This stimulating discussion of compellingly beautiful imagery is both lively and highly informative, leading readers on an adventure through spaces they can enter only in their imaginations.[...] Summing Up: Essential' — Amy Golahny, CHOICE Editors' Pick, March 2023
Winner of Choice Outstanding Academic Title 2023
‘By repeatedly pausing to note “the subtle tension” Vermeer maintains between the descriptive character of his work and its formal qualities, Georgievska-Shine also seeks to account, however partially, for our own lover-like absorption in the paintings. What keeps us looking, she implies, is what keeps us unsettled – caught between our surrender to illusion and our consciousness of the art that makes that illusion possible.’ - Ruth Bernard Yeazell, New York Review of Books
Table of ContentsPrologue; Part 1: The Varied Faces of Love in Dutch Genre Painting; 1.1: Words into Images; 1.2: Love's Rituals: Merry Companies to Music Lessons; 1.3: Cupid's Messengers; 1.4: Hunts and Conquests; 1.5: Indecent Proposals; 1.6: The Topsy-Turvy Family; 1.7: Picturing the Good Home; Part 2: The Reappearing Cupid; 2.1: The Cupid on the Wall; 2.2: The Dissolution of Narrative; 2.3: Invitation to Listen; 2.4: Reading, Writing, and Imagining Love; 2.5: Returning the Lover's Gaze; 2.6: Metaphysical Love; 2.7: Vermeer, his Muse, and the Unfinished History; Epilogue; Bibliography
