Erotics of Looking Early Modern Netherlandish Art
Produktdetaljer
Biographical note
Angela Vanhaelen is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University. Her publications include The Wake of Iconoclasm: Painting the Church in the Dutch Republic (2012).
Bronwen Wilson is Professor and Head of World Art Studies and Museology at the University of East Anglia. Her publications include The World in Venice: Print, the City, and Early Modern Identity (2005).
<p>“I highly recommend the ground breaking and landmark book The Erotics of Looking: Early Modern Netherlandish Art edited by Angela Vanhaelen, Ph.D., and Bronwen Wilson, Ph.D., to any students of art and art history, academics in the field, art gallery owners and managers, art collectors and dealers, and to anyone interested in the power of the senses and sensuality found in the interaction between artist and viewer. This book will transform the way the artists of the early modern Dutch period approached their vision, their works, and their engagement with the viewer of the paintings.” (<i>Blog Business World</i>, 16 August 2013)</p>
The Erotics of Looking: Early Modern Netherlandish Art presents a collection of provocative essays that explore the material qualities of early Dutch art to reveal ways new forms of visual imagery solicit a beholder’s involvement.
- Explores how descriptive pictures during the early modern Dutch art period operated as social things and were designed to pleasurably engage the eye and prompt discussion and debate
- Shows how these works potentially raised ethical and political questions about the interconnectedness of engaging with pictures and the material world
- Represents a major contribution to the field of early modern Netherlandish art and to general debates about the status and functions of descriptive art
- Features essays addressing a variety of aspects of the field, from the historiography of Dutch art to closely attentive readings of particular works
- Crafts an original theoretical framework by applying recent insights about the making of early modern publics and the study of material things to the analysis of Netherlandish art
6 Notes on Contributors
8 Chapter 1 The Erotics of Looking: Materiality, Solicitation and Netherlandish Visual Culture
Angela Vanhaelen and Bronwen Wilson
20 Chapter 2 Beer and Loafing in Antwerp
Bret Rothstein
42 Chapter 3 Perspectives in Flux: Viewing Dutch Pictures in Real Time
Celeste Brusati
68 Chapter 4 Entropic Segers
Christopher P. Heuer
92 Chapter 5 The Turn of the Skull: Andreas Vesalius and the Early Modern Memento Mori
Rose Marie San Juan
110 Chapter 6 Laying the Table: The Procedures of Still Life
Joanna Woodall
138 Chapter 7 Boredom’s Threshold: Dutch Realism
Angela Vanhaelen
158 Chapter 8 Response: Art/Matter(s)
Larry Silver
170 Chapter 9 Response: On the Impulse of Mapping, or How a Flat Earth Theory of Dutch Maps Distorts the Thickness and Pictorial Proclivities of Early Modern Dutch Cartography (and Misses Its Picturing Impulse)
Benjamin Schmidt
184 Chapter 10 Response: Reflections on Temporality in Netherlandish Art
Lyle Massey
192 Chapter 11 Response: The Work of Realism
Bronwen Wilson
209 Index
From the slyly suggestive to the overtly erotic, many early modern Dutch and Flemish artworks were designed to attract the eye, and yet the messages they convey are often equivocal. The Erotics of Looking: Early Modern Netherlandish Art presents a collection of provocative essays by leading scholars of art that delve into ways that material and pictorial qualities of descriptive artworks appeal to beholders to become involved with them. Exploring complex interrelations between making, displaying, and engaging with paintings and prints, the volume brings forward mechanisms through which visual imagery fostered new forms of association in early modern Europe. An introductory chapter lays out the innovative theoretical framework, arguing that descriptive pictures operated as social things, encouraging people to engage with them through the pleasures they offered the senses, prompting debate and potentially opening up ethical and political considerations about the interconnectedness of pictures and the material world. Challenging familiar interpretive models of iconography, verisimilitude, and social art history, the essays shift the focus away from a picture’s meaning toward why art matters, toward how artworks solicit beholders and stimulate deliberation. The Erotics of Looking: Early Modern Netherlandish Art not only offers illuminating insights into ways to look at art - it redefines the concept of art itself.
Produktdetaljer
Biographical note
Angela Vanhaelen is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University. Her publications include The Wake of Iconoclasm: Painting the Church in the Dutch Republic (2012).
Bronwen Wilson is Professor and Head of World Art Studies and Museology at the University of East Anglia. Her publications include The World in Venice: Print, the City, and Early Modern Identity (2005).