A Study Of Vermeer Revised And Enlarged Edition

This enlarged edition celebrates the images of Vermeer, presenting illustrations of the painter's works alongside revised and updated commentaries

"An exemplary book about seeing: about what the mind can do with great art. Like the sublime paintings which are its subject, "A Study of Vermeer is full of sensual and spiritual pleasures."--Susan Sontag "A rigorously searching analysis of the psychology and subject matter of a master whose paintings are as enigmatic as they are beautiful. This revision is not so much an improvement of the 1979 text as an elaboration of its insights, and with some very interesting reconsiderations."--Guy Davenport

The book explores the historical connections between the notions of architectural interior, subjective space, human interiority, and represented space including virtual space. The contributions examine models of understanding of "interiority" as these were developed in relation to the notions of space and spatial experience. The scope of investigations is the broadly understood modern period, from the 18th century to the present.

What might a self-conscious turn to formal analysis look like in Renaissance literary studies today, after theory and the new historicism? The essays collected here address this question from a variety of critical perspectives, as part of a renewed willingness within literary and cultural studies to engage questions of form. Essays by Paul Alpers, Douglas Bruster, Stephen Cohen, Heather Dubrow, William Flesch, Joseph Loewenstein, Elizabeth Harris Sagaser, and Mark Womack, together with an introduction of Mark David Rasmussen and an afterword by Richard Strier.

In Poets of Modern Ireland: Text, Context, Intertext, Neil Corcoran discusses the work of Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon, Michael Longley, Austin Clarke, Padraic Fallon, Louis MacNeice, and Ciaran Carson, constructing a critical account of the poets' work and putting it in the context of the contemporary debate surrounding their work. The contexts and intertexts Corcoran establishes for the study include the contentious debate between "nationalist" and "revisionist" criticism; the relationship between Irish and American poetry; the writing of "place" and its political significance; the focus on sexuality and eroticism; the persistence of religious impulse or theological content; the Irish language and the pre-occupation with forms of translation; and the foregrounding of textuality, which has affinities with, and may be usefully interpreted in relation to, some postmodern literary and cultural theory. Poets of Modern Ireland is a major contribution to the critical reception of modern poetry and focuses upon the major issues of debate in poetry criticism in Great Britain, Ireland, and the United States.

Art and Thought is a collection of newly commissioned essays that explores the relationship between the discipline of art history and important movements in the history of western thought. Brings together newly commissioned essays that explore the relationship between the discipline of art history and movements in the history of western thought. Considers the impact of the writings of key thinkers, including Aristotle, Kant, and Heidegger, on the way in which objects are perceived and understood and histories of art are constructed, deconstructed, and reconfigured according to varying sets of philosophical frameworks. Introduces the reader to the dynamic interface between philosophical reflections and art practices. Part of the New Interventions in Art History series, which is published in conjunction with the Association of Art Historians.

George Toles's Curtains of Light explores the ways in which various kinds of theatrical space in film engage with the film reality adjacent to them, and alter our understanding of the cinematic real. Film art is a dialogue between the world created for a film narrative and theatre spaces that confront it across the shadowline. This book provides a new way of thinking about film's relation to theatre, and challenges old conceptions of how cinema needs to escape the theatrical, or rise above it. Toles offers elegantly written and jargon-free readings of a rich variety of films, spanning the distance from D.W. Griffith's True Heart Susie up to David Lynch's Mulholland Dr. and Ang Lee's Lust, Caution. The methodology is predominantly aesthetic, but informed by Toles's decades of experience as a professional theatre director. Among the many topics covered are audition scenes, stage deaths on film, the close up and theatrical aloneness in film, eloquent objects, and characters who alternate between directing and playacting for each other, with tragic consequences. Curtains of Light would be an extremely useful introductory text for university students studying the relationship of cinema to theatre.

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.