Eye of the Beholder: Johannes Vermeer, Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, and the Reinvention of Seeing, by Laura J. Snyder
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Eye of the Beholder: Johannes Vermeer, Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, and the Reinvention of Seeing, by Laura J. Snyder
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The remarkable story of how an artist and a scientist in seventeenth-century Holland transformed the way we see the world.
On a summer day in 1674, in the small Dutch city of Delft, Antoni van Leeuwenhoek―a cloth salesman, local bureaucrat, and self-taught natural philosopher―gazed through a tiny lens set into a brass holder and discovered a never-before imagined world of microscopic life. At the same time, in a nearby attic, the painter Johannes Vermeer was using another optical device, a camera obscura, to experiment with light and create the most luminous pictures ever beheld.
“See for yourself!” was the clarion call of the 1600s. Scientists peered at nature through microscopes and telescopes, making the discoveries in astronomy, physics, chemistry, and anatomy that ignited the Scientific Revolution. Artists investigated nature with lenses, mirrors, and camera obscuras, creating extraordinarily detailed paintings of flowers and insects, and scenes filled with realistic effects of light, shadow, and color. By extending the reach of sight the new optical instruments prompted the realization that there is more than meets the eye. But they also raised questions about how we see and what it means to see. In answering these questions, scientists and artists in Delft changed how we perceive the world.
In Eye of the Beholder, Laura J. Snyder transports us to the streets, inns, and guildhalls of seventeenth-century Holland, where artists and scientists gathered, and to their studios and laboratories, where they mixed paints and prepared canvases, ground and polished lenses, examined and dissected insects and other animals, and invented the modern notion of seeing. With charm and narrative flair Snyder brings Vermeer and Van Leeuwenhoek―and the men and women around them―vividly to life. The story of these two geniuses and the transformation they engendered shows us why we see the world―and our place within it―as we do today.
16 pages of color illustrations Eye of the Beholder: Johannes Vermeer, Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, and the Reinvention of Seeing, by Laura J. Snyder- Amazon Sales Rank: #423762 in Books
- Brand: Snyder, Laura J.
- Published on: 2015-03-16
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.60" h x 1.40" w x 6.70" l, .0 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 448 pages
Review “Elegantly written intellectual history…fascinating.” (Deborah Blum - The New York Times Book Review)“An engaging and richly detailed work of interdisciplinary history.” (Jonathan Lopez - Wall Street Journal)“Beautifully evokes the ambience of late-seventeenth-century Delft… revelatory about Vermeer’s aims and methods, helping to explain what is so mesmeric about his work.” (Philip Ball - Nature)“Vivid and persuasive…. This poetic, inclusive approach to popular science writing makes Eye of the Beholder an unfailing pleasure to read.” (Wendy Smith - The Daily Beast)“Irresistible…. [Snyder] ingeniously explores the minutiae of her subjects’ lives to reveal sweeping changes in how their world was understood―ones that still resonate today.” (Jonathon Keats - New Scientist)“Absorbing…. Snyder takes us back through time, beyond the reflections and shadows, to the very heart of Vermeer’s art.” (Roma Tearne - The Independent [UK])“Laura Snyder is both a masterly scholar and a powerful storyteller. In Eye of the Beholder, she transports us to the wonder-age of seventeenth-century Holland, as new discoveries in optics were shaping the two great geniuses of Delft―Vermeer and van Leeuwenhoek―and changing the course of art and science forever. A fabulous book.” (Oliver Sacks)“Eye of the Beholder is a thoughtful elaboration of the modern notion of seeing. Laura J. Snyder delves into the seventeenth century fascination with the tools of art and science, and shows how they came together to help us make sense of what is right in front of our eyes.” (Russell Shorto, author of Amsterdam: A History of the World's Most Liberal City)“Laura J. Snyder's Eye of the Beholder is an irresistible invitation into the lives and work of Vermeer and van Leeuwenhoek and how the extraordinary intersection of their genius in Seventeenth century Delft awakened our perceptions of how we see the world. It's a wonderful and vivid book.” (Katharine Weber, author of The Music Lesson)“As in The Philosophical Breakfast Club, Laura Snyder tells the tale of a crucial moment in human discovery by focusing on the interplay between the personalities involved, in this case the great Dutch artist Johannes Vermeer and the amateur scientist Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, best known for his miniature microscopes and his pioneering work as a microbiologist. This was an age when artists as well as scientists explored nature, occasionally with the same technical means, such as optical devices. This delightful book is solidly researched but reads like a novel―and a good one at that!” (Walter Liedtke, Curator of European Paintings, The Metropolitan Museum of Art)
About the Author Fulbright scholar Laura J. Snyder is the author of The Philosophical Breakfast Club, a Scientific American Notable Book, winner of the 2011 Royal Institution of Australia poll for Favorite Science Book, and an official selection of the TED Book Club. She is also the author of Eye of the Beholder and Reforming Philosophy. Snyder writes about science and ideas for the Wall Street Journal. She is a professor at St. John’s University and lives in New York City.
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Most helpful customer reviews
22 of 27 people found the following review helpful. "See" for yourself! By Josette Abruzzini Undeniably, van Leewenhoek and Vermeer made monumental contributions in each of their fields. That they were neighbors, and that they may have inspired each other as they led mankind towards new ways of seeing, is now clear in Laura J. Snyder's book about these seventeenth century Delftians. Almost four centuries after their birth, the significance of their contributions has now been told in this beautifully written, widely researched and well-documented narrative, Eye of the. Beholder.To linger over a Vermeer is to feel like an intruder, sneaking a peek into a private moment as if you are in the room with the subject. The light through the window plays itself out in such a way that it feels real; yet you are entranced. Indeed. Ms. Snyder brings us inside Vermeer's thinking as she leads us through the process of his painting. He uses technology to understand what his mind's eye sees, and then transforms his vision, his ideas, into incredible works of art.Van Leeuwenhoek was a modest cloth merchant who honed his own magnifiers so as to better view his cloth. But a natural curiosity and a persistent nature led him to be the first human to witness the world of microbes. Through his letters, Ms. Snyder bids us into his world of wee beasties.What conversations these two men must have had! And now, thanks to Ms. Snyder's craftily-written story, we can truly appreciate why both Vermeer and van Leeuwenhoek's gifts to civilization are to be recorded on the same page. Whether your interest is art, science, or Holland's Golden Age, your perspective will be enriched by this book.
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful. Art and science intertwined By BCNYC This incredibly rich book lets us imagine a period and place where art and science were not at odds with each other, and when revolutionary achievements in painting and technology intertwined. It's beautifully written, carefully researched, and very accessible for lay audiences. Like the best literary nonfiction I've read recently (Shorto's Island in the Center of the World, also about this period), it both illuminates an important cultural moment and shows how the period can teach us a different way of seeing. And along the way, the lives of two fascinating individuals and their times emerge fully. Snyder's generous imagination and meticulous research models this more enlarged approach to science, art and experience -- the subject of the book.
19 of 26 people found the following review helpful. Proud and Prejudiced By Jon Boone Laura Snyder has written a generally informative but flawed account about the extent to which optical devices in seventeenth century Europe contributed to an ever expanding, "enlightened" knowledge about the material world, a process that continues to anchor contemporary scientific inquiry and will become increasingly important in and for the future. Snyder weaves a complicated narrative about how hundreds of people, led initially by the likes of Francis Bacon, Galileo, Johannes Kepler, reciprocally honed their thinking and developed increasingly sophisticated optical technology, throughout focusing upon the intertwining careers of the microscopist Antoni Van Leeuwenhoek and the painter Johannes Vermeer, exact contemporaries (born within days of each other in 1632) and lifelong neighbors in the Dutch town of Delft. Nearby lived the the influential statesman, Constantijn Huygens; his son, Christiaan, the most accomplished of the century's astronomers; and Baruch Spinoza, perhaps the century's greatest rationalist who died most likely of silicosis as he hand ground lenses for a living. Rene Descartes, while living in Leiden, published his "Meditations," a treatise in large part about the nature of human perception and the means by which people could discern trustworthy knowledge. All, to one extent or another, used optical devices--a variety of lenses, mirrors, magnification glasses--to inform their work.This kaleidoscope of interlacing optical activity constitutes the book's great value, bringing together in one rather chatty volume the key players and evolving optical technology that now undergird much of culture. We are familiar with microscopes, telescopes, photographs and motion pictures, along with the means by which these and their many offshoots permeate and influence our lives. However, this equipment was provisional and protean 350 years ago, and the men who invented and used it were pioneers, seeing farther, deeper, with greater discernment than anyone had before, often standing on each other's creative shoulders to do so. Van Leeuwenhoek, for example, was the first to see bacteria and sperm; Huygens, the first to articulate the rings of Saturn; Vermeer, likely the first, certainly the most adept, to record with high fidelity the perspectival and coloristic features of projections produced by monocular lenses, using paint to create what were essentially film stills. One expert believes Vermeer's optical paintings were better than today's photographic prints or film because Vermeer was able to reproduce what he saw directly onto his surface with great precision, without any requirement to "average" tones, which is what happens today with chemical printing techniques. I recommend that readers engage in some intellectual/aesthetic reconnoissance to better understand why Vermeer was a notch ahead of all his contemporaries in creating indelible optical images. Compare his "Little Street" with De Hooch's lovely "Woman with a Basket of Beans." Or contrast his "View of Delft" with any other painted landscape, even Canaletto's. I'm not arguing that Vermeer's paintings are "better" in any general way than those of other masters; rather, I'm arguing that his optical imaging was superior, more faithful to what is projected or mirrored via optical means. Which is what Snyder posits--why she places him in the upper pantheon of those protoscientists and natural philosophers who worked so diligently to understand the true nature of light, its underlying behavior, and the way its perception (beyond the limitations of the human eye) lead to truer knowledge.Because she had access to a range of Van Leeuwenhoek's private correspondence, Professor Snyder brings him, his work, his legacy, and his brigade of associates across the continent and in Delft to vibrant life. Regarding his connection to Vermeer, Snyder's research reveals the likelihood that Van Leeuwenhoek chose, and was not randomly appointed, to become the executor of Vermeer's estate upon the latter's death in December, 1675, an indication not only that the two men knew each other but also that they were associates, if not friends. Snyder dwells at some length speculating that the man the artist depicted in his two pendant paintings of 1668,1669, "The Astronomer" and "The Geographer," was Van Leeuwenhoek, building on the arguments that many others have made for this case over the last fifty years. In partial support of this speculation, she reproduces Cornelis de Man's "Anatomy Lesson of Cornelis 's Gravesande," which features the face of the forty nine year old Van Leeuwenhoek, a face that appears somewhat leaner than that depicted five years later in Johannes Verkolje's better known portrayal--and more congenially comparable to the features of Vermeer's astronomer/geographer. Of course, Snyder acknowledges that Vermeer himself may have posed for the paintings, or, less likely in my view, he may have crafted an idealized image of a man engaged in high tech pursuits.Where Snyder falters in too many areas of fact, interpretation, even logical conception, is with her account of Vermeer, both in some of her conclusions about his life's history and, more pointedly, about his optical technique and probable purpose. For a detailed account of her failings about Vermeer's use of optical equipment and in particular, the camera obscura, see Philip Steadman's Amazon review of her book. I share Steadman's astonishment about how Snyder, after surrounding her arguments with accurate, cogent evidence explaining the likelihood of Vermeer's exhaustive efforts to faithfully record light's optical effects, succumbs to the prejudices of the art history community, led by the late Walter Liedtke. As I read her Vermeer narrative, I recalled the ways in which Erasmus Darwin and David Hume missed "getting" the natural selection mechanism decades before Charles did: their prejudices kept it just out of reach. For a book reasonably entitled "Eye of the Beholder," I kept thinking that, regarding Vermeer, it could have been called "None So Blind As Those Who Will Not See."I would add to Steadman's concerns the way Snyder ignored the recent work of Tim Jenison, who, over the last year, has clarified and expanded the profound reverse engineering experiments (built upon Steadman's conceptual foundation) that he introduced in the documentary, "Tim's Vermeer" (2013). Using flat and concave mirrors and, for cannily reproducing Vermeer's "Music Lesson," a convex four-inch lens, all of which were readily available in Delft by the late 1650s, Jenison showed how a painter like Vermeer could discard both the camera and the obscura, using natural room light by which both to see projections and reflections and reproduce them with high fidelity. Moreover, Jenison has recently demonstrated the likelihood that Vermeer may not have always used a lens: looking at only a small, flat "comparator" mirror, Jenison painted a portrait of his daughter Claire in the pose of Vermeer's "Girl with a Pearl Earring" that is stunning in its verisimilitude, capturing as it does the main shadow patterns and optical effects of Vermeer's famous girl (he painted it in the same room with the same north lighting, the room he fashioned as a recreation of Vermeer's studio). Jenison also lays the groundwork for understanding how Vermeer probably crafted his "Girl with a Red Hat," using a box camera image and a comparator mirror, which builds upon Charles Seymour's thesis made fifty one years ago in the important essay, "Dark Chamber and Light-Filled Room." The painting's shape and dimensions (along with those of "Girl with a Flute") correspond almost exactly with the dimensions of the viewing rectangle that can be reconstructed from Johann Zahn's box camera apparatus, surely in use well before 1684.Beyond this, I should add that Snyder doesn't seem able to explain the difference between seeing binocularly with the eyes, where images are compressed and shorthanded by the optic nerve, in the process eliding a great deal of visual information (much in the way a digital recording elides the aural information that analog recording does not), and seeing monocular projections through appropriately refined lenses. Snyder quotes Melanie Gifford, who once wrote that Vermeer "recorded light effects as the eye perceives them, rather than the rationalized version into which the brain translates this image." Snyder then writes, "The way 'we' (my quotes) see is, once again, the subject of Vermeer's artistry."However, people, no matter how skilled and practiced, cannot envision the entire range of tonal values across an expanse of space. Many of the tones are just as invisible to our eyes as microbes and Saturn's rings are invisible to our eyes. It is only with enhanced optical equipment that WE are able to see them. That Vermeer seems to have recorded tonal ranges that would be impossible for the naked eye to see by itself has been evident to the discerning for more than a century, a view most articulately expressed by Lawrence Gowing, as he described Vermeer's seeming indifference to form and his incorporation of images wrought from optical devices that the eye doesn't see. Gowing gave wings to the idea that Vermeer must have deployed something like a camera obscura.Synder concurs. Indeed, some of her most persuasive arguments embody this point. She states that Vermeer used a camera to discover new phenomena, even as Van Leeuwenhoek used his microscope for this purpose. She also writes that, since imitation of nature was considered by many to be the highest calling for an artist, even a godly calling, Vermeer's mimesis had an aesthetic purpose as well, embedded as it was in the Dutch precept of "houding" (here, kudos to Snyder for mentioning Mariet Westermann's generally perceptive article, "Vermeer and the Interior Imagination," by way of elaboration). In short, for Vermeer (and most artists of his time), art had to embrace technology, aesthetics, and knowledge of psychology (what the audience perceived and believed) to achieve the highest mimetic quality. The author concludes her evaluation of Vermeer's achievements by declaring he made a career out of representing optical phenomena, then quotes the Goncourt brothers in Paris, who, in 1861, presciently wrote that Vermeer "was the only master who has made a living daguerreotype of the red-brick houses" of Holland.Unfortunately, Snyder's Liedtkean fear of labeling Vermeer as a "slave" to optical mimetics subverts her ideas about how Vermeer must have achieved his results. Whipsawed by her inability to resolve what seems to be a paradox (Vermeer's works are incredibly memetic/Vermeer's works are largely imaginative ideations), she resorts to a kind of intellectual displacement behavioral, much as a bird in fight or flight mode reverts to pecking its foot. Examples include: Snyder's lengthy discourse about how Vermeer's studio floor would not have been covered with Carrara or Calacatta marbled tiles and therefore, she declaims, Vermeer could not have painted that tiling from life, which conveniently ignores the probability the tiles were props, either assembled and laid in with the real thing (or were painted wood sections similar to those constructed by the tech crew of a high school play), extended only for the viewshed of the painting and for the duration of the painting process. Ditto for such objects as the double eagle chandelier, various musical instruments, and clothing. She insists, moreover, that Vermeer didn't trace his projected images, that he often used colors, tones, and perspectives that a lens projection would not show, that he did not replicate lens aberrations like "discs of confusion," that he frequently changed his compositions in creative ways, that he was a consummate optical innovator in thrall to his ability to use lenses, mirrors, painterly application, and knowledge of the history and craft of painting as tools enabling his creative genius. Such argumentation is the reddest of herrings.If, as his paintings abundantly attest, Vermeer were interested in painting real objects in real light conditions so that the heretofore invisible optical effects from such circumstance became visible in his lenses and mirrors, allowing him to reproduce them, why would he have invented objects and lighting conditions, a situation that would have subverted his intended purpose? Why wouldn't he simply have traced what he saw before filling the tracing in with such nuanced tone? Such a template would have been a time saving, geometrically opportune measure, as it continues to be for many artists today. Moreover, no one has ever suggested, neither Steadman, Gowing, nor Jenison, that Vermeer's masterpieces weren't the result of his ideations, much as the works of remarkable photographers, film directors and cinematographers are the result of a premeditated creative mind. The best photographs and cinema typically emerge from continuous trial and error before they are gotten "right." Their mimesis shares a great deal with Vermeer's--and is rightly celebrated for the way they pack layers of meaning and allusive references about tradition and craft into what an audience ultimately experiences, as the Goncourt brothers, among others, understood about Vermeer.Liedtke's objections to Steadman and others over the way Vermeer virtually duplicated the optical projections he saw vanish if there is no requirement to paint in the dark. Which is why Jenison's discoveries are so significant, even beyond their ability to explain with the power of Occam's Razor how Vermeer must have worked (where is a better, more parsimonious explanation accommodating all the known facts?). With natural room light, Vermeer would have had rather complete freedom to render optical truths and reproduce tiny detail while pursuing high art, manipulating his tableaus, his focus, the amount and angle of lighting, and, on occasion, indulging poetic whimsy, such as the cradling "shadow hand" in "Woman Holding a Balance". Overwhelmingly, however, he painted what his optical arrangements revealed; as his eye and hand became more practiced in optical seeing and doing, he could be ever more experimentally creative. Vermeer's painterly skills allowed the art and its underlying science to harmonize. Note the impressionistic (but optically true) way Vermeer painted both the table tapestry in his "Music Lesson" and the walls of the buildings along his "Little Street." Compare these to, in the first instance, the intricately detailed tapestry Jenison painted in his version of the "Music Lesson" (itself a remarkable achievement, the result of "slavishly" copying what he saw in his mirror) and the fussy particulars of a De Hooch wall, with every brick in place, along with its mortar. Vermeer was a superb tactician and a marvelous entertainer, who, as Snyder points out, was likely in lockstep with his patron's artistic and epistemic sensibility and cognitively attuned to Van Leeuwenhoek's optical muse.I'd be remiss not to mention matters that Professor Snyder claims as fact that aren't:1. There are a number of reasons to suspect Vermeer himself did not, as Snyder and a flotilla of art historians claim, convert to Catholicism, ranging from the circumstance of Vermeer's marriage, to the conventions of the Church, to the behavior of several principals close to Vermeer, and of course to the testament of Vermeer's paintings--the decrees of the Council of Trent notwithstanding. Mixed marriage, while uncommon in The Netherlands at the time, was not rare: witness Rembrandt's parents.2. There is no record that Vermeer's mother-in-law, Maria Thins, "purchased" the family house along the Oude Langendijk, as Snyder asserts. Documentation exists that the property was bought by Maria's elder cousin, who likely never lived there but may have expected its primary use would serve the discreet interests of the neighboring clandestine Jesuit church. When the cousin died, the house may have passed along to the cousin's two granddaughters, who became wealthy lay nuns and who, in turn, may have offered the house to Maria and her family. The granddaughters remained close to that family all their lives.3. No record exists that Vermeer's first child, Maria, was born in 1654, as Snyder affirms. I think it likely she was born late in 1653.4. Contrary to Snyder's account, many of Vermeer's greatest optically refined paintings were probably made before 1660, including the sublime "The Milkmaid," "The Little Street, "Cavalier and Young Woman," and, if Walter Liedtke's chronology has any merit, "The Letter Reader," "The Glass of Wine," and "Young Woman with a Wine Glass." Moreover, I submit that "The Procuress," painted in 1656 when Vermeer was twenty-three, was a major optical experiment in which the artist deployed both lenses and mirrors to get his splendid (but awkward) result (I love the painting, considering it one of the artist's great works). The basin depicted in perhaps Vermeer's earliest canvas, "Diana and Her Companions," seems an optical artifact. Even before 1660, the time he began painting his "View of Delft, Vermeer was an accomplished optical tactician in full command of his tools.5. Vermeer outlived his patron, Pieter Van Ruijven, by a year and a half.6. There are also numerous errata concerning Dutch spelling and history that mar the book, many of which a good editor should have caught.With the exceptions of an awful reproduction of "The Procuress," shown in its more than decade old pre restoration state, and a merely bad version of the pellucid "A Lady Standing by a Virginal," the illustrations that accompany "Eye of the Beholder" are first rate, gracefully complementing the text, which flows rather seamlessly, nicely melding intricate details, complex stories, and hundreds of personages. The general reader will gain much from the reading experience, even with the irritating errata and even as the work introduces Vermeer to new readers. However, “caveat lector” should be in their minds as Snyder discusses Vermeer. I hope they will desire to read Steadman’s “Vermeer’s Camera,” then watch “Tim’s Vermeer," after which they might peruse the blog on Jonathan Jansen’s Internet site, "The Essential Vermeer," scrolling to “Tim’s Vermeer…from a Painter’s Point of View," a masterful essay by Jansen, followed by hundreds of comments, many from Jenison himself (and me).The evident plagiarism that Professor Steadman cites blemishes Dr. Snyder's book and blights her reputation. It seems more the result of a hurried mind at the business of attempting to corral a great deal of information near deadline than it smacks of intentional deception. Nonetheless, it's likely the book's publishers knew about the charge well in advance of publication. If so, this raises the stakes. Snyder and her publisher must step forward to address this issue promptly and publicly with an explanation/defense or, preferably, an apology, for the longer they wait, the greater insult to integrity.
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