Through a historical analysis of Vermeer's method of production
and a close reading of his art, Daniel Arasse explores the
originality of this artist in the context of seventeenth-century
Dutch painting. Arguing that Vermeer was not a painter in the
conventional, commercial sense of his Dutch colleagues, Arasse
suggests that his confrontation with painting represented a very
personal and ambitious effort to define a new pictorial practice
within the classical tradition of his art. By examining Vermeer's
approach to image-making, the author finds that his works
demonstrate the concept of painting as a medium through which the
viewer senses the ungraspable and mysterious presence of life. Not
only does this concept of painting carry on the traditions of
Classical Antiquity and the High Renaissance, but it also relates
to Catholic ideas about spiritual meditation and the power of
images.
Arasse shows that although Vermeer usually uses secular subject
matter commonplace among his contemporaries, his treatment of
iconography, light, and line, for example, varies greatly from
theirs. Iconographical elements tend to hold meaning in suspense
rather than to explicate; dazzling light emanates from interior
objects; sfumato renders the presence of objects without depicting
them. Discussing these and other aspects of Vermeer's art, Arasse
locates the painter's genius in the reflexive, meditative nature of
his works, each of which seems to be a painting about painting.
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