Books > Arts & Architecture > History of art / art & design styles > 1600 to 1800
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Tables of Knowledge - Descartes in Vermeer's Studio (Hardcover)
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Tables of Knowledge - Descartes in Vermeer's Studio (Hardcover)
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Descartes believed that his analytic model applied to all fields of
research and that all branches of science lead to truth. His many
analogies with literature and art notwithstanding, Descartes offers
an entry into knowledge that fails nevertheless to take into
account how in the seventeenth century Dutch painters such as
Vermeer similarly order a view of the world by concentrating on the
properties of individual objects. Descartes's celebrated scientific
method offers a protocol for conducting experiments; Harriet Stone
argues that this method can also serve as a guide for classifying
the findings obtained from experiments. Tables of Knowledge shows
that Dutch genre paintings and still lifes enact in visual form a
process of recording information similar to that of science, with
intriguing results.Stone investigates such diverse topics as
seventeenth-century advances in optics and the attendant explosion
of data about the natural world; the proliferation of material
goods in prosperous Dutch homes; and the compelling realism of
Golden Age paintings. Vermeer and his contemporaries, she contends,
transform a potentially threatening consumerism into the viewer's
aesthetic pleasure. The artists' depictions of rooms where framed
images and maps adorn walls and where fruit, shimmering glassware,
gold pieces, and other precious items are set out on tables
constitute an inventory of middle-class life. Appealing to both the
eye and the mind, Dutch paintings convey meaning by accentuating
the luxury of objects displayed in all their specificity. While not
without its voyeuristic, sensual, and even lascivious overtones,
art offered the Dutch, who labored under the moral austerity of the
Protestant Church, a way of bearing witness to ordinary experience
that was unmistakably satisfying and surprisingly
Cartesian.Illustrated with sixteen pages of color reproductions of
Dutch masterworks, as well as five black-and-white images, Tables
of Knowledge will interest intellectual and cultural historians of
the early modern period, art historians, and historians and
philosophers of science.
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