Eye of the Beholder
Written by Laura J. Snyder
Narrated by Tamara Marston
4/5
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About this audiobook
Laura J. Snyder
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 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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Reviews for Eye of the Beholder
20 ratings2 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Vermeer and Leewenhoek were neighbors and Leewenhoek was Vermeer’s executor, though there’s no definitive evidence they knew each other. Snyder examines their careers as representative of a time in which art and science flowed in similar paths; the lenses Leewenhoek used to examine the microscopic world could also be used in the camera obscura, which allowed painters like Vermeer to see the visible world differently and change their painting styles in response. Scientists and artists had to learn to see in these new ways; it wasn’t “natural” but nor was it an “unnatural” way of seeing. Snyder analogizes Vermeer’s repeated choice of similar subjects to a natural philosopher’s replication of an experiment under different conditions: Vermeer, she suggests, was experimenting to see the effects of different kinds of light on the emotion of a scene, and the effects of different painting strategies on perceived color.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Having spent much of my life contemplating Vermeer's extraordinary paintings, I approached Laura J. Snyder's new volume on Vermeer and his milieu - "Eye of the Beholder: Johannes Vermeer, Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, and the Reinvention of Seeing" with an open but discerning mind. I must say that I was impressed by Snyder's scholarship and her deft storytelling. What Snyder's book does most of all is allow us to lift the veil of our own conceptual blinders and peer into the world of Vermeer and van Leeuwenhoek. Highly recommended.