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    Eye of the Beholder
    Eye of the Beholder
    Eye of the Beholder
    Audiobook13 hours

    Eye of the Beholder

    Written by Laura J. Snyder

    Narrated by Tamara Marston

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    quot;See for yourself!quot; was the clarion call of the 1600's. Natural philosophers threw off the yoke of ancient authority, peered at nature with microscopes and telescopes, and ignited the Scientific Revolution. Artists investigated nature with lenses and created paintings filled with realistic effects of light and shadow. The hub of this optical innovation was the small Dutch city of Delft. Here Johannes Vermeer's experiments with lenses and a camera obscura taught him how we see under different conditions of light and helped him create the most luminous works of art ever beheld. Meanwhile, his neighbor Antoni van Leeuwenhoek's work with microscopes revealed a previously unimagined realm of minuscule creatures. The results was a transformation in both art and science the revolutionized how we see the world today.#160;
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHighbridge Company
    Release dateMar 16, 2015
    ISBN9781622316571
    Eye of the Beholder
    Author

    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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    • 4/5
      Vermeer 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.
    • 5/5
      Having 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.