Full Description
The Erotics of Looking: Early Modern Netherlandish Art presents a collection of provocative essays that explore the material qualities of early Dutch art to reveal ways new forms of visual imagery solicit a beholder's involvement.
Explores how descriptive pictures during the early modern Dutch art period operated as social things and were designed to pleasurably engage the eye and prompt discussion and debate
Shows how these works potentially raised ethical and political questions about the interconnectedness of engaging with pictures and the material world
Represents a major contribution to the field of early modern Netherlandish art and to general debates about the status and functions of descriptive art
Features essays addressing a variety of aspects of the field, from the historiography of Dutch art to closely attentive readings of particular works
Crafts an original theoretical framework by applying recent insights about the making of early modern publics and the study of material things to the analysis of Netherlandish art
Contents
6 Notes on Contributors
8 Chapter 1 The Erotics of Looking: Materiality, Solicitation and Netherlandish Visual Culture
Angela Vanhaelen and Bronwen Wilson
20 Chapter 2 Beer and Loafing in Antwerp
Bret Rothstein
42 Chapter 3 Perspectives in Flux: Viewing Dutch Pictures in Real Time
Celeste Brusati
68 Chapter 4 Entropic Segers
Christopher P. Heuer
92 Chapter 5 The Turn of the Skull: Andreas Vesalius and the Early Modern Memento Mori
Rose Marie San Juan
110 Chapter 6 Laying the Table: The Procedures of Still Life
Joanna Woodall
138 Chapter 7 Boredom's Threshold: Dutch Realism
Angela Vanhaelen
158 Chapter 8 Response: Art/Matter(s)
Larry Silver
170 Chapter 9 Response: On the Impulse of Mapping, or How a Flat Earth Theory of Dutch Maps Distorts the Thickness and Pictorial Proclivities of Early Modern Dutch Cartography (and Misses Its Picturing Impulse)
Benjamin Schmidt
184 Chapter 10 Response: Reflections on Temporality in Netherlandish Art
Lyle Massey
192 Chapter 11 Response: The Work of Realism
Bronwen Wilson
209 Index
