Muy irregular. Capítulos estupendos y otros muy flojos y densos ( )

http://bactra.org/weblog/algae-2018-08.html#snyder ( )

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. ( )

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. ( )