The Erotics of Looking
Early Modern Netherlandish Art
Art History Special Issues
June 2013
218 Pages, Softcover
Wiley & Sons Ltd
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
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
href="http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-1118465253,subjectCd-AA12.html">The
Erotics of Looking: Early Modern Netherlandish Art edited by
Angela Vanhaelen, Ph.D., and Bronwen Wilson, Ph.D., to any students
of art and art history, academics in the field, art gallery owners
and managers, art collectors and dealers, and to anyone interested
in the power of the senses and sensuality found in the interaction
between artist and viewer. This book will transform the way the
artists of the early modern Dutch period approached their vision,
their works, and their engagement with the viewer of the
paintings." (Blog Business World, 16 August
2013)
Bronwen Wilson is Professor and Head of World Art Studies and Museology at the University of East Anglia. Her publications include The World in Venice: Print, the City, and Early Modern Identity (2005).
