Home › Books › Vermeer: A Life Lost and Found
Vermeer: A Life Lost and Found
by
88/99
Critics' Rating Index
71/99
Readers' Rating Index
n/a
Scholars' Citation Index
66/99
Volume of Reviews
49/99
Volume of Reader Ratings
Sign in to add to your shelf, rate, or review this book.
About This Book
This revelatory biography persuasively addresses the two great unresolved questions about Vermeer—why did he paint his pictures, and what do they mean? One spring day in 1683, a notary's clerk in Delft entered the home of the late Magdalena Pieters van Ruijven and stumbled on one of the wonders of the seventeenth–century twenty paintings by Johannes Vermeer. How had this one Dutchwoman come to possess the majority of the master's work? And why have these images—among the most beautiful, even sublime, in the history of art—defied explanation for so long? Following new leads and drawing on freshly uncovered evidence from Dutch archives, acclaimed art historian Andrew Graham–Dixon presents a dramatic and transformative new interpretation of the artist's life and work. Rich with piercingly direct descriptions of Vermeer's paintings, Graham–Dixon's biography is full of revelations. It upends the master's enigmatic reputation and depicts him instead as a pioneer of the early Enlightenment, a pacifist who was deeply affected by the wars and religious conflicts of the Dutch Republic and allied to a radical movement driven underground by persecution.
Reviews
"Art and spiritual history are woven throughout this luminous and fascinating biography."
"A well-researched, penetrating investigation."
"Along the way, Graham-Dixon makes informed, well-researched guesses about whom Vermeer might have apprenticed with, among other mysteries."
"This is a fascinating portrait of Vermeer, his times and his mind."
"But the test of an artist's biography is always going to be how it treats the paintings, and here Vermeer: A Life Lost and Found is much less successful ..."
"Graham-Dixon's task, as it was in his biography of Caravaggio, is to resacralize an art that the current age consigns to the realms of the secular ..."
Preview
Reader Reviews
0 reviewsSign in to write a review.
No reader reviews yet. Be the first!