Vermeer

"I think that is Gowing’s point in his book about Vermeer—and that was one of the reasons why I wanted to include it here. What he brings out is that you can know all there is to know about 17th-century Delft, and Vermeer’s contemporaries, but none of that explains why Vermeer is so much greater than any of the other genre painters working at the time. He adopts what you might describe as a formalist aesthetic approach to characterising the power of these paintings and characterising that irreducible quality. I think there’s a lot to be said for both perspectives. Obviously, you can’t understand Vermeer without understanding Dutch history and culture but, at the same, the visual can’t be reduced to an illustration of the textual either. True. That goes back to another debate, which I personally think has been a bit overplayed, about his use or reliance on optical instruments. I think Gowing makes a good point, that Vermeer may have learned a few lessons from optical instruments, but that doesn’t really explain why he was interested in these very curious visual effects that often, in fact, interfere with a realistic depiction."