| Description |
This seminar is intended to perform two tasks: it offers an introduction to Dutch seventeenth-century painting through the lens of Johannes Vermeer and also provides an introduction to thinking about methods of art history and the work of interpretation. Vermeer serves as a focus for thinking about Dutch painting more generally because in many ways his art – though we think of it today as unique – responded to pictorial problems and strategies of his predecessors and contemporaries. He was deeply engaged in a dialogue about painting with other artists of the Golden Age. We will, therefore, put his work into dialogue as well with other genre painters, still life painters, history painters, and landscape/cityscape painters. In doing so, we will consider the ways in which Vermeer’s works are similar to, but also differ from the art of his contemporaries.
In particular, we will consider the inscrutability and ambiguity that infuse his works, qualities which ask us to think about the role of interpretation in art history more generally. What methods are available for us, as modern viewers, to understand and even produce meaning ourselves from objects so removed from us in space and time? Our primary concerns, therefore, will be twofold. On one hand, we will be concerned with visual properties, artistic practices, and their motivations: why things (were made to) look the way they do in these paintings. You will be asked to think critically about works of art within a historical context, and to write about visual form, effect, and experience. On the other, we will be concerned with how art historians have written about these objects and used different methods to ground their interpretive claims.
The success and fun of the seminar will depend on the active participation of all students in these weekly presentations and discussions. You must do the readings, prepare for presentations, come to every class, and engage in the discussions. We will think about concepts like silence, resemblance, seduction, habitat, meaning, ambiguity, gender, and objecthood in Dutch painting, comparing Vermeer’s treatment of these things to the way other painters handled them. We will also consider technologies of making and seeing that may have influenced Vermeer’s painting, and think about the relationship between Dutch painting and questions of “global empire” that emerge when considering the growing world of 17th-century maritime trade and commerce.
Readings will include texts by authors such as Svetlana Alpers (The Art of Describing), Alois Riegl, Karin Leonhard (Das Gemalte Zimmer), Daniel Arasse (Vermeer: Faith in Painting), Karel van Mander, and Roland Barthes among others. The seminar is reading heavy, in the interest of presenting numerous methodologies. Class will be held in German, or English, depending on the wishes of the students. Reading will be primarily in English. Written work can be submitted in both languages. |
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