For some reason, I thought Eye of the Beholder was art-related historical fiction; however, it is a nonfiction look at art, mapmaking, optics, and learning to see through the new devices: telescopes, microscopes and camera obscuras. I found it fascinating, none the less. It is well researched and well documented. Even the footnotes were interesting. Snyder does a great job showing the day to day life of the seventeen century Dutch while focusing on cartographers, artists such as Rembrandt and Vermeer, and scientists such as Galileo and Newton. It covers broad ground as the ramifications of optics spreads from country to country: the Netherlands, England, Italy, France, and beyond.
Snyder goes into detail regarding how lenses were made back then, how the use of the camera obscura (a box with a tiny aperture to let in light which allowed painters and cartographers to see an image and trace it). Lenses back then were fraught with problems: chromatic and spherical aberrations caused by the lenses, distortions from the glass itself, and foreign bodies or bubbles within the glass from the manufacturing process. One had to learn to “see” what was real under the lens. Once learned, that knowledge informed painters in terms of perspective and coloring, scientists in terms of realizing they were seeing something previously unseen, something new to the eye. Through the use of mirrors, lenses, and the camera obscura, painters could achieve remarkable authenticity in the details of their works. There are ample illustrations, all at the back of the book. I would have liked a link from the mention of the illustration to the illustration itself so I could flip back and forth between the narrative and the illustration and see what Snyder describes for myself.
This book ties in nicely with a a historical fiction novel I read back in November of 2020, The Company Daughters by Samantha Rajaram, which conveys Dutch life in 1620 as two young women sign on to become wives of men settling in the Far East with the Dutch East India company. It also is good to read alongside The Miniaturist and Girl with a Pearl Earring.
********************
Eye of the Beholder: Johannes Vermeer, Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, and the Reinvention of Seeing (W. W. Norton & Company, March 16, 2015) is available through:
********************
This post may contain Amazon Affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate, I may earn a small amount from qualifying purchases at no cost to you.
