Vermeer's Hat
The "glowing" painting by Johannes Vermeer, "Officer and Laughing Girl", is featured on the cover of this new book: Vermeer's Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global World by Timothy Brook.At the intersection between World History and Art History, this book examines the work of Vermeer, while focusing on the things that appear in Vermeer's paintings: beaver hats from the New World, porcelain from China, and Turkish rugs. Brook discusses how the "urge to acquire the goods of distant lands was refashioning the world more powerfully than we have yet understood."
Featured in the background of the painting is a Willem Blaeu print of a map of Holland and West Friesland, by mapmaker Balthasar van Berckenrode.
Labels: books, netherlands
posted by Cartophiliac @ Thursday, May 29, 2008
4 Comments
4 Comments:
Hmmm, looks interesting. Have you read it?
Not yet, just started it.
That's cool! I just got back from the Maps exhibit at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore and they had a "Germania Inferior" map(love that name!) that appears in a different Vermeer - "Young Woman with a Water Pitcher". Guess he liked painting maps.
And here she is:
http://www.essentialvermeer.com/catalogue/young_woman_with_a_water_pitcher.html
Thanks!
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