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Eye of the Beholder

Johannes Vermeer, Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, and the Reinvention of Seeing

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Eye of the Beholder

Written by: Laura Snyder
Narrated by: Tamara Marston
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"See for yourself!" was the clarion call of the 1600s. Natural philosophers threw off the yoke of ancient authority, peered at nature with microscopes and telescopes, and ignited the scientific revolution. Artists investigated nature with lenses and created paintings filled with realistic effects of light and shadow. The hub of this optical innovation was the small Dutch city of Delft.

Here Johannes Vermeer's experiments with lenses and a camera obscura taught him how we see under different conditions of light and helped him create the most luminous works of art ever beheld. Meanwhile his neighbor Antoni van Leeuwenhoek's work with microscopes revealed a previously unimagined realm of minuscule creatures. The result was a transformation in both art and science that revolutionized how we see the world today.

©2015 Laura J. Snyder by arrangement with W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. (P)2015 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books Arts & Entertainment Biological Sciences History & Culture Physics Science Western Western Europe Innovation France
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Way beyond art

There was lots in this book on art, especially the techniques of Vermeer and the masters, which I enjoyed, but there was also a LOT on science, the invention of microscopes, the discoveries of cells (with details on dissections). For the most part it worked, though the narrative had a couple of annoyances: announcing “footnote” and “end of footnote” when asides or tidbits of information were included (the content should stay, the awkward transitions should go), plus there must have been sub chapters or something that caused the narrator to keep saying, “4”, “7” etc, even when there wasn’t a start of a chapter. A proper audio production would have excluded these, vs narration of a printed book.

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