Description
In this critical darling Vermeers captivating and enigmatic paintings become windows that reveal how daily life and thought-from Delft to Beijingwere transformed in the 17th century, when the world first became global.
A Vermeer painting shows a military officer in a Dutch sitting room, talking to a laughing girl. In another canvas, fruit spills from a blue-and-white porcelain bowl. Familiar images that captivate us with their beautybut as Timothy Brook shows us, these intimate pictures actually give us a remarkable view of an expanding world. The officers dashing hat is made of beaver fur from North America, and it was beaver pelts from America that financed the voyages of explorers seeking routes to China-prized for the porcelains so often shown in Dutch paintings of this time, including Vermeers. In this dazzling history, Timothy Brook uses Vermeers works, and other contemporary images from Europe, Asia, and the Americas to trace the rapidly growing web of global trade, and the explosive, transforming, and sometimes destructive changes it wrought in the age when globalization really began.
Author: Timothy Brook
Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 01/02/2009
Pages: 288
Weight: 0.65lbs
Size: 8.20h x 5.40w x 0.90d
ISBN: 9781596915992
Language: English
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