I recently started reading a book,
"Vermeer's Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global World."
And frankly it is excellent. I have enjoyed every page of it and Timothy Brook is a master at story telling. His thesis is given on page 9 of his book:
"As we gaze at each of the seven paintings on which this book has been draped...We can still enjoy the pleasures of the surface, but I also want us to duck past the surface and look hard at the objects as signs of the time and place in which the painting was made. Such signs slipped into the picture as it was being painted largely unawares. Our task is to coax them out, so that we can in effect use the painting to tell not just its own story, but our own...If we think of objects in them not as props behind windows but as doors to open, then we will find ourselves in passageways leading to discoveries about the seventeenth-century world that the paintings on their own don't acknowledge, and of which the artist himself was probably unaware" (Brook, 9).
Brook has chosen 7 paintings by Vermeer as the framework of this book. From within the paintings the Chinese historian picks out certain objects and uses them as a window into the seventeenth century world. For example, the second chapter is dubbed, "Vermeer's Hat" and he takes Vermeer's painting, Officer with a Laughing Girl, and gives readers an introduction of the changing relationships between men and women during the Dutch Golden Age in Delft. But he then goes on and uses the hat on the officer's head as a "door" into Canada where he spins the narrative of the story of Samuel Champlain and his alliance with the Huron Confederacy of Indians against the Iroquois Confederacy as he searched for beavers...for making hats. Just like the one that the officer is wearing on his head. That is essentially the book. Brook takes objects from the paintings and uses them to launch us into the seventeenth century world.
I will add further posts about this book as well. It is truly fascinating.
