“The clarion call of natural philosophers (for they were not yet called ‘scientists’),” Ms.Donna Douglas, who died Thursday, found lasting fame in her role as Elly May Clampett on the CBS sitcom “The Beverly Hillbillies.” But it was a small role she had two years before that has arguably had a more lasting impact. And at this early stage in the developing scientific paradigm, the reports of a lone investigator on a promising path of discovery could appear almost miraculously insightful. Snyder writes, “one that emerged only in this period with the birth of optical instruments and new theories of vision.” The Scientific Revolution, a movement advanced by the likes of Copernicus, Kepler, Bacon, Galileo and Newton, emphasized empirical methods of research and precise observations of the natural world. Their work “exemplified a particular notion of seeing,” Ms. John’s University, chronicles, the shared obsessions of these Dutch doppelgängers derived from more than mere happenstance. But there’s no indication he knew the artist in life. Van Leeuwenhoek, a minor public official in Delft, was appointed executor of Vermeer’s estate after the painter’s death in 1675, a task he performed for a fixed fee as a perquisite of office.
But what Van Leeuwenhoek and Vermeer seem never to have perceived, remarkably, was each other.
Snyder recounts in “Eye of the Beholder,” an engaging and richly detailed work of interdisciplinary history, each of these visionaries honed his powers of observation by tinkering with optical lenses, a pastime then at the forefront of scientific progress. His neighbor, the painter Johannes Vermeer (1632-75) created some of the most highly praised works in the history of art, including the “Girl With a Pearl Earring” (ca. Antoni van Leeuwenhoek (1632-1723), a microscopist, initiated the discipline we now call microbiology when he discovered hitherto unseen organisms-protozoa and paramecia-in a sample of ordinary drinking water. In the 17th century, two men of genius resided within a stone’s throw of each other in the picturesque Dutch town of Delft. Details from ‘The Geographer’ (1668-9) and ‘The Art of Painting’ (1666-8) by Johannes Vermeer.
0 kommentar(er)
