TALK SERIES 30 November 2022: Vermeer and the Art of Love

Wednesday, November 30th - December 21st, 8:00 - 9:00 PM GMT

In this Roundtable series, by the 92nd Street Y, New York, Aneta Georgievska-Shine, Senior lecturer in the Department of Art History, University of Maryland, explores the theme of love in Vermeer's paintings, both in a romantic sense and as a spiritual attitude towards the visible world.

A master of light and colour, Johannes Vermeer creates a timeless world where the smallest actions take on a sense of beauty and meaning beyond their commonplace settings. Gloriously lit, serene, and exquisitely rendered, his seemingly unmediated scenes of daily life touch upon some of the most universal ideas in human experience.

Join art historian Aneta Georgievska-Shine as she places Vermeer within the artistic culture of 17th century Holland, before turning to a closer investigation of the qualities that distinguish him from his contemporaries. Drawing from her research for Vermeer and the Art of Love, Georgievska-Shine argues one of the crucial aspects of his difference is his approach to the theme of love, so popular within his milieu: the love evoked in elegant interiors in which a young woman may be writing a letter to her absent beloved, but also the love we sense in the painter's attentiveness to detail, which lends even the most mundane of objects the quality of something extraordinary. Finally, students will address Vermeer’s influence on other artists, following his rediscovery in the late 19th century.

MORE INFO on the Roundtable series.

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