Vermeer's Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global World - Hardcover

Brook, Timothy

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1596914440 ISBN 13: 9781596914445

Publisher: Bloomsbury Pub Plc USA, 2007

Synopsis

In the hands of an award-winning historian, Vermeer’s dazzling paintings become windows that reveal how daily life and thought—from Delft to Beijing—were transformed in the seventeenth century, when the world first became global.
A painting shows a military officer in a Dutch sitting room, talking to a laughing girl. In another, a woman at a window weighs pieces of silver. Vermeer’s images captivate us with their beauty and mystery: What stories lie behind these stunningly rendered moments? As Timothy Brook shows us, these pictures, which seem so intimate, actually offer a remarkable view of a rapidly expanding world. The officer’s dashing hat is made of beaver fur, which European explorers got from Native Americans in exchange for weapons. Those beaver pelts, in turn, financed the voyages of sailors seeking new routes to China. There—with silver mined in Peru—Europeans would purchase, by the thousands, the porcelains so often shown in Dutch paintings of this time. Moving outward from Vermeer’s studio, Brook traces the web of trade that was spreading across the globe.
The wharves of Holland, wrote a French visitor, were “an inventory of the possible.” Vermeer’s Hat shows just how rich this inventory was, and how the urge to acquire the goods of distant lands was refashioning the world more powerfully than we have yet understood.

About this title

Review:

A more entertaining guide to world history is difficult to imagine.

(Ross King, author of Brunelleschi’s Dome)

Brook takes his readers on a journey that encompasses Chinese porcelain and beaver pelts, global temperatures and firearms, shipwrecked sailors, silver mines and Manila galleons. A book full of surprising pleasures. (Jonathan Spence, author of The Search for Modern China)

The writing is informed, evocative, grips the attention. (Svetlana Alpers London Review of Books 2009-02-26)

Enthralling... original and stimulating... Vermeer's hat is a jewel of a study of two distinct yet intertwined worlds, feeling their way together towards modernity (Lisa Jardine Literary Review)

Brook's eye conjures up the invisible vistas through Vermeer's open windows (Peter Conrad Observer)

An adventure in itself... clear, original, thoughtful and engaging (Spectator)

Spellbinding...as a guide to the world behind the pictures Vermeer's Hat is mind-expanding (John Carey Sunday Times)

Book Description:

In a remarkable book Vermeer's magical paintings become windows that reveal how daily life - from Delft to Beijing - was transformed.

About this edition

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Pub Plc USA
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 1596914440
• ISBN 13: 9781596914445
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 272