Aneta Georgievska-Shine

Vermeer and the Art of Love deals with private emotions evoked in domestic interiors in which a young woman may be writing a letter to her absent beloved or playing a virginal in the presence of an admirer. But it is also about the love we sense in the painter’s attentiveness to every detail within those rooms, which lends even the most mundane of objects the quality of something extraordinary. In this engaging book, the author uncovers the ways in which Vermeer challenges the dichotomies between 'good' and 'bad' love, the sensual and the spiritual, placing him within the context of his contemporaries, as well as within the broader discourse on love and art in early modern Europe.

This essay addresses Rubens’s perspective on the human/animal relationship as exemplified by the figure of the satyr. As the author argues, in addition to established associations with ideas of unbridled sensuality, this liminal character relates to deeper philosophical considerations about the interconnectedness of all living beings. Furthermore, a closer look at the connection between the satyr and the literary satire demonstrates that Rubens’s satiric images bear a number of salient qualities of this genre as one that destabilizes all boundaries: be it between the beautiful and the repulsive, the tragic and the comical, or the sublime and the grotesque.

This essay explores Vermeer’s painting known as A Woman with a Lute as a visual poem on amorous and artistic longing. A closer look at its key elements—from the musical instrument being tuned by the lady to the map on the wall behind her—shows that this seemingly unmediated view into a private world is as engaged with ideas as Vermeer’s more overtly allegorical compositions. Most notable among these ideas are the relationship between the microcosm and the macrocosm, the notion that every record of the present is a form of “history,” and that the art of painting is no less eloquent in its silence than its sister arts of music or poetry. Ultimately, as in many other images of solitary females, the artist pulls us into a circle of desire, effectively turning us from beholders to coparticipants in a “composition” whereby the absent comes back into presence.

This study provides a new analysis of the pictorial ensemble of the Torre de la Parada, the hunting lodge of King Philip IV of Spain. Created in the late 1630s by a group of artists led by Peter Paul Rubens, this cycle was completed by Diego Velázquez. Despite the lack of a written program, surviving works provide eloquent testimony of several themes revolving around Neostoic ideals of self-restraint and prudent governance. Rubens set the moral tone through his serio-comic Ovidian narratives, complemented by Velázquez’s portraits of ancient philosophers, and royals and fools of the court. This study is the first to consider in depth their joint artistic contributions and shared ambition.

This book focuses on several mythological paintings created by Rubens between 1610 and 1620. Even by the standards of erudition commonly applied to his oeuvre, these works demonstrate a particularly intense engagement on his part with questions of artistic originality and ideal style. Furthermore, their learned themes point to a rarefied audience steeped in classical and renaissance theories. Through these close readings, the author illuminates the importance of the rhetorical conventions of the period for Rubens’s mode of composition, or the intersection of the poetic and the “archaeological” in his approach to themes drawn from classical mythology.