Vermeer and the Art of Love

Aneta Georgievska-Shine author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Lund Humphries Publishers Ltd

Published:1st Jun '22

£39.99

Available to order, but very limited on stock - if we have issues obtaining a copy, we will let you know.

Vermeer and the Art of Love cover

Vermeer and the Art of Love is about the emotions evoked in those elegant 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 and beautifully illustrated book, Georgievska-Shine 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 to give the reader a fascinating insight into his unique understanding and interpretation of the subject.

Featured in ‘Best new art books for 2022' – Christie's 

'This stimulating discussion of compellingly beautiful imagery is both lively and highly informative, leading readers on an adventure through spaces they can enter only in their imaginations.[...] Summing Up: Essential' — Amy Golahny, CHOICE Editors' Pick, March 2023


Winner of Choice Outstanding Academic Title 2023


‘By repeatedly pausing to note “the subtle tension” Vermeer maintains between the descriptive character of his work and its formal qualities, Georgievska-Shine also seeks to account, however partially, for our own lover-like absorption in the paintings. What keeps us looking, she implies, is what keeps us unsettled – caught between our surrender to illusion and our consciousness of the art that makes that illusion possible.’ - Ruth Bernard Yeazell, New York Review of Books


'This meditative and beautifully-illustrated volume examines the truth behind the sentiment, offering up love – earthly, divine, and metaphysical – as a potent conceptual framework for unpacking Vermeer’s stylistic and iconographic preoccupations. {...} a highly cogent, pleasurable look at Vermeer through loving eyes.' – Elizbeth Berry Drago, HNAR

  • Winner of CHOICE Magazine Outstanding Academic Title 2023

ISBN: 9781848224896

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: unknown

160 pages