Vermeer and the Art of Love by Aneta Georgievska-Shine

Vermeer and the Art of Love by Aneta Georgievska-Shine

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.

'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

Aneta Georgievska-Shine is an academic and writer. A senior lecturer in the Department of Art History at the University of Maryland, she has published widely on early modern art, including the books Rubens, Velázquez, and the King of Spain (co-authored, Ashgate, 2014) and Rubens and the Archaeology of Myth (Ashgate, 2009).