Overview

"Perspective determines how we, as viewers, perceive painting. We can convince ourselves that a painting of a bowl of fruit or a man in a room appears to be real by the way these objects are rendered. Likewise, the trick of perspective can prevent us from being absorbed in a scene. Connecting contemporary critical theory with close readings of seventeenth-century Dutch visual culture, The Rhetoric of Perspective puts forth the claim that painting is a form of thinking and that perspective functions as the language of the image. Aided by a stunning full-color gallery, Hanneke Grootenboer proposes a new theory of perspective based on the phenomenological aspects of non-narrative still-life, trompe l'oeil, and anamorphic imagery. Drawing on playful and mesmerizing baroque images, Grootenboer characterizes what she calls their ""sophisticated deceit,"" asserting that painting is more about visual representation than about its supposed objects. Offering an original theory of perspective's impact on pictorial representation, the act of looking, and the understanding of truth in painting, Grootenboer shows how these paintings both question the status of representation and explore the limits and credibility of perception.  “An elegant and honourable synthesis.”—Keith Miller, Times Literary Supplement"

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9780226309705

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Reviews

This is a lucid, sustained meditation on one of the most difficult ideas that the twentieth century produced about painting: that an image is somehow a form of thinking or a model of thought. Grootenboer follows her theme through its tangled genealogy in Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Lacan, and Damisch, weaving in examples of Dutch still-life painting. This book should be required reading for those interested in the conceptualization of painting. --James Elkins, School of the Art Institute of Chicago

This is a lucid, sustained meditation on one of the most difficult ideas that the twentieth century produced about painting: that an image is somehow a form of thinking or a model of thought. Grootenboer follows her theme through its tangled genealogy in Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Lacan, and Damisch, weaving in examples of Dutch still-life painting. This book should be required reading for those interested in the conceptualization of painting. --James Elkins, School of the Art Institute of Chicago<br>

Author Information

Hanneke Grootenboer is a research leader at the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, University of Amsterdam.

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