Vision in early modern culture
March 23rd, 2008
Stuart Clark’s Vanities of the Eye: Vision in Early Modern European Culture (Oxford University Press, 2007) had been waiting for me on my bookshelf for a while, and this week I finally got round to it. It was a great read. Vanities of the Eye is a wonderfully erudite book, teeming with information and original ideas about the changing perception of the sense of vision in early modern culture.
The book argues that contrary to what theories of the rationalization of sight and the invention of perspective suggests, vision came to be characterized by unreliability and uncertainty in the early modern period. As Stuart Clark puts it with a pun: “It is as though European intellectuals lost their optical nerve.” Read the rest of this entry »
