Treasuring the gaze
Subtitle: intimate vision in late eighteenth-century eye miniatures
By: Hanneke Grootenboer
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2012
Place of publication: Chicago
Language: eng
Number of pages: 223
ISBN-13: 9780226309668; 9780226309712
Copyright date: 2012
Subjects: Gaze in art; Eye in art; Intimacy (Psychology) in art; Visual perception in art; Portrait miniatures; History
Description: "The end of the eighteenth century saw the start of a new craze in Europe: tiny portraits of single eyes that were exchanged by lovers or family members. Worn as brooches or pendants, these minuscule eyes served the same emotional need as more conventional mementoes, such as lockets containing a coil of a loved one's hair. The fashion lasted only a few decades, and by the early 1800s eye miniatures had faded into oblivion. Unearthing these portraits in Treasuring the Gaze, Hanneke Grootenboer proposes that the rage for eye miniatures--and their abrupt disappearance--reveals a knot in the unfolding of the history of vision. Drawing on Alois Riegl, Jean-Luc Nancy, Marcia Pointon, Melanie Klein, and others, Grootenboer unravels this knot, discovering previously unseen patterns of looking and strategies for showing. She shows that eye miniatures portray the subject's gaze rather than his or her eye, making the recipient of the keepsake an exclusive beholder who is perpetually watched."--
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: An overlooked episode of vision's history; title: Intimate vision: the portrait miniature's structure of address; title: Gazing games: eye portraits and the two sexes of sight; title: The crying image: the withdrawal of the gaze; title: Intimate as extimate: the gaze as part-object; title: The face becoming eye: portraiture's minimum; title: The eye portrait's afterlife.