The erotics of looking: Materiality, solicitation and netherlandish visual culture

Abstract

This collection sets out to interrogate the intercourse engendered by the material qualities of Netherlandish artworks. The volume shifts the focus away from the fraught question of how to determine the meanings of pictures by turning instead to an investigation of how ostensibly descriptive works announce themselves, how they actively solicit beholders. It explores how, as theoretical objects invested in their own material history, artworks themselves insist on the performative dynamics involved in making and engaging with the world. The manner in which the essays bring forward the complex interrelations between making, viewing and artefacts presses for an assessment of how such processes contributed to new forms of association in early modern Europe. The Introduction argues that descriptive pictures especially operated as social things, drawing people to engage with them through the pleasures they offer the eye and the wit, prompting discussion and debate, and potentially raising ethical questions about the interconnectedness of diverse beholders and the material world. © Association of Art Historians 2012.