Woman Holding a Balance (1664) - Jan VermeerNational Gallery of Art, Washington
It has been awhile since we've featured a work by Vermeer, but this one bears a repeat performance. I read an extremely thoughtful analysis by Robert Hamerton-Kelly about apocalypse, Revelation, and, of course, mimetic theory. If you have the time, gentle reader, I commend his explication to you here.
2 comments:
There is some excellent and interesting stuff in there, though it is a bit hard to focus. It seems to be extensive symposium notes of what several different people think rather than a consolidated thesis.
It is typically high power scholarship from H-K, but separating the wheat from the chaff (in terms of MT), the operative section is "Mimetic Theory as Apocalypse" a little past the halfway mark.
I don't agree w/everything Hamerton-Kelly says, particularly about gnosis. His analysis is tight, well-written, and admirable. But he does not distill it through the Church's teachings. Therefore, it takes peculiar turns here and there. But it is almost as if he senses this and does not allow these skewed inferences to go too far afield.
What he could do if he stood on the shoulders of the Magisterium is anyone's guess ....
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