Eye of the beholder : Johannes Vermeer, Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, and the reinvention of seeing / Laura J. Snyder.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 391-405) and index.

-- Prologue: More than meets the eye -- Counterfeiter of nature -- From the lion's corner -- Fire and light -- Learning to see -- Ut pictura, ita visio -- Mathematical artists -- A treaure-house of nature -- Year of catastrophe -- The invisible world -- Generations -- Scientific lion -- New ways of seeing -- Dare to see!

"Snyder transports us to the streets, inns, and guildhalls of seventeenth-century Holland, where artists and scientists gathered, and to their studios and laboratories, where they mixed paints and prepared canvases, ground and polished lenses, examined and dissected insects and other animals, and invented the modern notion of seeing, ... [bringing] Vermeer and Van Leeuwenhoek--and the men and women around them--vividly to life"--Dust jacket flap.