| The work of Carel Fabritius (1622--1654), one of the most talented mid-seventeenth-century Dutch painters, has never received critical analysis despite its inclusion in virtually all surveys of Dutch, and particularly Delft, painting and its being the subject of two recent exhibitions. The nature of the work has long been considered intractable: in a small ambit---the entire oeuvre numbers between eleven and sixteen---Fabritius engages the issues central to Dutch art history by blurring genres, distorting perspective, and creating incoherent spaces and enigmatic themes, all resistant to traditional art historical methods. In this dissertation I examine the works as pictorial experiments and investigations of visual perception, thus embracing their radical and productive ambiguity. Several themes wind through the project: the works engage the status of subject and object as defined by the gaze; defamiliarize architecture and the usual division between public and private; and explore the relation of description to blank expanses, anticipating its elaboration in the painting of Vermeer. A resolutely non-narrative art, Fabritius's paintings concern the material basis of painting and representation and the optical nature of perception, realized through self-conscious experiences of viewing. |
