Introduction: An overlooked episode in vision's history -- 1. Intimate vision: the portrait miniature's structure of address -- 2. Gazing games: eye portraits and the two sexes of sight -- 3. The crying image: the withdrawal of the gaze -- 4. Intimate as extimate: the gaze as part-object -- 5. The face becoming eye: portraiture's minimum -- Conclusion: The eye portrait's afterlife
Summary
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