"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.