Introduction: reception and interpretation; Part I. Idyll: The German Reception of Dutch Art and Vermeer's Paintings of Social Life: Introduction; 1. Hegel's legacy to German scholarship on seventeenth-century Dutch painting; 2. Vermeer's paintings of social life as 'disturbed idylls'; 3. Temporality and difference: 'The Chinese Hat'; Part II. Fiction: The French Reception of Vermeer and the Modernity of Vermeer's Cityscape: Introduction; 4. French travel literature of the nineteenth-century; 5. Art criticism 1859-1913: the 'Oriental' Vermeer; 6.

The modern Vermeer: Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past; 7. Seriality and originality: Vermeer's View of Delft, his 'Identical World' and Dutch painting in Proust's Remembrance of Things Past; 8. 'Fernbild'; Part III. Allegory: The Question of Authority in Vermeer's The Art of Painting and Allegory of Faith: Introduction: 'The Rat and the Snake'; 9. Theories and concepts of allegory; 10. Vermeer's The Art of Painting; 11. Veritas Filia Temporis; 12. Vermeer's Allegory of Faith; Epilogue; Notes; References; Index.