There are a few painters whom I have admired over the years and will often seek them out when I visit museums. For that is where great art can truly inspire the viewer. On the wall in my bedroom hangs two such works of art by the same painter, the Dutch Johannes Vermeer. The works are titled "The Geographer" and "The Astronomer". Many people are familiar with his work, whether they realize it or not because of the recent movie "The Girl with the Pearl Earring," based on one of his paintings. As Thomas Kinkade was considered a modern painter of light, Johannes Vermeer was considered the Dutch painter of light.
Vermeer both enchants and provokes. His art transcends all technical categories and humbles all the precepts of aesthetics. On first encounter he looks like a painter of everyday life, one who recorded in detail of almost hallucinatory precision the homely life of prosperous, scrubbed Dutch families in the seventeenth-century heyday of their Republic. His subjects also seem everyday, exemplary only in their ordinariness.
Vermeer reproduces, with dazzling facility, the bright light that pours through crystal-clean windows into shapely rooms, light that picks out the hard surfaces and elegant shapes of gleaming pewter and china vessels; the wrinkled, curling, richly detailed maps that turn white plaster into studies in design and texture; the thick-napped, precisely knotted rugs that transform ordinary tables into a feast of elegant forms and rich colors.
The scenes he staged and reproduced with such intensity and panache only seem like slices of everyday life. The actual rooms of Vermeer’s own house burst with possessions of the most varied shapes and qualities. The post-mortem inventory of the movable goods in his estate shows that one small room on the ground floor contained the entire sprawl of things, new and old, shiny and dilapidated, that are reproduced in thousands of Dutch prints and paintings. Vermeer’s paintings do not entertain or distract the viewer with many props of this kind, any more than they feed the eye with the heaps of fragrant fish and bowls of gleaming fruit that so many of his contemporaries liked to depict.
Vermeer and his wife had eleven of the children who, foreign travelers regularly complained, ran wild through the Dutch streets, enjoying a strange impunity as they pelted strangers with stones. Tightly swaddled infants, older children at prayers and lessons, children’s hobbies, toys, and games fascinated many painters of the Dutch domestic scene. But they too make few appearances on Vermeer’s domestic stage.
Vermeer’s characters play parts in mysterious dramas, austere scripts staged in enclosed spaces, whose nature the viewer can only guess at. His ability to suffuse everyday scenes and actions with an elegiac, classical dignity and stillness, the extraordinary variety of his methods and the extraordinary economy of his subjects and interests - these qualities, rather than a preternatural gift for treating illusion through draughtmanship and painting, make his paintings leap off the wall into the eyes and memories of museum visitors. At his most radical - as in the "View of Delft" and "Girl with a Pearl Earring" - Vermeer seems less to record his own time than to predict the art of centuries to come.
Like many painters of his day, Vermeer began as a painter of large pictures of biblical, classical, and early Christian scenes, since he probably converted to Catholicism in the early 1650s, suggesting a young artist fascinated by the example of others: particularly, perhaps, the Utrecht artists who had brought Caravaggio’s intensely dramatic techniques of narrative and chiaroscuro north.
By the mid-1650s, however, Vermeer evidently turned his attention from the melodramatic to the mundane, the general to the specific, and the imagined past to the known present. Two paintings of cityscapes - "The Little Street" and the "View of Delft" - would be enough to establish him as a master of European art. With great delicacy and deftness, Vermeer employed a wide range of techniques: thick, almost impasto surfaces, sharply contrasting with one another, conveyed the worn brick, smooth wood shutters, tough ivy, and rough cobbles of the Dutch street. For the vividly dramatic actions of his first, larger-than-life characters, he substituted the humdrum every day. Yet these paintings are anything but simple. They convey, with a depth of attention that seems almost religious, the whole history of the buildings they depict. Every crack filled with mortar, every metal brace is picked out by Vermeer’s meticulously evoked flat Dutch light. Vermeer’s buildings exist in time as well as space: they emerge, with thrilling clarity, as the products of a long history.
Vermeer dramatized some urban symbols: the brilliant clouds and sky and thick, lumpy yellow paint draw the viewer’s eye. Here, too, however, he hardly emphasized the shiny newness that one might expect in a visual celebration of the Republic, that association of herring fishers and cloth workers recently risen to prosperity. Instead, he concentrates on the momentary: gestures, glances, gleams of light. Orange tile and blue slate roofs sparkle with the water left by a recent rain. Distant facades glow in the sunlight that penetrates the parting clouds. Still figures on the bright canal shore quietly converse. Vermeer has found a way to represent, through stillness, time in all its various senses; the city’s history and this passing moment are fused and held motionless.
Vermeer loved most to strip exterior brick and tile away so that he could peer into the domestic world they hid. In his interiors a few men and many women stand and sit, read and work, talk or sleep. Seen together, the pictures reveal a painter passionately, even obsessively interested in examining a small number of objects and effects over and over again. The same chair, with and without lion finials, the same map, the same window and furniture, the same jacket with its fine fur color recur again and again, patterns or colors slightly varied as the artist liked. So, more importantly, does Vermeer’s favorite central character: a woman, alone or with one companion, sometimes entirely self-absorbed and intent on carrying out a task, sometimes looking at and responding to a viewer, evidently male. Picasso’s classic woman, she of the Greek profile and heavy, symmetrical limbs, comes to mind - but only briefly. For if Picasso returned, over and over, to the same themes and symbols, he did so with all his force and spontaneity, producing sketches with inexhaustible fertility. Vermeer, by contrast, did not sketch but painted.
His obsession vented itself in a small number of exquisite, minutely detailed works rather than in a vast number of experiments. To these painted rooms belong the most accessible - and widely known - of Vermeer’s women and their occasional male companions.
Vermeer never entirely abandoned the effort to cast complex ideas in powerful visual forms. He used dots of paint almost invisible to the naked eye to create his illusions of human space and buildings. The clear presence of allegories in a few of Vermeer’s paintings, early and late, raises fascinating questions about his masterworks. Did they, too, contain cues to their own interpretation?
Openly moralizing images reached the Dutch public, and in large numbers, in a favorite form of publication of the time: the woodcut and engraved emblems which circulated in thousands, as prints and in books. These illustrated guides to biblical and humanist morality conveyed their teachings in a form at once vividly accessible and crisply memorable. On each page an image, accompanied by a caption and often explicated by further comments in verse and in prose, reminded young women of their duty to stay at home and arouse no comment, or young men of theirs to show courage under adversity. Both visually and verbally explicit, the emblem books encoded the stoical tenets of late Renaissance humanism in readable symbols that became widely familiar. Easily memorized and recognized, they were useful in classrooms and became a favorite form of general reading.
Historians - especially, but not only, of Dutch art - have often tried to use these emblems as Rosetta stones which can enable the modern viewer to decipher the seventeenth century’s forgotten visual codes. Sometimes, close visual correspondences suggest that painters drew on particular emblems.
One form of commentary, finally, would have shed another sort of light on Vermeer’s rooms and streets: a pictorial one. On the one hand, a richer selection of images from Vermeer’s own world would make the individuality and distinction of his painting stand out all the more sharply. Many Dutch painters specialized as Vermeer did, in portraying women in domestic interiors. With great enthusiasm and charm, they embedded wives and daughters in the concerns and appurtenances of an idealized home life, placing them under the benign patriarchal supervision of fathers and husbands and setting them to work as the Marthas of busy, shining households. Vermeer, by contrast, pared away the mundane. He turned a large number of his women - not only the bourgeois writers of letters but also the penniless but powerful milkmaid - into monumental figures, whom he celebrated as powerful and independent beings, unthreatened by any imaginable male onlooker. Visual parallels and contrasts could do more than verbal explication to highlight Vermeer’s remarkably individual attitudes and qualities.
Vermeer did not occupy a high position in the artistic pantheon until the mid-nineteenth century.
And the paintings themselves inspire delight and wonder. Vermeer awaits, ready to enslave and puzzle.
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