Eye of the Beholder: Johannes Vermeer, Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, and the Reinvention of Seeing

by Laura J. Snyder

  Constantijn had sought out Drebbel at first because of his renown as an inventor of remarkable objects: a perpetuum mobile, a perpetual motion machine, in which the constant motion of water inside a series of glass tubes seems to have been caused by changes in the temperature and pressure of the surrounding air (it was a kind of air thermometer/barometer); a regulated oven, in which the temperature could be controlled; an incubator, which Drebbel used to hatch ducklings and chicks by himself even in the coldest winters; and, most spectacularly, a kind of submarine or diving bell, which he demonstrated with great fanfare in the Thames River one afternoon.

  In his autobiography, Huygens described what he had observed on that day. Drebbel and a few trusting souls had dived under the water in a “little ship” with a leather-covered frame. On hand were King James I of England and several thousand Londoners. They waited for the ship to resurface … and waited … and waited longer, until everyone was quite sure the funny little inventor and his crew had been swept away by the tides and drowned. Many in the crowd went home. Some curious onlookers remained, along with the king, who refused to give up hope. Finally, Huygens remarks, after three long hours, Drebbel

  suddenly rose to the surface a considerable distance from where he had dived down, bringing with him the several companions of his dangerous adventure to witness to the fact that they had experienced no trouble or fear under the water, … yea, even that they had done in the belly of that whale all the things people are used to do in the air, and this without any trouble.

  Although King James did not take up Drebbel’s suggestion that this ship could be useful in warfare, he was still impressed enough to take the plunge with Drebbel on a later trip—or so a possibly apocryphal story has it. Decades later, fellows of the Royal Society of London, including Robert Boyle and Robert Hooke, would marvel at how Drebbel had managed to replenish the breathable air underwater for such a long time; even the philosophers Gottfried Leibniz and Baruch Spinoza would wonder about this. To this day, no one knows Drebbel’s secret for certain, though Boyle thought that Drebbel had likely generated oxygen by heating nitre (potassium nitrate or sodium nitrate) in a metal pan to make it emit oxygen. That would also turn the nitrate into sodium or potassium oxide or hydroxide, which would tend to absorb the carbon dioxide being exhaled by those inside the ship. In 1662 Boyle wrote that he had spoken with “an excellent mathematician,” who was still alive and had been on the submarine, who said that Drebbel had a “chymical liquor that would replace that quintessence of air that was able to cherish the vital flame residing in the heart.”

  But Huygens, who was beginning to take an interest in lenses and optical instruments, was most interested in the fact that Drebbel was not only grinding his own lenses, but had created a new type of device with those lenses. Some believe that it was actually Drebbel who made the first instruments designed specifically for viewing very small objects. He was certainly the one to devise a crucial innovation. Each of Drebbel’s devices consisted of a three-piece extensible brass tube. The tube was fitted with a small plano-convex lens as the objective (that is, the lens was convex on one side but flat on the other), with the convex side turned to the object being examined. The ocular end of the tube held a larger, double-convex lens (both sides were convex), which was not right at the end but about five centimeters from its mouth. The tube was encased in a brass ring, fitted with three legs fastened to a small, flat round surface. The object to be studied was placed in the middle of this surface. The lens was focused by sliding the tube up and down within its tripod stand. Magnification was increased by extending the tube out to different lengths. The use of two convex lenses rather than the concave/convex combination of the Galilean telescope was ingenious, because it allowed for a shorter tube and a broader field of vision. After looking through one of Drebbel’s microscopes, Constantijn Huygens enthusiastically wrote of the “new theater of nature,” indeed “another world,” visible through it.

  By the early 1620s, several microscopes of this type made by Drebbel were fast circulating throughout Europe; one was presented to Marie de Médicis, queen of France, in 1622, by a brother of Drebbel’s son-in-law. Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc, a French natural philosopher and collector, saw the Drebbel microscope when he was attending the court of Marie de Médicis and insisted on acquiring several copies for his own use. Some of these made their way to Roman notables by 1623. Peiresc wrote excitedly to Girolamo Aleandro describing this device: it was a

  periscope or occhiale, a new invention different from that of Galileo, which shows a flea as large as a cricket … [and] the minute animals generated in cheese, called mites, so tiny that they are like dust-grains, but when seen with this instrument become as large as fleas but without wings.

  Galileo came across one in 1624 and proceeded to use the concave/convex system to create his own new microscopes. He presented examples of these to Cesi at the Accademia dei Lincei. Cesi would later employ one to produce the first published microscopic study, a close examination of the bee, in 1625. Another of the Linceans, Johannes Faber, after seeing the instruments presented to Cesi by Galileo, wrote in a letter to Cesi, “I should also mention that I am calling the new occhiale for looking at minute things a microscope.”

  The microscope had entered the scientific toolkit. It was clear from the start that this new device would revolutionize science no less than the telescope had already done. However, while the microscope captured the imagination of natural philosophers, it did not immediately lead to new scientific discoveries—unlike the telescope, through which Galileo had seen never-before imagined celestial objects and attributes (the satellites of Jupiter, the mountainous surface of the moon) almost immediately. For the next forty years, the role of microscopes was limited mostly to the demonstration of wonders and curiosities of nature, as natural philosophers and the public delighted to see the known world magnified. Insects, in particular, were examined, and examined again, as everyone marveled at the intricacy and beauty of the smallest and lowliest of God’s creatures—or, what were believed to be the smallest of his creatures. Athanasius Kircher gaped at the unexpectedly complex construction of even the smallest insect. Who would have thought that God would spend such care in forming the lowly mite or louse? Pierre Borel, who published the first book devoted exclusively to microscopic observations, gazed in awe at the wondrousness of the minute body of a mite, remarking especially on its eye—in which he could sometimes perceive a mischievous glint. Gioanbatista Odierna conducted a more detailed study of the eye of the fly, making observations both before and after a dexterous dissection of the tiny organ. Francesco Fontana delicately pressed the transparent eggs out of the abdomen of a flea and observed the nits emerging prematurely from the damaged ova, charting a future role for the microscope in the controversy about spontaneous generation, as tiny pests were, at this time, still generally assumed to arise from mud or decay.

  These observations set the stage for a new revolution in science and in the understanding of how we see. But it would not be until forty years after its invention—when the new device began to be used less for evoking curious delight and more for the purposeful study of organic structure—that the true age of the microscope was born. Only then would the invisible world be made visible. This transformative moment had to await the flowering of genius in a draper’s apprentice, Antoni Leeuwenhoek.

  *1 Until about 1680, Antoni spelled his surname a number of ways, including “Leeuwenhoeck” and “Leewenhoeck.” I will use the later version that he preferred from 1680 until his death.

  *2 Grietge is listed on the marriage license as living at the Oude Langendijck, though it does not give a number of the house. But as the street is not very long, only the length of the Market Square, and Maria Thins’s house was right in the middle of it, so wherever Grietge’s parents’ house was on that street it would have been only a few doors away from Maria Thins’s house.

  *3 One wonders whether some upper-class men wore spectacles with
out needing them, as a sign of their intelligence, like Brooklyn hipsters today.

  PART 3

  Fire and Light

  * * *

  ON MONDAY, OCTOBER 12, 1654, around ten thirty in the morning, the painter Carel Fabritius—considered one of the finest students of Rembrandt’s—sat in front of his easel on the ground floor of his small house on the Doelenstraat, a narrow street in the northeast part of Delft. Fabritius’s house was close to the headquarters of the city militia and near the former convent of the Poor Clares, which had been repurposed after the founding of the Protestant republic as a store for army munitions. The subject of his portrait—Simon Decker, the former sexton of the Oude Kerk—posed patiently, and Fabritius’s student Mathias Spoor stood nearby, ready to bring his master a fresh brush when needed.

  As Fabritius painted, a clerk for the States General approached the former convent, which lay nestled among the trees behind the Doelen, on a mission: to remove a two-pound sample of gunpowder. Although the Treaty of Münster had ended the fighting with Spain in 1648, security continued to be of major concern for the Dutch. Conflict with England had led to an Anglo-Dutch war in 1652 that had only ended five months earlier. Tensions still simmered between the two seagoing powers; they clashed frequently over who had the right to the vast schools of herring passing by England’s east coast, and who would dominate the Iberian spice trade. The Dutch militia remained on a state of semi-alert, and on this day a routine test of the quality of the gunpowder stores was to take place.

  The clerk lit a lantern and entered the gunpowder store, a tower partly submerged in the ground of the convent garden holding about ninety thousand pounds of gunpowder. Moments passed. Then, suddenly, a roar, which Fabritius heard—indeed, it was heard as far as the island of Texel in the North Sea—followed by five immense explosions. An immense cloud of smoke rose over Delft, a dark shroud filled with rubble, chalk, stones, and wooden beams, mixed with human and animal body parts. It was, as one eyewitness recorded, “as if the pools of hell had opened their throats to spew out their poisonous breath over the whole world.”

  -1-

  The munitions depot explosion destroyed much of Delft. In the large area bounded by the Geerweg on the north, by the Verwersdijck on the west, the Singel canal on the east, and Fabritius’s street, the Doelenstraat, on the south, every house was razed to the ground—at least two hundred buildings. Many buildings beyond this area—over three hundred—were completely wrecked, and it was said that not one house in Delft escaped damage. Furniture was splintered, china was smashed, clothing left torn and dirty. Even the stained glass windows of the Nieuwe Kerk—which had been spared by Protestant iconoclasts destroying the trappings of Catholicism in 1566 and later—were shattered by the explosion’s force. All the windowpanes in the Town Hall were blown out. One eyewitness said it looked as if houses were belching out their very innards. Hundreds of lives were lost; to this day no one knows exactly how many people died. All that was left at the site of the gunpowder magazine was a hole about fifteen feet deep, filled with water. For seventeen years the ground would remain open, as a kind of sacred ground, used only periodically as the town’s horse market (paardenmarkt).

  In the chaos immediately following the explosion, as horses screamed in their stables and people huddled under tables hoping to save themselves from falling roofs and shattered glass, someone pulled Fabritius from the rubble of his house. He was, miraculously, still alive. Carried to Delft’s hospital, along with hundreds of other wounded citizens, Fabritius died an hour later. Most of his paintings—still stacked in his studio, waiting to be sold—were destroyed in the blast. Fabritius was also known to have painted murals directly on walls for some patrons; many of these murals were destroyed in the blast as well. Yet at least one was spared: in 1660 the widowed owner of a Dutch brewery called The World Upside Down made it a condition of the building’s sale that she be allowed to rip out the part of the wall that Fabritius had painted, so that she could take it with her. Only about a dozen of his paintings are known to us today, including the glorious study The Goldfinch, which features the kind of lush backlighting that could have inspired Vermeer’s later work.

  Fabritius would be memorialized in 1667 by the Delft chronicler Dirck van Bleyswijck, who described him as “a very fine and outstanding painter, who in matters of perspective and natural coloring … was so skillful and powerful that (according to the judgment of many connoisseurs) [he] has never had his equal.” In a later edition of the work, Bleyswijck would add a reference to Vermeer as the “phoenix” who arose out of Fabritius’s ashes.

  Soon after the explosion, Fabritius’s neighbor Egbert van der Poel memorialized the event by painting the destroyed town. Though Van der Poel and his wife had survived the blast, two days later they buried a daughter, who probably perished in the explosion. Van der Poel, haunted by the tragedy, produced no fewer than twenty views of Delft as it looked immediately following the disaster. In one, A View of Delft after the Explosion (1654), the devastated landscape is filled with the rubble of collapsed buildings; the only structures remaining intact are the Old and the New Churches, whose spires can be seen looming over burned trees and piles of rubble. Groups of people help the wounded, comfort each other, and try to salvage some belongings. After depicting the obliterated landscape so many times, Van der Poel, as if unable to bear living in the ruined city depicted in his pictures, left his native Delft forever, and settled in Rotterdam.

  Six years later, Johannes Vermeer would paint his own View of Delft. His picture shows the town, which had been rebuilt remarkably quickly, in its full glory. Delft citizens had had to rebuild before—after the great fire of 1536 had destroyed the western quarters of the city. Like before, Delft had risen from the ashes. Vermeer exhibits Delft from the south, depicting from across the harbor its city walls, the Schiedam Gate with its clock tower and the Rotterdam Gate with its twinned turrets. The interior of the city is bathed in strong sunlight, in which the reddish tile roofs of the buildings lining the canals seem to glow with their own benign flame.

  -2-

  In the 1650s, Delft was home to some of the most brilliant artistic talent in the world. Fabritius lived and worked in Delft from the summer of 1650 until his tragic death; his few remaining paintings are enough to secure his position as a true master. Jan Steen, a Catholic whose lively genre paintings, filled with light and color, depicted chaotic and even lustful moments in family life (so much so that messy and unordered Dutch households began to be called Jan Steen households, een huishuden van Jan Steen), was on the scene from 1654 to 1656. And Pieter de Hooch, sometimes spelled Hoogh, who had worked in Haarlem as an assistant to a linen merchant, moved to Delft, married a local woman named Jannetge van der Burch, or Berch (who may have been a relative of Leeuwenhoek’s mother, Grietge van der Berch), and began painting his decorous interiors featuring merry figures, often viewed through doors and corridors.*1 De Hooch remained in Delft until moving to Amsterdam in 1661; he died in Amsterdam’s dolhuis, or madhouse, though when exactly he died, and why he became mad, no one knows. Delft also hosted a brief flourishing of architectural painting—especially by Hendrik van Vilet, Gerard Houckgeest, and Emanuel de Witte—spurred on by the vogue among patriotic buyers for views of the city’s New Church, and its mausoleum of William the Silent, father of the United Netherlands.

  When he joined this thriving art scene, Vermeer was newly married. Babies began arriving almost immediately—his daughter Maria was born in 1654. If the young man featured in Vermeer’s painting The Procuress is a self-portrait, as many believe, then Vermeer was a jolly-looking man with long, curly dark hair (probably a wig, as the style dictated), a pale face, a wide nose, and a large grin. Vermeer and his wife, Catharina, may have been renting rooms for a short time, probably on the Market Square; by the time they buried a child, in December 1660, the couple are listed in the city’s records as residing in the Oude Langendijck, where they lived with Catharina’s mother. Once they began to
have a family, Vermeer and his wife would have needed the space that could be provided by sharing the large house owned by Maria Thins.

  Vermeer’s father, Reynier, had died in 1652. His widow was left with Mechelen, and with its remaining mortgage. When Vermeer returned to Delft after his apprenticeship, he must have helped his mother run the inn. It was a great deal of work for an older woman left alone (by the time of the Delft explosion his mother would have been around sixty). Food, beer, and spirits needed to be ordered, a serving girl, barmaid, and cook hired, the daily cleaning and weekly accounts done. Vermeer also inherited the art-dealing business of his father, and for the rest of his life a good part of Vermeer’s income would come from selling the works of other painters. Perhaps Vermeer inherited something else from his father: a convex lens, left over from Reynier’s days as a cloth merchant.