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

by Laura J. Snyder

  Once he was established in the Delft artists’ guild, Vermeer commenced painting works that he could sign with his own name and sell. He began with large-scale works based on biblical or mythological traditions. His first-known paintings are Christ in the House of Mary and Martha and Diana and Her Companions. Two other early history paintings, Jupiter, Venus, and Mercury and Visit to the Tomb, are known to have existed at one point but have not survived. The latter was listed and attributed to Vermeer in the 1657 inventory of the estate of an Amsterdam art dealer.

  In his Diana and Her Companions, Vermeer depicted the goddess gathered with four of her attendants at the edge of a forest. The scene is more chaste in Vermeer’s painting than in its portrayal by other artists, who tended to envision it as a kind of female bacchanal, with Diana and her nymphs cavorting nakedly in the woods. Here, Diana and her companions are fully clothed. Diana wears a golden dress cinched at the waist with an animal skin. She perches on a boulder while one of her nymphs bends down to bathe her left foot, which is held out slightly. The subject, its innocent depiction, and some aspects of the arrangement of figures are similar to Van Loo’s Diana and Her Nymphs, from around 1650, and this is one reason that some experts think Vermeer studied with Van Loo in Amsterdam. Yet Vermeer’s painting is quite reminiscent of Rembrandt’s Bathsheba at Her Bath (ca. 1654). In Rembrandt’s picture the main figure is nude, facing toward the viewer’s left, and has only one attendant, while in Vermeer’s Diana the goddess is clothed, is facing the viewer’s right, and is surrounded by her four nymphs. But in both pictures, the central figure is turned to one side, holding out her foot for another to wash it. There is a similar use of brushwork, especially in the thickly laid-on layers of paint, known as impastos, and the visible brushstrokes that follow the contours of the folds of flesh. And there is something about the fleshiness of the bodies of two women, contrasted with their quiet, reflective countenances, and the way the light is centered on them against darkened backgrounds, that suggests a connection between the two paintings. Diana’s mood and her pose, as well as that of her kneeling attendant, so resemble Rembrandt’s Bathsheba in content and feeling that it seems likely Vermeer knew this work firsthand—another reason to think he studied in Amsterdam. If Vermeer did serve his apprenticeship in Amsterdam, he could have seen the Bathsheba itself, while Rembrandt was still working on it. Indeed, the similarities between Vermeer’s Diana and Rembrandt’s Bathsheba could almost convince one that Vermeer must have been in Amsterdam to see the Bathsheba at some point before painting his Diana.

  Another very early work, Christ in the House of Mary and Martha (ca. 1654–55), is based on a text from the New Testament. Both Luke and John describe Mary and Martha as friends of Jesus. Luke’s story about the two sisters, though brief, has been debated for centuries, because of the different ways it is interpreted by Catholics and Protestants. According to the story, Christ arrives in Bethany, a town not far from Jerusalem beyond the Mount of Olives. Martha welcomes him into her home. Her sister Mary sits at Christ’s feet and listens to his teachings, leaving Martha to take care of all the household tasks. Martha comes to Christ and asks, “Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to do all the work by myself? Tell her then to help me.” But Christ answers her, “Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things; there is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her” (Luke 10:38–42). In the Dutch Republic of Vermeer’s day, the story was seen as drawing a contrast between Catholics and Protestants: the latter sought salvation in action, like Martha’s work, while the former placed greater value on the contemplative life, like Mary’s study at Christ’s feet.

  Vermeer’s choice of subject may have been motivated by his recent conversion to Catholicism, or the picture may have been a commission from a local collector. The seated Christ is the focus of the scene; Mary sits at his feet gazing up at him, her head resting on her fist, and Martha stands over both of them, bowing down to speak to Christ, holding a basket of freshly baked bread in her hands. Most art historians believe that Vermeer’s composition was influenced by a painting of the same scene by Erasmus Quellinus—one of Rubens’s most successful followers—from 1645, which is one reason why it is thought that Vermeer may have studied with him during the short period Quellinus was in Amsterdam. However, a number of Dutch painters of the day depicted this moment—including, notably, Jan Miense Molenaer of Haarlem, whose more earthy version captures the aggrieved Martha still holding by its legs a goose she has just killed for dinner when she complains to Christ (1635). Vermeer’s composition is similar to Molenaer’s (minus the goose) except that Vermeer closes in on the figures so that they fill up most of the canvas in a more classical way.

  In his next painting, Vermeer radically shifted his subject matter away from the historical and religious. Painters at the time generally specialized; the unprecedented numbers of buyers for art in the seventeenth century created a market for variety, so painters would focus on one type of picture: religious or historical scenes, still lifes, landscapes, portraits, or other kinds. Vermeer’s next picture was one of these types: it was a so-called bordeeltje, or brothel scene, like those that popular Dutch painters were selling to wealthy merchants around the country. In Delft, Christiaen van Couwenbergh—who was also Delft’s leading history painter—had been profiting from such pictures for decades already. Gerrit van Honthorst and Dirck van Baburen in Haarlem did numerous brothel scenes in the 1620s, intended less to titillate than to dramatize the dangers of the seductive prostitute and venal brothel keeper. The Procuress is the only picture before 1658 that was dated by Vermeer himself, so we know it was painted in 1656, when he was twenty-four years old. He may have been inspired to paint it by the presence in Maria Thins’s house of Van Baburen’s Procuress, which Vermeer later included in the composition of two of his works, The Concert and Young Woman Seated at a Virginal. He may, too, have wanted to try his hand at a more “marketable” painting.

  Like many of these bordeeltjes, Vermeer’s painting depicted the moment at which a prostitute is accepting money from a client; as was often the case, the brothel keeper—generally depicted as an avaricious elderly woman—is shown hovering about, keeping an eye on the transaction (the brothel “madams” were usually retired prostitutes who had saved their earnings and entered into the more profitable part of the trade when their looks faded). In his composition, Vermeer includes another onlooker, a man (who is thought to be a self-portrait) genially eyeing the viewer as if to confirm that he or she is taking note of what is happening. What stands out is Vermeer’s sensitive rendering of the prostitute, who looks sweet and contemplative, and is dressed as a proper young married woman would be; only her heightened redness suggest an overly zealous use of rouge and the effects of too much wine. A number of the Dutch genre painters played with ambiguity in depicting young women, enticing viewers to try to guess whether a subject was innocent or carnal. This ambiguity can also be seen, for example, in Ter Borch’s Soldier Offering a Young Woman Coins (1662–63).

  Although Vermeer’s Procuress is one of his earlier efforts, the young painter’s interest in experimentation and his knowledge of the scientific principles of painting are already on display. We see him experimenting with unusual paints, in particular for the lush oriental carpet covering the balustrade in front of the prostitute and her procuress. The blue parts of the carpets are now a dull, grayish color. Chemical analysis has shown that Vermeer used a rare pigment, a mineral iron phosphate, most likely vivianite, which is known to darken under the influence of light. Those grayish areas of the carpet would originally have been a clear, bright blue. Vivianite was used only infrequently by painters of the day, and Vermeer’s choice to try it illustrates his willingness to experiment with unusual colors. Vermeer had also begun to engage in other kinds of experiments—namely, optical experiments.

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  The Procuress demonstrates Vermeer’s early attempts—partly successful,
partly not—to deploy the perspective theory he would have studied during his apprenticeship. Perspective is a method for approximating on paper an image seen by the eye. In this way, perspective is related to optics, the science of light, which explains how objects are seen by the eye in the first place. Indeed, in Medieval Latin texts, the term perspectiva was used to denote the science of optics. It is a common misperception that no artists depicted perspective prior to the fifteenth century; artists before, such as Giotto, had developed their own empirical strategies for evoking space and depicting solid forms by around 1325, including the use of light and dark parts to mimic the way three-dimensional objects are illuminated by a light source, known as chiaroscuro. But the first systematic attempts to explain perspective theory, and the first explicit efforts to exemplify it in painting, did arise during that period. That perspective theory was born in the fifteenth century has partly to do with the status and content of theories of vision at that time.

  Many ancient writers believed in the “active eye”—they thought the eye sees by sending rays out from within itself to the object being viewed. The eye, as the ancient Greek philosopher Theophrastus wrote, sends out its “fire within.” Plato had a more complex idea of seeing, in which the eye sends out rays from its inner fire, which meet and coalesce with the rays coming from the sun, forming “a single homogenous body in a direct line with the eyes … and thus causes the sensation we call seeing.” Later, Aristotle rejected the notion that there is an emanation from the eyes, arguing instead that the eye receives rays from an object or the air. Constantijn Huygens contrasted the two competing views of vision in verse:

  Here our eyes are [seen as] bows,

  And shoot out rays: there it’s [deemed] a gross lie,

  There it’s naught but mirror glass that takes things in.

  In the third century BCE the Greek mathematician Euclid connected theories of vision to mathematics. In his Optica, he defined the visual process in a purely geometrical way: rays proceed in straight lines from the eye, radiating outward to objects in the shape of a cone. This cone, with its apex at the eye and its base at the object viewed, became known in the eleventh century as “the pyramid of vision.” In this way, optical problems of how we see the size and position of objects were transformed into geometrical problems. For example, a visible object’s size is determined by the angular separation between the visual rays that encounter its extremes; large objects subtend large angles of vision, small objects subtend small angles. A visible object’s position in space is determined by the location within the visual cone of the rays by which it is perceived; Euclid noted that rays from the eyes to the right see objects on the right, and rays to the left see objects to the left. Although Euclid accepted the so-called extramission theory, believing that sight is achieved by the process of rays sent by the eye to the seen object, his main concern was with the geometrical relations, which could be used, he believed, to explain various visual phenomena. He completely ignored questions about vision that could not be determined geometrically, questions such as how the eye perceives color or the relation between touch and vision.

  In the second century CE the Roman physician-philosopher Galen extensively studied the eye as a physical organ. Benefiting from the work of the Alexandrian anatomists who performed dissections, Galen described many fundamental features of the anatomy of the eye, including the retina, cornea, iris, uvea, tear ducts, and eyelids. He postulated that the most important organ of sight is the crystalline humor, a lentil-shaped organ at the center of the eye. Visual impressions received on the surface of this organ were transferred to the brain through hollow optic nerves by an optical pneuma, or “visual spirit.” Galen adopted a bidirectional sequence of extramission-intromission (from the eye and to the eye): rays issue from the eyes to somehow transform the “medium” between the eye and the object seen, and this medium, the air, returns visual impressions to the eye.

  During the medieval period Islamic medical writers and natural philosophers wrote scores of books on vision. Most of these Islamic writers accepted either Galen’s bidirectional approach or a straightforward extramission theory of vision. One exception to this was the early eleventh-century writer Abu Ali al-Hasan ibn al-Haytham (known in the West as Alhazen). Alhazen’s was the first fully integrated theory of vision, bringing together anatomical studies of the eye, like the ones Galen used, and mathematical approaches to sight, like Euclid’s. Alhazen used insights from both areas to make the first strong case for an intromission theory of vision. Each point of an illuminated object emits rays of light; these travel in straight lines to the eye. The surface of the crystalline humor receives each of these rays of light separately; there is a point-to-point correspondence between the object and the image as it appears on the surface of the organ of sight.

  Alhazen insightfully proposed that vision was a type of pain sensation; he noted that, because strong light hurts the eye, it made more sense to assume that light enters the eye during vision than otherwise. He also claimed that only perpendicular rays traveling from the object to the eye are responsible for sight. By such rays, the form of light and color is transmitted to the eye from the visible object; this form endows the “glacial humor” (that is, the organ of sight at the center of the eye) with the qualities of the object, including its color. Vision is transmitted not by particles or corpuscles flying from the object into the eye, as others had argued, but by a “quality” of bodies that can be propagated in straight lines through a transparent medium, the air, to produce visual sensation. This quality is then transmitted to the brain through the optic nerve in order to be interpreted as a visual perception. Alhazen’s comprehensive view of vision would go on to be enormously influential, providing the basic conceptual framework of Kepler’s theory of vision in the seventeenth century. It also supplied the basis for the science of perspective that first arose in the fifteenth century.

  Alhazen believed that rays issue in every direction from every point of a visible object and reach all points on the surface of the eye. Another way of putting this, from the viewpoint of the observer, is that “each point on the surface of the eye is the point of a pyramid of radiation emanating from the visible object.” There is, in this way, a “visual pyramid” whose base is a series of points on the visible object and whose apex is at the center of the “glacial humor.”

  This notion of the “pyramid of vision” made possible the one-point perspective system, devised by the Florentine painter and architect Filippo Brunelleschi around 1413. According to his disciple Antonio Manetti, Brunelleschi’s theory of perspective “consists of setting down properly and rationally the reductions and enlargements of near and distant objects as perceived by the eye of man: buildings, plains, mountains, places of every sort and location, with figures and objects in correct proportion to the distance in which they are shown.”

  Brunelleschi had famously painted a panel depicting the baptistry in the Piazza del Duomo in Florence; it was perforated with a small peephole in the center. The viewer was instructed to point the painting at a mirror held at arm’s length, and view it through the peephole to see the picture reflected in the mirror. This forced the viewer to observe the painting from the single point corresponding to that viewpoint from which it had been painted. Viewed this way, the painting appeared so true to life that, as Manetti put it, “the spectator felt he saw the actual scene” and not just a painting of it.

  Brunelleschi’s system was translated into a practical system and set down in a formal treatise by his friend Leon Battista Alberti, in his book Della pittura (On Painting), first published in 1435. Alberti refused to take a position on whether the intromission or the extramission system was correct, but he used the notion of a visual pyramid and the straight-line radiation of sight to explain how the artist can truly imitate nature. Thinking, perhaps, of Brunelleschi’s neat trick with the baptistry panel, Alberti explained that a painting is to be imagined as a flat piece of glass, or an open window, intercepting
the visual pyramid extending from the artist’s eye to his subject. The vanishing point—at which all sight lines in the painting converge—marks the point at which the central ray of the pyramid of vision intersects that flat plane.

  More technically, one-point perspective exists when the picture plane is parallel to two axes of a rectilinear scene—a scene composed entirely of linear elements that intersect only at right angles. If one axis is parallel to the picture plane, then all elements are either parallel to the picture plane (either horizontally or vertically) or perpendicular to it. All elements that are parallel to the picture plane are drawn as parallel lines. All elements that are perpendicular to the picture plane converge at the vanishing point.

  The introduction of perspective theory dramatically changed the way paintings were perceived. Previously, a painting was thought of as an opaque two-dimensional surface covered with lines and colors meant to be seen as symbols of three-dimensional objects. After the enunciation of the principles of perspective, a painting was to be considered, in Alberti’s words, as a “window through which we look out onto a section of the visible world.”

  This innovation was possible in the fifteenth century partly because of the development of optics and theories of visions that had occurred from the time of Euclid to the medieval period. But there is another reason as well for the appearance of a formal theory of perspective at this time, one that can be understood in the context of ongoing debates about the value of painting as one of the “liberal arts.” Centuries earlier, Plato had disparaged painting for not being based on any mathematical knowledge, but being instead dependent upon the senses, and thus subject to the imperfections and contingencies of the physical world. Renaissance theorists wanting to elevate painting to what they viewed as its proper place among the liberal arts had two choices: either show that painting was based on mathematical principles and was therefore as “scientific” as arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music (as it was thought at the time), or prove that the visual arts were as worthy as the practical literary arts of grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric. By devising laws of perspective on a geometrical basis, art theorists such as Alberti sought to justify the scientific validity of painting. (Ironically, given this scientific motivation for developing the geometrical principles of perspective, the topic was, for a time, regarded as a kind of natural magic, a “visual alchemy” that could transform the base methods of painting into a kind of visionary gold. It was regarded this way by the German painter and inventor Albrecht Dürer, who told a correspondent, “I shall ride to Bologna, where someone is willing to teach me the secrets of perspective.”) Once painting was thus elevated to the status of the liberal arts, artists could commence arguing about whether painting or sculpture was the superior art. Galileo weighed in on this controversy, agreeing with an earlier writer who had praised painters for representing the world in two dimensions when God himself had needed three to produce it.