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

by Laura J. Snyder

  The camera obscura not only opened up new views of the visible world, to artists and natural philosophers alike, but was instrumental in overthrowing old and faulty ideas of vision. In this sense the camera obscura was no less significant than the telescope and microscope in ushering in a new approach to seeing the world.

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  This new view of vision also changed the perception among some artists about the use of optical aids like the camera obscura. If the eye was itself a kind of camera obscura, then how could the use of an additional camera, let alone basic mirrors or lenses, be a form of “cheating”? More particularly for the seventeenth-century Dutch painters, concerned as they were with a type of natural depiction of the physical world, since the eye is an optical instrument there is no artifice in using another optical instrument, the camera obscura, to view nature. As Kepler put it, ut pictura, ita visio: sight itself is a picture. In 1637 the French mathematician and astronomer Pierre Hérigone similarly wrote, “La vision est la perception de l’image de l’objet, peinte en la retine.” Vision, he said, is but the perception of the image of an object, painted on the retina. Images seen through the camera obscura came to be considered “more natural” than those produced by painting alone, because they were created in the same way as images on the retina of the eye.

  Although the use of an optical device like the camera obscura would have seemed to artists to be a useful and even legitimate tool for them to employ, we have no direct evidence that seventeenth-century Dutch painters used the camera obscura. This is not surprising; in general artists were secretive about their methods. Huygens pointed to this with his recollection of Torrentius’s pretending he did not understand the workings of the camera obscura. Rembrandt, too, notoriously hid his method for making his engravings, even from the artists in his own workshop—to this day engravers are hard-pressed to attain the same quality of prints even with today’s technology. (It may be something as mundane as the rag he used to wipe off the excess ink.) In his Vita Alberti described visiting painters in their workshops to try to uncover the “exceptional and secret knowledge” regarding their art. Hendrik Hondius, describing how some painters used a tilted glass frame through which they viewed a scene in order to help them capture the proper perspective, noted that artists held the technique as a “fort secrete, & comme un mystere”—as a deep secret, and like a mystery. As another writer of the time pointed out, “that which ravishes the spirit of men is an admirable effect of which the cause is unknown: otherwise should one discover the trick half the pleasure is lost.” The painter could not trick the eye if he revealed his secrets. Even the recipes for mixing paint colors were considered privileged information; books containing these recipes were considered “books of secrets.” Not only did painters wish to increase the allure and mystery of their work; they were keeping their methods from competitors, as a protection of their trade secrets. We have little documentary evidence about methods from the artists themselves during this time. So it is no argument against the use of the camera obscura that painters did not discuss it in written documents. We must look to the pictures themselves for our evidence. Of all the artists who may have experimented with looking at the world through the camera obscura, Vermeer presents in his paintings the clearest evidence of such experimenting.

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  After turning to the quiet, intimate scenes that he began to paint at the end of the 1650s, Vermeer realized he had found his niche, and over the next decade he produced his most exquisite pictures. He had already experimented with mirrors and lenses. But who could have introduced Vermeer to the camera obscura? It might have been his possible teacher Evert van Aelst, or Evert’s son Willem. It could have been Huygens, who owned a box-type camera obscura since 1622, and was recommending its use to his artist friends. It might have been Fabritius, a close friend of Van Hoogstraten’s—and Van Hoogstraten was at that time exhorting artists to use the device. It could have been any of the other painters who seem to have been familiar with the device. Or, as some writers have casually suggested, it might have been Vermeer’s neighbor Antoni Leeuwenhoek, though there is no direct evidence of this.*3 However it was that Vermeer came to know the camera obscura, his pictures from about 1660, when he was twenty-eight years old, demonstrate a familiarity with images seen through the device. A likely candidate for his first painting made after experiencing a camera obscura image is his only known cityscape, A View of Delft. In that picture, we see Delft across the Schie Canal, with the Schiedam Gate at the left, the twinned-turret Rotterdam Gate at the right, and, in the brightest area of light, the tower of the New Church. To the left is the smaller tower of the Old Church. Although A View of Delft depicts a restful scene, the Schie Canal was a bustling waterway. On any given day a constant stream of tugboats, clam runners, and trekschuits (horse-drawn canal barges) came up the river Schie from Rotterdam, Schiedam, and Delfshaven, headed to The Hague, Leiden, and ports north. Passengers and goods incessantly streamed on and off along this stretch of the city walls. As Mariët Westermann evocatively writes of this picture, “the scene’s varied light effects look so natural—deep shadow and bright patches, pinpoint highlights and watery reflections—that the eye ignores what the mind knows: that this light is high artifice, that it is a work of painting.”

  Other artists known for using the camera obscura tended to specialize in “chorographical” or panoramic studies such as this. Canaletto, of whom it was said that he “taught the correct way of using the camera ottica [camera obscura],” was expert in painting views of Venice by means of the optical device starting around 1719. Even earlier than Canaletto, a painter from the Netherlands was known to rely on a camera obscura to depict Roman cityscapes.

  Gaspare Vanvitelli (born in Utrecht as Gaspar van Wittel in 1653) had originally been employed by a Dutch engineer to make topographical drawings of the area around the river Tiber, a task for which the use of a camera obscura was already routine. He later Italianized his name and became a successful painter of panoramic Roman scenes. Vanvitelli would take a portable, box-type camera obscura to a site opposite a view that he wanted to paint. He used a coordinate grid system to map what he saw on the screen of his camera onto his canvas. Then he would take the canvas to his studio and fill in the remaining details of the picture. As Vanvitelli would later do, Vermeer may have taken a box-type camera on-site to explore the optics of the scene before painting A View of Delft. He may even have taken his canvas with him. But even if he did so, instead of using a careful and precise coordinate grid system, Vermeer probably just took some visual “notes,” either in white chalk on the canvas (which would be dissolved by the later addition of oil paint, and so become invisible to x-rays centuries later) or in the lead white underpainting. There is evidence for a similar kind of “note taking” in the underpainting of several of Vermeer’s paintings, including Girl with a Pearl Earring. Stereomicroscopic analysis has shown some paint strokes in a light ocher color on the ground at the edge of the girl’s face. In the seventeenth century it was not unusual to use light ocher for sketching the composition before beginning to paint.

  Looking at the scene of Delft through a camera obscura, Vermeer would have noted the richness of color, the nuances of light and shade, the special nature of the highlights glinting off the canal. He would have seen the different planes of focus, how the foreground looks slightly blurred as the middle ground is sharp. He would have taken in the very “visual feel” of the camera obscura image, which he would file in his mind—as a kind of “visual memory”—for recalling while painting in his studio. One reason it is clear that Vermeer did not merely trace the camera obscura image is that we can see by x-ray analysis that he modified the red roofs to the right of the image, a change that reinforced the essential horizontality of the composition and so seems to have been made for that reason alone—a change, then, that he made for stylistic rather than photographic reasons. We can date Vermeer’s discovery of the value of the camera obscura to about this time because
, in his earlier works, Vermeer was struggling with the perspective of his scenes, as in The Procuress, where there seems to be a “split screen” between the two parts of the painting, the triad of the courtesan, brothel keeper, and customer on the one side and the onlooker on the other. Similarly, the sloping table of A Maid Asleep seems to exist in a distinct perspective scheme from the lady slumbering over it. In his masterworks of the 1660s—The Milkmaid, Woman in Blue Reading a Letter, and Woman with a Pearl Necklace, for example—Vermeer’s figures and their spatial environments are, at last, “mutually complementary,” with a newfound harmony between them. Suddenly, every element in his pictures finds its place. In Woman with a Pearl Necklace, the perspective pattern extends along the window frames, across the floor, to the wall where the girl is “discovered” by the viewer. She is caught in what Lawrence Gowing beautifully described as Vermeer’s “mathematical net, made definite at last.”

  At this time Vermeer’s painting style becomes more consistent with the way that perspective was being depicted in the domestic interiors of this period by artists such as De Hooch, and in the church interiors painted by Houckgeest, Van Vliet, and De Witte. These pictures feature black and white marble floors such as those Vermeer began to include in his domestic interiors. In many of those pictures, the floor tiles, tabletops, windows, and figures all recede to a single vanishing point on the horizon. Vermeer takes this to its highest level; in The Glass of Wine not only do the floor tiles, tabletop, and window all recede to a single vanishing point, but so does the man’s eye and the top of the woman’s head. Vermeer in a sense one-ups De Hooch, whose similar painting from the same year, An Interior with a Woman Drinking with Two Men, and a Maidservant, does not fully integrate the figures into their setting. The two men, painting similar scenes in Delft in the late 1650s, clearly inspired—and may have been competing with—each other. (It may not be accidental that around the time that Vermeer discovered the camera obscura and began to create his finest paintings, De Hooch also “upped his game,” seemingly making a conscious decision to raise his standards and paint pictures addressed to connoisseurs.)

  The camera obscura was known by artists to be an extraordinary tool in composing perspective views. Jean-François Niceron wrote in his book on perspective theory that images created in the camera obscura were so vivid that if “the painter imitates all the shapes he sees, and if he applies to them the colors that appear so vividly, he will have a perspective as perfect as one could reasonably desire.” As Leonardo had much earlier recognized with mirrors, it was of great value for the painter to see three-dimensional scenes reflected or projected into a two-dimensional form, since painting with proper perspective required imitating the same result: a flattened rendering of three-dimensional space. The artist is in the challenging position of looking at a three-dimensional scene with his two-dimensional retinas and then generating a two-dimensional picture that appears three-dimensional to viewers looking at it with their two-dimensional eyes. An optical device that projected a two-dimensional image of the scene would be valuable in solving this problem by replicating the image on the retina. Vermeer’s sudden facility with perspective may have been related to his discovery of the camera obscura, because seeing the way that three-dimensional perspective is rendered on the two-dimensional screen of a camera obscura would have provided insights for his own depictions of perspective.

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  A camera obscura may also have helped Vermeer with his composing of pictures. He doubtless possessed an uncanny sense of how composition could convey a sense of timelessness to fleeting moments of daily life: the milkmaid caught pouring out a pitcher, a woman glimpsed reading, or writing, an emotion-laden letter. His compositions were highly geometrical as well; in Study of a Young Woman, the girl’s wrist is but a blob of flesh—not at all anatomically correct—but with its shape and position it echoes the head and gives a kind of rhythm to the drape of her garment. By adding just a touch of a white shirt at her collar, Vermeer is picking up the white of her eyes and, of course, the large dimly gleaming pearl earring. In Young Woman with a Water Pitcher, the geometry of the composition suggests calmness and concentration, and we sense that we would have the same emotional reaction to this picture even if we viewed it upside down.

  Vermeer did not need an optical instrument to compose his pictures. But by looking at his compositions with a camera obscura, he could have seen new ways to frame a scene, including complex arrangements that would have been difficult to translate into two-dimensional space without the camera obscura’s flattening effect. We do know that Vermeer took great care in composing his pictures, so much so that many of them have alterations made during the painting process: chairs, maps, framed pictures, musical instruments, men, and even a dog can be seen under x-ray analysis to have been taken out of compositions once Vermeer saw that they did not contribute to the overall compositional or emotional effect he sought. Why would he not, then, have availed himself of a device that would have enabled him to experiment with how certain complex compositions would look on a flat canvas, even before starting to paint?

  Vermeer’s mastery with color and tone could also have been aided by the use of a camera obscura. Tone is the relative darkness or lightness of a color, and it is not always accurately evaluated by the naked eye. For one thing, the mind’s involvement in sight means that we tend to compensate for disparities in tone for the sake of object recognition: when we view a white shirt in the sunlight, and then in shade, we “see” it both times as white, because we know it is the same shirt. However, color perception changes under different levels of illumination, as Vermeer recognized. He realized that if the painter wishes to distinguish different lighting conditions, he or she must represent the white shirt differently in the two cases, by using a pure white pigment in the first case and adding black and/or a bit of umber to the white. Sometimes it is difficult for the painter to do this properly, because he, too, is used to seeing the shirt as having the same tone of white in both lighting conditions. Viewing the shirt through the camera obscura renders the differences in tone under different lighting conditions more noticeable, since the device narrows the range of brightness found in nature to a more limited range—one that is easier to reproduce with the painter’s palette. And the camera obscura, unlike the human eye, does not immediately adapt to different amounts of light; the camera obscura allows the painter to see the relative values of tones present in a scene more clearly. In the image produced by a camera obscura, the shirt looks darker—and even a different color—in shadow, and brighter in light. Vermeer’s familiarity with the images seen through the camera obscura is apparent in the way he records tonal value. In The Concert, for example, we find the white fur trim on the standing woman’s jacket to be a bright white on top, but a darker color at the hem, where it is receiving less of the light from the window.

  The camera obscura concentrates colors into a restricted area, so objects seem more intensely pigmented than when seen with the naked eye. The scale of the images is reduced, but not the intensity of the color, resulting in the concentration of color. The effect is the appearance of richer and seemingly purer colors than those seen in nature. Among the most obvious hallmarks of Vermeer’s canvases are the bright, jewel-like tones of his colors, his extravagant use of ultramarine and yellow pigments. The richness of color in A View of Delft suggests the image in a camera obscura. So does the intensity of yellows and whites, and the saturation of the blues and the browns, in Mistress and Maid. But camera obscuras have a particularly noticeable effect on colored objects in deep shadow: even here, the objects are seen with a chromatic intensity missed by the naked eye.*4 In his Trattato Leonardo da Vinci had pointed out that shadows have colors—they are never purely black, or even almost black. For instance, the shadow cast by a haystack on the snow will look bluish, because the haystack is blocking the direct yellow light from the sun, so the snow is lit only by the scattered blue light from the sky. Claude Monet would later use this insig
ht to paint his studies of haystacks, such as Grainstack in the Morning, Snow Effect (1891).

  Vermeer was one of the first artists to realize this insight in his pictures; his shadows are never uniformly brown or black; time and again we find him reaching for blues—and even yellows—to depict shadows. We see this in the deep blue shadows of the woman’s wrap in The Milkmaid, the shadows to the right of the chair in Woman in Blue Reading a Letter, which are rendered in colors ranging from a soft blue to a deep blue-black, and in The Music Lesson, on the lower part of the back wall, where shadows range from blue to yellow. In The Guitar Player, the shadow on the girl’s neck is almost green. Other painters of Vermeer’s time, such as De Hooch and Dou, used the more traditional neutral grays to render deep shadows.

  Vermeer would have seen that images viewed with a camera obscura have softer contours; the seventeenth-century lenses, suffering from spherical aberration, did not focus with complete precision through the entire depth of fields, so even a single three-dimensional object would appear blurred in parts. Like camera obscura images, Vermeer’s forms, especially in the middle and later paintings, have soft contours made up of areas of light and shade, rather than strict outlines. In Girl with a Pearl Earring there are no defining lines of the face; the shape of the head is marked out merely by broad areas of light and dark, separated by softly rounded edges. There is no strong line to speak of between the girl’s nose and her right cheek, just a modulation of tone that is enough to signify the division. Similarly, in Mistress and Maid the face of the woman of the house is defined only by the slightest of variation in flesh tones, yet still manages to convey her deep concern. Vermeer learned that by applying glazes over impastos he could soften forms and create diffused contours; in Woman in Blue Reading a Letter, the woman is outlined with a soft diffused stroke, painted with a blend of the blues of her dress and the white of the wall behind her. In this way Vermeer gives us the impression that the woman is part of the scene, bound tightly to it—and yet, at the same time, standing apart from it. In The Milkmaid he achieved a softer “edge” in the contour of the woman’s blue skirt against the pale wall by extending the black underpainting beyond the edge of the skirt. The white underpaint of the background wall overlaps this black layer. The blue of the skirt was applied overlapping this white background. The skirt’s edge was established just beyond this line with the final background color painted over the white.