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

by Laura J. Snyder

  Leeuwenhoek and his wife Barbara de Meij continued to live at The Golden Head, on the Hippolytusbuurt, the street right behind the Town Hall, “not more than one hundred feet from our Vlees-hall,” where an obliging butcher would sell Leeuwenhoek cows’ eyes, the testicles of hares, and other required specimens. This house was about 150 yards away from Vermeer’s residence, diagonally across the Market Square. Like the Thins house, The Golden Head no longer stands. In front of the house was a courtyard containing a well surrounded by a wall so high that the sun barely reached the well and did not warm the water. In the back of the house was a garden; Leeuwenhoek would speak of studying the aphids found on cherry trees, apple trees, and currant bushes from his own orchard. We know that his study was on the ground floor, probably in the space he had formerly used as his haberdashery shop. The room where Leeuwenhoek and his wife slept was also on the ground floor. The Golden Head was not as large as Maria Thins’s house, but it was more than adequate for Leeuwenhoek’s small family.

  Both Vermeer and Leeuwenhoek were raising families, and both had, by 1669, suffered the loss of children. Vermeer and his wife had eleven living children, seven girls (Maria, Elizabeth, Cornelia, Aleydis, Beatrix, Gertruyd, and Catharina), three boys (Johannes, Franciscus, and Ignatius), and one other child, whose sex and name are not known. They lost four children in infancy or early childhood. Leeuwenhoek and his wife Barbara also lost four children; they had had five children, all of whom died in infancy except one, Maria. It has become almost a commonplace to say that in those days parents were so inured to the loss of children that they treated their deaths with resigned stoicism or callousness as a coping strategy. But this is one of those historical truisms that are, in fact, false. Parents—both mothers and fathers—mourned their deceased children with as much pain as they do today. Their outpourings of grief were not only expressed privately in letters to family and friends, but also publicly; family group portraits, such as those by Nicolaes Maes (1634–93) and Johannes Mytens (1614–70), often included lost babies as angels hovering above, watching over their parents and siblings. Sometimes children were painted on their deathbeds; Ferdinand Bol depicted a young boy, Jodocus van den Bempden, already dead, lying in bed with a crown of flowers and holding a wilted rose still in bud, while an extinguished torch and a setting sun further attest to his early death. The fear of losing a child was very real, and it hung over parents throughout their child-raising years. Heijman Jacobi exemplified this parental nightmare in a book published the year that Leeuwenhoek and Vermeer were born, Schat der Armen (The treasury of the poor): a woodcut illustration shows the skeletal figure of death plucking a newborn baby from his crib while his mother slumbers nearby.

  The flip side of the omnipresent fear of infant death in the Dutch Republic was the exuberant celebrations greeting the birth of a new child. Almost twenty times combined, Leeuwenhoek and Vermeer would have donned the “paternity bonnet” of new fathers, hosted a festive meal, and posted on the door a kraam kloppertje made of paper and lace indicating the sex of the newborn and muffling the sound of the door knocker. When a piece of white cloth was placed behind the open lacework, the family was announcing the birth of a girl; when the red door knocker showed through the lace, a boy had been born. This door “beater” was removed after six to eight weeks, at the time the mother first resumed attending church services. Only then would the tax collector and debtors be allowed to come knocking—during the period immediately after a child was born, the father’s household would be exempt from some taxes and duties. Still, having as many living children as Vermeer and Catharina had put a great strain on finances, and the young painter struggled to make ends meet, even with the help of his mother-in-law and his patron Van Ruijven. Leeuwenhoek, with his fixed income from the city government and smaller family, was more at ease financially. During these years, Vermeer and Leeuwenhoek were raising—and losing—children, and carrying on with their work, within a three-minute walk from each other.

  A skein of thread ties together Leeuwenhoek and Vermeer, catching them both in something like the “mathematical net” of Vermeer’s best paintings. But the speculation that they knew each other must remain only that: a speculation.

  *1 Although the geographer is looking out the window, toward the light, it is known by x-ray analysis that Vermeer originally painted his head looking down at the table; indeed, the faint outline of the original position of the head is still visible in the picture.

  *2 Adriaen Metius was the brother of Jacob Metius, who had applied unsuccessfully to the States General for a patent for his telecscope in 1608.

  PART 7

  A Treasure-House of Nature

  * * *

  ON THE CHALK cliffs near Gravesend, a market town twenty-six miles from London on the southern bank of the Thames, Leeuwenhoek made his first-known microscopical examinations. He traveled to England in 1668 or 1669, when he was around thirty-six years old. His wife Barbara had died in 1666, after twelve years of marriage. Of their five children, only Maria, then ten years old, had lived past infancy, while a daughter and three sons—each named Philips, in a series of heartbreaking attempts to name a child after Leeuwenhoek’s father—had died. Two years or so later Leeuwenhoek had departed Delft to travel across the North Sea to England. He may have left Maria with his sister Margriete in Delft or with his sister Catharina and her husband in Rotterdam. Or he may have taken Maria with him, especially if the reason for the journey—never disclosed by Leeuwenhoek—was to visit relatives of his wife’s still living in Norfolk.

  We know from his later report that Leeuwenhoek brought at least one of his microscopes with him on the trip. While walking along the chalk cliffs, he must have taken a pinchful of the chalk, placed it in a stoppered vial, and brought it back to his room. He would have placed a tiny grain of the sample on the point of the specimen pin behind the lens. Keeping his hands perfectly steady, he would have lifted the device upward, aiming it toward a window slightly cracked open, if he examined it during the day, or in the direction of a burning candle, if he examined it at night. He would have gazed through the tiny lens intently, adjusting the specimen pin this way and that, until he could see clearly. What he saw were very small, transparent “globules,” which he realized were minuscule round constituents of the chalk. At first Leeuwenhoek was confused—as the chalk was white, he would have expected its parts to be white too. But then he noticed that the globules overlapped each other, and concluded that this was why the chalk looked white.

  -1-

  To get to England, Leeuwenhoek would have traveled to Rotterdam, where his sister Catharina and her family lived, to catch one of the many ships that left the port bound for Harwich, England, every week. In those days the trip to London from Amsterdam was not considered difficult; on the contrary, it was easier—and cheaper—for a Londoner to travel to Amsterdam than to Lincolnshire, and the “Narrow Seas” between the two nations were more like a highway than a barrier. The travel between the Dutch Republic and England was constant, moving in both directions, as successive waves of religious and political exiles—Calvinists, royalists, republicans, and Whigs—took refuge in the more tolerant United Provinces, while Dutch inventors, scholars, merchants, craftsmen, and artists poured into England to make a good living.

  Nevertheless, political tensions between the Dutch Republic and England had remained acute since the end of the First Anglo-Dutch War in 1654. A surge of patriotism after the restoration of King Charles II in 1660 led to the country’s being “mad for war,” in the words of Samuel Pepys. Hostilities broke out in 1664, with the official declaration of war in March of 1665—by which time some two hundred Dutch ships had already been captured and several Dutch colonies had been overtaken by the British, including New Netherland in the Americas, with its capital, New Amsterdam, promptly renamed New York. But the Dutch, unlike the English, had enough money, munitions, and matériel to keep fighting. In 1666 the English war effort was undermined by two tragedies: the Great Fire
of London, which devastated the city, and the Great Plague, which carried off over 100,000 people, about 15 percent of the population of London. Dutch victories at sea proved decisive, and the war ended in 1667 with the Dutch at the zenith of their military and trade power. Peace was signed at Breda in July of 1667.

  Once the war ended, it was possible again to travel to England from the Dutch Republic, and soon afterward Leeuwenhoek took advantage of the opportunity. We know that he went from Harwich to London, along the way examining the yellowish “English earth” imported into the Dutch Republic and used by the Delft potters to make “Porcelanware.” He compared how that English earth looked when viewed with his microscope to the “Black earth” around Delft; he saw that the globules in the Delft earth were even smaller than those composing the English earth and, he believed, not as heavy. The Delft earth—really a sand—is a dark gray color, and better suited for being turned into glass than into porcelain—which explains why Delft produced glass among the finest in all of Europe, but had to import the earth used for its famous Delftware. In describing his examination of the chalk and earth in England, Leeuwenhoek made his first reference to using his microscopes to examine the microscopic structure of substances. At the same time, he showed his detailed knowledge of the practice of artisans in Delft—he even knew the recipe the Delftware producers employed. The Dutch earth alone, when it is “baked, ’tis red, and therefore not fit for Porcelan, but ’tis blended with the English and Flamish Earth, to give a strong and good sound to our Porcelan.” Leeuwenhoek’s combined interests in science and artistic processes coincided with the same fascinations of a recently founded English organization: the Royal Society of London.

  -2-

  The origins of the Royal Society lie in a so-called invisible college of natural philosophers who began meeting in the mid-1640s for discussions of the new methods of seeking knowledge of the natural world through observation and experiment. On November 28, 1660, twelve men met at Gresham College after a lecture by Christopher Wren, then the Gresham Professor of Astronomy, and decided to found “a Colledge for the Promoting of Physico-Mathematicall Experimentall Learning.” The gathering included Wren, Robert Boyle, John Wilkins, Sir Robert Moray, and William, Viscount Brouncker. One of the first acts of Charles II when he was restored to the throne was to bestow a charter on the group, from then known as The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge. The society planned to meet weekly, on Wednesdays “after the lecture of the Astronomy Professor,” to witness experiments and discuss scientific topics.

  The earliest meetings of the Royal Society demonstrated the wide-ranging nature of its members’ interests. The men discussed the petrification of wood, properties of the lodestone (natural magnet), parts of the anatomy of various creatures, the transfusion of blood of one animal into another, the ebb and flow of the sea, the kinds and feeding of oysters, the “wonders and curiosities” observable in the deepest mines. They sent emissaries to try to answer questions about a strange poison believed to be in the possession of the king of Macasser, about whether master craftsmen in Peru used a method to intensify the color of their native rubies, and whether the bones of a certain fish were able to stop the flow of blood from a wound (only this last question was answered definitively, with samples of the fish sent to England on Dutch ships).

  Early meetings of the Royal Society were devoted to the methods and processes of artists. On April 10, 1660, the society appointed a committee “to consider about all sorts of tooles and instruments for glasses for [making] perspectives.” On January 16, 1660/61, the fellows heard Dr. Goddard read a paper titled “A Brief Experimental Account of the production of some colours by mixtures of several liquors, either having little or no colour, or being of different colours from those produced.” At the same meeting Mr. Eveleyn was asked to “bring in a history of engraving and etching.” In April of 1666 the fellows heard about a method of making a nonglossy paint glaze by the addition to the paint of either an egg or the sap of the fig tree. No less a member than Sir Robert Moray, one of the society’s founders, went along with Hooke to see the method in action at the artist’s studio; afterward it was reported that Moray himself had “broken eggs into two little vessels.” (Around this time Van Hoogstraten complained that the glossiness of paintings was one reason why they could never fully deceive the eye into believing it was viewing anything other than a picture.) The following year, Thomas Povey produced a letter by an artist, Alex Marshall, reporting his methods for producing different colors of paint. Povey tried to get the Royal Society’s support for a large-scale “History of the Art of Painting,” which he would facilitate by bringing together Royal Society fellows and the “best masters of that art living in London,” including Peter Lely. Sounding much like Van Hoogstraten’s call to artists, published a few years later, Povey described painting as “this almost divine art, which not only imitates but approacheth very deceivably, even to the giving of life itself.”

  The Royal Society fellows had a particular interest in devices to aid the artist, befitting its original charter “to improve the knowledge of natural things, and all useful Arts Manufactures, Mechanic practices, Engines and Inventions, by Experiments.” In 1668 Hooke demonstrated to the group Della Porta’s method of projecting with a mirror and lens a scene from another room—without mentioning Della Porta’s description in his book, which had been translated into English ten years earlier. In Della Porta’s discussion, the experiment had appeared as “how in a Chamber you may see Hunting, Battles of Enemies, and other delusions,” while at the Royal Society the demonstration received a more mundanely descriptive title: “A contrivance to make the picture of anything appear on a wall, cupboard, or within a picture frame, etc. in the midst of a light room in the daytime, or in the night time in any room which is enlightened with a considerable number of candles.” Boyle had demonstrated his box-type camera obscura sometime before this, and Wren showed his “machine for drawing in perspective” to the fellows in 1669.

  What tied together all these different areas of inquiry was the importance placed upon experimentation. It was not enough to read reports of travelers extolling the Macasser king’s poison or the blood-clotting fish; the fellows wanted to see for themselves. They did not just read a paper on the egg-glaze method for making paintings appear with less of a glare in the noontime sun—they went and saw (and mixed in the egg) for themselves. As the first historian of the Royal Society, Thomas Sprat, put it in 1667, they believed the “Seat of Learning” should be in “Laboratories” not “Schools.” This emphasis was codified in the society’s motto, a saying from Horace: “Nullius in verba,” roughly translated as “Take no one’s word for it,” expressing the determination of the fellows to reject the domination of authority of past texts and experts and instead to verify all statements by an appeal to experiment. The Royal Society endeavored, in Sprat’s words, “to separate the knowledge of Nature, from the colours of Rhetorick, the devices of Fancy, or the delightful deceit of Fables.”

  -3-

  This demand for experimental verification was explicitly linked to the new philosophy proposed by Francis Bacon. Bacon had called for a fresh start to knowledge of the physical world; the natural philosopher must “vex” nature, as he vividly put it, learning her secrets by observation and rigorous experimentation. This was a requirement that resonated with the natural philosophers of the time, who had already begun to practice what Bacon was preaching.

  Bacon’s inductive method was explicitly opposed to that of the Aristotelians. Bacon respected Aristotle himself, but disdained the views of many medieval followers of Aristotle, who slavishly believed whatever their master had said so many centuries before. Bacon knew that Aristotle himself would have changed his mind on some of his conclusions had he had access to modern knowledge and ways of investigating nature. In the year that Leeuwenhoek and Vermeer were born, Galileo had expressed Bacon’s point with a sly story he recounted in a book promoting the Copernican view a
gainst the old Aristotelian astronomy. He told of a man attending a dissection at the home of a famous anatomist. Aristotelians believed that all the nerves originated in the heart, while their opponents held they began in the brain. “The anatomist showed that the great trunk of nerves leaving the brain and passing through the nape, extended down the spine and then branched out through the whole body, and that only a single strand as fine as a thread arrived at the heart,” Galileo wrote. The anatomist then turned to an observer who was an Aristotelian and asked whether he was now convinced that the nerves originate in the brain and not the heart. “The philosopher, considering for awhile, answered: You have made me see this matter so plainly and palpably that if Aristotle’s text were not contrary to it, stating clearly that the nerves originate in the heart, I should be forced to admit it to be true.”

  Kepler, too, criticized the slavish allegiance to ancient wisdom, referring to it as nothing but a “world on paper.” William Harvey, who discovered the circulation of blood by the pumping of the heart, claimed, “I profess both to learn and to teach anatomy, not from books but from dissections, not from the positions of philosophers but from the fabric of nature.” Leeuwenhoek would later similarly chide those who drew conclusions about salt particles in the body without ever having seen them.

  Bacon rejected as well the claims of those who thought that all knowledge, even knowledge of the physical world, came primarily through human reason and not the senses. He considered these philosophies to be like the method of the spider, which spins a web entirely out of its own body, not using anything outside of itself. In Leeuwenhoek’s time the most prominent “spider” was René Descartes, who had lived in Amsterdam for twenty years until leaving for Sweden to tutor Queen Christina in 1649 (there he died, partly from the cold climate, soon afterward). Descartes espoused an epistemology, or method of knowledge acquisition, that expressed mistrust in the senses, and placed primary value on reasoning from ideas found in the mind rather than from observations of nature.