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

by Laura J. Snyder

  For example, in determining his three laws of motion, Descartes began from a “clear and distinct” idea found in his mind: the idea of God. His idea of God included, by definition, that God is omnipotent, immutable, and eternal (that is what we mean by “God,” Descartes believed). From this “first principle” Descartes derived his three laws of physics, what we would call his laws of motion, as well as a general law, the law of conservation of motion—that the total amount of motion in the world remains constant. Descartes’s proof of this law is logical, rather than empirical, following necessarily from God’s properties. When God created the universe, he endowed its material bodies with a finite quantity of motion. At each moment subsequently, God acts to preserve this same amount of motion.

  It is obvious that when God first created the world, He not only moved its parts in various ways, but also simultaneously caused some of the parts to push others and to transfer their motion to these others. So in now maintaining the world by the same action and with the same laws with which He created it, He conserves motion; not always contained in the same parts of matter, but transferred from some parts to others depending on the ways in which they come in contact.

  In his treatise on scientific method, Descartes employed the same logic to prove all sorts of laws of nature. By the end of the book he concluded—optimistically and erroneously—“no phenomena of nature have been omitted.… There is nothing visible or perceptible in this world that I have not explained.”

  As the Royal Society’s historian Sprat put it, “I confess the excellent Monsieur des Cartes recommends to us another way in his Philosophical Method.… He at once rejected all the Impressions, which he had before receiv’d … and wholly gave himself over to a reflexion on the naked Ideas of his own mind.” Sprat allows that this might be appropriate for the “Contemplation” of a gentleman, but emphatically not for a philosopher’s “Inquiry” into the natural world. In Amsterdam, the microscopist Swammerdam criticized Descartes’s scientific method on similar grounds, noting that many a natural philosopher had made egregious errors by relying on reasoning while neglecting to observe the phenomena for himself.

  Not only did Descartes invent his theories solely from his mind; he also erred, according to the method of the new philosophy, by not carefully testing and retesting his theories. For Bacon, experimentation was required in order to make a proper induction to a scientific law in the first place. Most of his seventeenth-century followers required additional experimental confirmation of a scientific law. While Descartes did claim to have conducted experiments to confirm his conservation law, many writers today agree with Sprat, who pointed out that his so-called experiments were merely “grosse trials” based on “conjecture.” Descartes envisioned experiments based on the assumption that the law was correct, and in this way “proved” what he already “knew” to be true—not only true, but self-evidently true, obvious just by definition. Indeed, echoing Galileo’s Aristotelian anatomist, Descartes insisted that “the demonstrations are so certain that, even if experience seemed to show us the contrary, we would nevertheless be obliged to place more faith in our reason than in our senses.”

  As one would expect from a philosopher emphasizing the use of the senses, Bacon praised microscopes for extending the reach of the sense of sight. (Descartes, too, had praised the invention, as a means to rectify some of the infirmities of the senses, but he still emphasized that the mind had precedence over the senses in science.) The microscope, “lately invented,” said Bacon, enables us to “perceive objects not naturally seen.” These instruments “exhibit the latent and invisible minutiae of substances, and their hidden formation and motion.” With the assistance of a microscope “we behold with astonishment the accurate form and outline of a flea, moss, and animalculae [little animals], as well as their previously invisible color and motion.” Indeed, microscopes and telescopes satisfied the “true and lawful goal of the sciences”: to ensure that “human life be endowed with new discoveries and powers.” These new instruments gave natural philosophers the power to make thrilling discoveries.

  Instruments themselves cannot transform science, Bacon was careful to add—experimentation was necessary in conjunction with aids to the senses. Merely looking at the world, even with a microscope, is not enough. But Bacon believed that science fundamentally involved the investigation of “hidden schematisms” and unobservable structures, and the “true textures” of physical bodies; and this was where the microscope would later prove invaluable. One of the problems with the followers of the Scholastics, according to Bacon, had been their readiness to rely on the naked senses; he criticized them for ending their investigations “where sight ceases.” The new investigators of nature would have to go beyond naked sight itself.

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  Even before his reputation grew in his native England, Bacon’s works were appreciated in the Dutch Republic. One of his earliest and most prominent Dutch readers was Constantijn Huygens, who became interested in Bacon’s writings after meeting him in London in 1622. But Bacon’s reputation in the Dutch Republic had preceded him; the year prior to Huygens’s trip to London, he had solicited the poet and classics professor Daniel Heinsius’s opinion of Bacon’s Instauratio magna, which had just been published in England. While Huygens did not care for Bacon personally, he admired his writings on scientific method and his efforts to spark a new era in science. Huygens saluted Bacon, along with Drebbel, as his time’s leading thinkers, saying, “I have looked up in awe at these two men who have offered in my time the most excellent criticism of the useless ideas, theorems, and axioms which … the ancients possessed.” Indeed, at times Huygens seemed to revere Bacon as an intellectual saint, admitting that he had a sort of “sacred respect” for him. Huygens agreed with Bacon’s view that the natural philosopher must reject ancient learning and start anew to discover knowledge through observations and experiments.

  In 1648 Bacon’s Sylva sylvarum was translated from English into Latin by a Dutchman, Jacob Gruter, allowing the book to become more accessible to Dutch readers accustomed to books written in the scientific language of Latin. Gruter’s brother Isaac later published a number of important manuscripts of Bacon’s he had inherited from the British diplomat Sir William Boswell. Isaac also put out a second edition of his brother’s translation of the Sylva, asking Huygens whether any corrections were needed. The botanist and physician Herman Boerhaave, who would be appointed a lecturer in medicine at Leiden in 1701, expressed a view widespread among his countrymen when he called Bacon “the father of Experimental Philosophy.”

  The philosophical outlook of Bacon particularly appealed to the Dutch, with their emphasis on practical innovation and invention, as much as to the English. Indeed the English natural philosophers, who favored the Baconian approach to that of Descartes—partly for patriotic reasons—saw the Dutch as their compatriots in Baconianism. In his defense of the Baconian philosophy against the attack of the Cambridge Platonist Henry More, William Petty (one of the founders of the Royal Society) contrasted the useful activity of the Dutch inventor Cornelis Drebbel with the worthless endeavors of the speculative philosophers such as the Frenchman Descartes. Philosophical systems, Petty argued, were premature and vacuous, metaphysical speculations unproductive; only practical inventions based on observations, experiments, and trials were worth the natural philosopher’s time and energy. The “hub” of Dutch scientific activity was known to be Constantijn Huygens’s hometown, The Hague (in large part because Huygens lived there), which Sprat compared to Bacon’s ideal of a scientific nation, the “New Atlantis” (described in Bacon’s book by that name): “They have one place (I mean the Hague) which may be soon made the very Copy of a Town in New Atlantis; which for its pleasantness, and for the concourse of men of all conditions to it, may be counted above all others (except London) the most advantageously seated for this service.”

  Another reason Bacon’s empirical philosophy appealed to the Dutch was a religious one. While Bacon did
not place scientific inquiry squarely upon the shoulders of God, as Descartes had done, he nevertheless expressed a religious, as well as scientific, motivation for studying nature.

  Let no man upon a weak conceit of sobriety or an ill-applied moderation think or maintain, that a man can search too far, or be too well studied in the Book of God’s Word, or in the Book of God’s Works—Divinity or [Natural] Philosophy. But rather, let men endeavour an endless progress or proficience in both.

  This idea that God had created two books—the book of scripture and the book of nature—was perfectly attuned to the Calvinism of the day, in both England and the Dutch Republic. The Apostle Paul had described the universe “which is before our eyes as a most elegant book, wherein all creatures great and small, are so many characters leading us to contemplate the invisible things of God, namely his eternal power and Godhead.” Closer to home, the opening lines of the Protestant Confession of Faith as revised during the Synod of Dordrecht (1619), establishing the fundamental principles of Calvinism, had echoed the apostle’s words by noting, “We know [God] by two means. Firstly, through the Creation, preservation and government of the entire world.… Secondly, He reveals himself yet more clearly and perfectly through his holy and Divine word.”

  Science was esteemed as a way of learning more about God, by studying his works on earth. As Jacob Cats, the most popular poet of the Dutch Republic in the seventeenth century, put it, the first of God’s books taught his will; the second, his power. The religious justification for science that was, in a sense, “built in” to Protestant theology helps explain why England and the Dutch Republic were such bastions of scientific discovery in the early modern period, as opposed to the Catholic countries like Spain and the Papal States in Italy, where the Inquisition persecuted Galileo and spread fear throughout the scientific community. It also explains the dominance of Baconianism in Calvinist countries. In the worldview of the Puritans, according to one historian, Bacon’s writings “came to attain almost scriptural authority.” The Royal Society co-opted this “natural theology,” as it was called in England, highlighting the fact that “the Power, Wisdom, and Goodness of the Creator, is display’d in the admirable order, and workman-ship,” of his creation.

  In one of his works Bacon had quoted from Proverbs, “It is the glory of God to conceal a thing, but the honor of Kings to search out a matter.” The microscope accordingly became the means of searching out what God has chosen to conceal from man’s naked sight, a way of magnifying the “Wisdome of the great Architect of Nature,” in the words of Matthew Wren, a cousin of Christopher Wren’s and a political writer and proponent of monarchy. As the microscope began to expose the surprising complexity of the smallest insects, natural philosophers and theologians alike mused that by studying these creatures we could come to understand God as never before. The Northern Brabant minister Johannes Feylingius exclaimed in a work titled De wonderen van de kleyne werelt (The wonders of the small world), “God has deposited his holiness in all things; / He can be read in the tiniest ant and stone.” The Englishman Thomas Moffett would go so far as to say that, apart from man, nothing in the universe is more divine than insects. While some wondered why God would have bothered to create structures so small that we could not see them, others were content to assume that God foresaw that man would invent devices with which such intricacy could be observed and admired.

  Similar claims had been made about the structure of the heavens—with its faraway stars and moons only now visible to men and women. An admirer of Galileo’s, Thomas Seggett, had even noted that by enabling humans to behold what was until then the prerogative of heavenly dwellers, the telescope rendered mortals similar to Gods. Constantijn Huygens similarly rhapsodized, “At last mortals may, so to speak, be like gods / If they can see far and near, here and everywhere.” Swammerdam, who would later cease his scientific examinations to devote himself full-time to theology, enthused that the study of the smallest visible things, by allowing us to peruse “the book of Nature,” would be a way by which “God’s invisibility becomes visible.” Leeuwenhoek himself would proclaim that there was “no better way to glorify God than observe in amazement his omniscience and perfection in all living things no matter how small.” One of his own draftsmen, while drawing the leg of a flea, would, Leeuwenhoek reported, “often burst out with the words, ‘dear God, what wonders there are in such a small creature!’”

  Constantijn Huygens ended his autobiography with an account of the emotion that overtook him when he first looked through Drebbel’s microscope.

  Nothing can compel us to honor more fully the infinite wisdom and power of God the Creator unless, satiated with the wonders of nature that up till now have been obvious to everyone … we are led into this second treasure-house of nature, and in the most minute and disdained of creatures meet with the same careful labor of the Great Architect, everywhere an equally indescribable majesty.

  For the English and Dutch natural philosophers, nature was God’s second book, a treasure-house given to us by our Creator. Microscopes and telescopes were new instruments that would enable us to peer more deeply into this treasure-house than ever before.

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  When the Royal Society was founded as an experiment-based organization, the original fellows felt they required a “curator of experiments,” a position to which they appointed Robert Hooke. In doing so, the society created a new job description—Hooke was first “curator” in the modern sense. Today the idea of a curator as a person in charge of a museum, a gallery of art, or a library, or a keeper or custodian of a collection, is familiar, and even the newer notion of a “curator of ideas” is becoming more common. However, earlier uses of the term “curator”—which derives from the Latin curare, “to care for”—were applied either to religious personnel (the “curates”) who were caretakers of the souls of their flock or to government bureaucrats who were in charge of public works such as transportation, sanitation, and policing. This latter usage appears as early as Roman times, during which there were curatores in charge of navigation on the river Tiber, others who kept records of public spending, and others responsible for the condition of the roads. This bureaucratic use persisted in the seventeenth century for the person appointed trustee or executor of an estate—so Leeuwenhoek would later be appointed “curateur” of Vermeer’s estate.

  It was only in the 1660s that the use of the term “curator” in something like the modern sense appeared. The second volume of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, published in 1667, described “the Curator of the Royal Society” as the person responsible for making “Tryals” or experiments. The first History of the Royal Society, published the same year, also refers to the position of the curator, and outlines one of his duties as cataloging the many gifts given to the new society by its fellows and by foreign correspondents: “all the Effects of Arts, and the Common, or Monstrous Works of Nature.” Only much later would the term be applied to the keeper of a museum collection—in 1767 it was used to describe the custodians of the British Museum.

  In some ways Hooke was the perfect candidate for this newly invented position. He was born on July 18, 1635, two and a half years after Vermeer and Leeuwenhoek. Robert was a sickly boy, and rather than sending him out to study, his parents left him basically alone; he developed an interest in mechanical devices, amusing himself by taking clocks apart and putting them back together. His father, John Hooke, was a curate in Freshwater, near the western tip of the Isle of Wight. Suffering from a variety of ailments—“a Cough, a Palsy, Jaundice and Dropsy”—John Hooke died, possibly by his own hand, when Robert was thirteen.

  When a famous painter of miniatures visited the Isle of Wight in the 1640s, Hooke confidently believed he could master the skills of the artist. According to a boyhood friend, “Mr. Hooke observed what he did, and, thought he, why cannot I doe so too? So he getts him chalke, and ruddle [red ocher], and coale, and grinds them, and putts them on a trencher [a wooden platter], gott
a pencil [brush], and to work he went, and made a picture.” He proceeded to copy all the pictures in his parents’ parlor. In October of 1648, after his father’s death, Hooke left for London, where he began his apprenticeship with Lely. Though he was quite talented, Hooke had to give up his artistic pretensions when the chemicals involved in making and using the paint exacerbated his own ill health and migraines.

  Hooke instead entered Dr. Richard Busby’s Westminster School. Busby was as famous for the frequency with which he meted out corporeal punishment as for his scholarship. But his harsh methods produced—or at least did not destroy—some of the most inventive minds of the day. Hooke’s fellow pupils included the future poet and playwright John Dryden and the future philosopher John Locke. (Hooke’s future friend and colleague Christopher Wren had left the school by the time Hooke arrived.) At Busby’s school, Hooke learned Latin and Greek, studied the first six books of Euclid, and—as he later boasted to a friend—“invented thirty several [different] ways of flying.” After he completed his studies there, Hooke enrolled at Christ Church, a college at Oxford with links to the Westminster School. The Oxford botanist and inventor John Wilkins was impressed with Hooke and hired him as his paid laboratory assistant.

  Through his association with Wilkins, Hooke soon came to the notice of the chemist Robert Boyle, who hired him and gave him lodging. Hooke worked with Boyle on the famous experiments with an air pump that led to the positing of the law bearing Boyle’s name: that at constant temperature the volume of a gas is inversely proportional to the pressure exerted on it. Boyle generously acknowledged that Hooke had been the one to build him the air pump. Although an air pump was a common experimental apparatus at the time, the pump Hooke built for Boyle was exceptional, in that it was able to create and sustain a complete vacuum in an apparatus small enough to be worked by one man.