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

by Laura J. Snyder

  In Woman in Blue Reading a Letter Vermeer took much care to create the effect of the highlights on the brass nails in the back of the blue chair on the left. He initially painted each nail at full size in a light color—probably lead-tin yellow. He next added shadows around the nails with a dark thin glaze, applying the glaze more heavily on the right side of each nail. Finally, he added a small dot of the yellow over the glaze to create the accent.

  In A Lady Writing Vermeer created different visual textures on the brightly lit tabletop by only partially covering his rough underpaint with smooth layers on top. The underpainted layer includes coarse translucent particles of lead-tin yellow paint, which not only represents highlights, but actually catches the light. To suggest the objects on the desk—gray writing paper, a blue tablecloth, and a strand of white pearls—Vermeer simply dragged smooth final paints irregularly over the surface. Elsewhere in the picture a brown monochrome underpaint shows through thinly applied final paint layers, evoking an area of dark shadow. In The Music Lesson, Vermeer used several layers of paint, including a thin layer of natural ultramarine, in order to depict the sun-drenched carpet covering the table. In the lead bars of the nearest window, he used the ultramarine again, to show their contours diffused with a brilliant light. He distinguished the differences in tone between direct and reflected light by his depiction of the light falling on the viola da gamba from the window (using a warm brown underpaint) and the glimmer of light reflected in the viola from the woman’s skirt (where the underpaint is the same red as the ground underlying the skirt itself). In the viola’s red underpainting, which is slightly offset from the folds of the skirt above, Vermeer conveyed not only the color of the light reflected from the skirt, but also the angle of the reflection. In his late painting Young Woman Seated at a Virginal, he chose an entirely different way to depict a reflection seen under diverse conditions of light. Here, the woman’s skirt and left arm are reflected in the polished surface of a wooden instrument. But there is also another, dim reflection, as if cast by artificial illumination at night. He suggested this with a faint “scumble” of opaque paint—an area of paint that he rubbed out with a finger to reveal a bit of the layer below—in order to convey the look of a light object reflected on a dark surface.

  Vermeer was sensitive, like no other painter, to the variations of color that result from the varying intensities of light. In A Lady Writing a Letter with Her Maid, he used different colors to depict the bodice of the letter writer’s costume as a way of conveying the different conditions of light in which it appears. In the middle tones of light, he painted the bodice a greenish tan; on her shoulder, where full daylight falls, he used not a lighter version of the same color, but a yellowish white. The conservator Melanie Gifford compares this effect to an overexposed photograph, in which the full range of color is not registered where the light is strongest. “He recorded light effects,” she explains, “as the eye perceives them, rather than the rationalized version into which the brain translates this image.” The way we see is, once again, the subject of Vermeer’s artistry. And Vermeer recognized, ahead of the natural philosophers and “opticians,” that the physiology of our color perception is such that when the light is intensified, the hue changes. We may think we see the bodice as uniformly greenish tan, but that is because of the phenomenon of color constancy—the brain compensates for the effect of varied lighting and interprets the dress as a uniform color under different light conditions. What Vermeer was painting was the way the eye actually sees, not the way the mind thinks it sees.

  Finding this kind of detail in the layers of paint laid down by Vermeer should, as Walter Liedtke notes, put to rest the idea that Vermeer “sat in a dark closet [a room-type camera obscura] with the projected image of an actual room, and a palette holding colors he could not even see, and simply ‘copied’ reality.” He did not paint his pictures “in a moment,” although he did depict the effect of capturing a moment in time. On the contrary, it is not surprising, with all of this carefully crafted detail, that it took Vermeer at least three months to finish a single painting. In his later years it took longer. Not only was Vermeer painstaking in his application of the paint, but there is evidence that there were extended intervals between painting sessions, periods in which a layer of paint dried completely before a new layer was added; this is seen in a kind of “beading” at the edges of the later paint, an effect that he may have deliberately sought by waiting before adding the later layer. This beading effect is apparent in A View of Delft in the edge of a rooftop as well as in the rigging of one of the boats in front of the Schiedam Gate. Vermeer’s method may have been like that of Titian, who we know would work for a while on a part of a picture, then turn it around to face the wall, coming back to it again and again over a long period of time.

  It is estimated that Vermeer painted only forty-five pictures in total, of which roughly thirty-five are known to us today. This is in contrast to other painters of the time, like Rembrandt and Hals, who produced works in the hundreds, and even to the fijnschilders like Dou and Ter Borch, who, similar to Vermeer, used a controlled and refined method, and yet made many more paintings over their careers. Of course, these painters had longer careers—Vermeer painted for only twenty years, while Rembrandt’s working life was twice that. In earlier years, when Vermeer was earning perhaps a couple of hundred guilders per painting, and completing several a year, selling the pictures of other artists, and living rent-free with his mother-in-law, his household was comfortable. But later, during the last few years of his life, Vermeer sold no paintings at all, and times were very hard indeed.

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  Besides his careful rendering of optical effects, another obsession becomes apparent in Vermeer’s later works: the depiction of maps and globes. A map is central to his composition in Cavalier and Young Woman, from about 1657. In the 1660s and early 1670s, Vermeer returned to this motif no fewer than nine times in all, four times in his final nine pictures. He did seem to have, as a nineteenth-century commentator noted, a “mania for maps.”

  Wall maps were common elements of home decor in Vermeer’s day. Paper maps were often glued onto heavy cloth and hung, tapestry-like, on wooden rods with ball-shaped finials; these finials functioned to hold the map a few inches away from the wall, protecting the map from the wall’s humidity, ubiquitous in the Netherlands. Maps provided a relatively inexpensive way of decorating large swaths of bare walls, with their colorful patterns of land and sea, fleets of sailing ships, ornate emblems and fanciful cartouches—while at the same time exhibiting the owner’s national pride in the United Provinces and its domination of world trade. Maps became so common as wall decorations that some map publishers even began reissuing old, out-of-date (but decorative) maps for this purpose. Map production throughout the world had become centered on Amsterdam in the 1590s, in part because Holland’s position as a seafaring power required the development of accurate maps, and also because the change from woodcut to copperplate engraving as the method for mapmaking benefited artisans in the Netherlands, who were skilled metalworkers.

  Seven of Vermeer’s pictures feature maps displayed especially prominently, on the wall behind the figure or figures depicted in the foreground. These maps take on a greater prominence and importance in the final five of these: Woman in Blue Reading a Letter (ca. 1663–64), The Art of Painting (ca. 1666–68), The Astronomer (1668), The Geographer (1669), and Allegory of the Catholic Faith (1670–72).

  The large map behind the Woman in Blue Reading a Letter serves as a suggestion of the wider world—one through which her correspondent may be traveling. It also provides a harmonious background for the young woman’s face, neck, and hair, which glow with just a hint of light from the window on the left. At the same time the map provides a counterbalance on the top right of the picture, against the weight of the woman’s bell-shaped beddejak (bed jacket) and the table and chair in the bottom left. Vermeer’s concern with getting the compositional balance right is apparent by
x-radiograph, which shows that the map had originally extended a few centimeters to the left. By making this adjustment, Vermeer ensured that the woman was closer to the center of the canvas, framed by the map and the two chairs—she becomes the center of our attention.

  The map Vermeer depicted has been identified as a map of Holland and West Friesland designed by Balthasar Florisz. van Berkenrode in 1620 and printed by Willem Jansz. Blaeu a few years later. The same map appears, smaller and with the landmasses colored differently, in Cavalier and Young Woman (ca. 1657). The Berkenrode-Blaeu map is oriented with the west, not north, at the top; during this period, designing a map with north at the top was not yet standard cartographic procedure. A mapmaker could choose to depict his subject with north at the left, right, or bottom, if he so pleased.

  Only one original of the Berkenrode-Blaeu map remains. A comparison of that map with Vermeer’s painting shows that his depiction of the map is extremely realistic, down to the detail of the ships shown sailing on the seas, with the names of the seas as written by the mapmaker: MARE GERMANICVM and DE SVYDER ZEE. By the time Vermeer painted this picture, the map was outdated; it would have been considered out of date even by 1626. The topography of the Dutch provinces was changing quickly in the seventeenth century because of extensive “poldering,” by which land was reclaimed from the sea. In his later picture Young Woman with a Water Pitcher, we see part of a different map on the wall that is also outdated; it can be identified as a map of the seventeen provinces (with north to the right) by Huyck Allart. When Allart printed this map in the early 1670s, he used plates that had been engraved much earlier. The map shows the Zyp polder, completed in 1597, but not the Beemster polder, completed in 1612.

  Although Vermeer’s depiction of the Berkenrode-Blaeu map is highly realistic, in Cavalier and Young Woman Vermeer chose to color the map oddly, using blue tones for the land and ocher for the sea, an inversion of the usual pigmentation of maps. In Woman in Blue Reading a Letter, the map is shown fully in dark, ocher tones, with less attention to the details of content and decoration. Yet Vermeer’s depiction in both pictures includes the very same small folds in the surface of the map, suggesting that a copy of the map was actually in Vermeer’s possession when he painted both pictures. Although it was not listed in the inventory taken after his death, it may have been a map that he owned as an art dealer, and that he eventually sold.

  We have seen that both The Astronomer and The Geographer prominently feature maps and globes. Maps take on added significance in these paintings because both natural philosophers depicted by Vermeer are makers, as well as users, of maps: astronomers made celestial maps, while geographers or surveyors made terrestrial ones. These were related endeavors—indeed, at the time astronomy and geography were often studied as interdependent parts of cartography; astronomy was essential not only to navigation but also to mapmaking, for it helped in the determination of latitude on land as well as on the high seas. Holland’s greatest mapmaker, Willem Jansz. Blaeu, had studied astronomy with Tycho Brahe, and charted not only the earth but also the heavens, making some important celestial observations. Vermeer underscored this relation between the disciplines—and his two pictures—by having the astronomer consult a book on both astronomy and geography, Adriaen Metius’s Institutiones astronomicae & geographicae. (Vermeer’s depiction is detailed enough that scholars can recognize the second edition of 1621—an edition published by Blaeu.) In that book Metius recommended the globes of his publisher; however, in The Astronomer Vermeer depicts a celestial globe by Blaeu’s competitor Hondius, dating from 1600. Vermeer meticulously re-creates the constellations appearing on the globe; we can make out the Great Bear on the upper left part of the globe, the Dragon and Hercules in the center, and Lyra to the right. Such globes were often produced in pairs, one depicting the celestial map, one the terrestrial. The terrestrial counterpart to the Hondius celestial globe appears in The Geographer, further tying together the two works. These two globes were published and sold together, intended as companions, and were the same size: thirty-four centimeters in diameter. If Vermeer owned a pair of these hand-colored globes, they would have cost him thirty-two guilders (roughly $540 today) in total. The Hondius terrestrial globe of 1618 also appears in the Allegory of the Catholic Faith. In The Geographer the globe is turned to show the Indian Ocean—called the Orientalis Oceanus—across which the ships of the Dutch East India Company industriously sailed (in Allegory of the Catholic Faith the globe is turned so that the decorative cartouches are facing the viewer, highlighting the large central cartouche honoring Prince William of Orange). A map on the wall behind the geographer is a sea chart by Willem Jansz. Blaeu, published in 1600 and intended as a guide for navigating the waters around Europe. Two unidentified maps lie on the floor, and a large nautical map has been unrolled on the table.

  Another picture from this period, Vermeer’s The Art of Painting (1666–68), prominently features a large map behind the model posing as Clio, the muse of history. Maps frequently adorned artists’ studios—perhaps because painting them was a way to show off the artist’s technical bravura. They were employed as backdrops in a number of seventeenth-century paintings, including Jan Miense Molenaer’s 1631 The Artist in His Studio. Incorporating a map in studio paintings was a means of suggesting the importance of the artist in society by placing him right in the center of the world. By depicting maps of the Dutch Republic, the artist was demonstrating his value to the nation.

  The map in Vermeer’s The Art of Painting is recognizably Claes Jansz. Visscher’s map of the seventeen provinces, probably a later edition published by his son, Nicolas Claesz. Visscher, after he took over his father’s business in 1652. This map was, for centuries, known only via its depiction in paintings, before a copy was found in the Bibliothèque Nationale, in Paris, in 1962. The Visscher map appears in at least two paintings by Nicolaes Maes and as many as four by Jacob Ochtervelt. The map shows the Netherlands at the edge of a ship-filled sea, framed by topographical views of its major cities. It also features several decorative cartouches, explained beneath by a text. The west coast of Holland—rather than the northern border—appears at the top of the map. Vermeer shows the map in its entirety, including decorative elements not seen in other paintings in which the map is depicted. These elements, such as borders with topographical depictions of cities, were generally available by “special order” to purchasers of a particular map, and so they may not have been part of the maps owned or used by Maes and Ochtervelt. Vermeer’s mastery at depicting light and substance is evident here, where the map’s cracked and varnished surface has a tactile quality—we can almost feel its surface and sense its weight as it hangs from its supports. The map presents to us the strongest sense that Vermeer may have traced an image projected by a camera obscura—we know the instrument was used extensively for tracing maps in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

  On one level of abstraction, the map in The Art of Painting represents the past, just as does the artist’s outmoded fashion and the appearance of Clio, with her symbolic laurel wreath and trumpet. The seventeen provinces had not been politically united since 1581, before independence was declared from Spanish rule. Could the appearance of this map in this picture suggest a yearning for the days when the Netherlands was united under Catholic Spanish rule? Could the fold that appears in the center of the map, about where the city of Breda would be, mark out a division between the southern and the northern provinces, which by now were split up? Maps showing the seventeen provinces were still being issued long after the Treaty of Westphalia had decisively split the Northern and Southern Netherlands in 1648.

  There is another symbolic meaning of the map in The Art of Painting, a metaphor that applies to the depiction of maps in Dutch pictures more generally. On the upper border of the map is written “Depictio,” reminding us that mapmakers were known as “world describers.” The great mapmaker Jacobus Hondius was referred to in 1634 as “the best world-describer of the century.” Ma
pping a place was a common way of depicting it—even memorializing it. Cornelis Drebbel, for instance, mapped his hometown of Alkmaar before he left it; the only map he ever made, it was a kind of homage to his home as well as a way of contributing to knowledge of it. Many of the artists of the day were engaged in mapping. Gaspar van Wittel, later known as Vanvitelli, originally went to Italy as part of a Dutch hydraulics team to map the Tiber as part of a scheme to make it navigable. (That is the job that introduced Vanvitelli to the camera obscura, which he employed to map the Tiber, and which he later used for painting his famous Roman cityscapes.) Claes Visscher was not only a mapmaker but also a draftsman and engraver, and a publisher of not only maps but also landscapes and portraits. Mapmakers were members of the Guild of St. Luke, as were sellers of maps, who were often the same dealers who sold other kinds of prints. Mapmaking was considered both an art and a science in the seventeenth century, often symbolized—as in one map—by the addition of a decorative cartouche showing a woman holding a paintbrush and palette, representing the art of drawing and painting, and a man holding a pair of dividers, a yardstick, and a straightedge, representing the science of measuring and surveying.

  Vermeer was painting maps at a time when his neighbor Leeuwenhoek was engaged in surveying, geography, and astronomy—endeavors all related to mapmaking. And it was a time when Leeuwenhoek was conducting his early microscopical observations. Although maps looked outward to the wider world, and microscopes looked inward, at the hidden structures of organisms, they shared one characteristic: maps, like Leeuwenhoek’s microscope, brought to the eye what could not be seen otherwise, making the invisible visible. “How wonderful a good map is,” Van Hoogstraten told artists, “in which one views the world as from another world thanks to the art of drawing.” And like a telescope, a map makes distant, unseeable things visible to us. Indeed, maps were often referred to as “glasses” (that is, lenses) to bring objects before the eye. In the introduction to his Theatrum orbis terrarum of 1606, Ortelius noted, “Those chartes being placed as it were certaine glasses before our eyes, will the longer be kept in memory and make the deeper impression in us.” Placing maps within pictures reinforced the Dutch notion of painting as describing, as opposed to the Italian narrative tradition, in which pictures told stories. Mapping grew out of the impulse to describe nature—an impulse that was shared at the time by surveyors, artists, printers, and the general public in the Netherlands.