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

by Laura J. Snyder

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  The descriptive impulse was related to the empirical outlook that pervaded Dutch society, and that spurred the collecting of data, specimens, and observations in natural history, anatomy, medicine, and astronomy, and in the cabinets of curiosity compiled by many Dutch citizens. Bacon’s writings illustrated and codified this empirical trend. Natural philosophers were not the only ones reading Bacon during that time—artists were paying attention to his writings as well. Van Hoogstraten, for example, quotes from Bacon’s works several times in the Inleyding, his treatise instructing artists, and so we know that artists were aware of the English lord chancellor at least after reading that work (if not before).

  Van Hoogstraten may have been introduced to Bacon’s works during a visit to England in 1662, soon before he began writing his treatise. He had traveled to England as part of his “grand tour” throughout Europe. Reaching London in early August 1662, Van Hoogstraten remained—with just two brief trips elsewhere—until 1667, when he departed for The Hague (where he remained until his death in 1678). While in England, Van Hoogstraten became acquainted with several fellows of the Royal Society of London at a party he attended at the home of Thomas Povey, one of the society’s founders. Van Hoogstraten would go on to paint seven pictures while in England, two of which were produced for Povey. Bacon’s idea of science was likely one of the topics of discussion at evenings Van Hoogstraten would later spend with Povey and other fellows of the Royal Society. During his stay in London, Van Hoogstraten also attended meetings of the “Tas” association in Vauxhall, which was a meeting place for artistans and engineers; decades earlier Drebbel had been a fixture at the Tas. The group watched experimental demonstrations and discussed technical inventions at the meetings.

  Van Hoogstraten’s overriding concern in writing his book was to show how the insights artists gained by their scrupulous attention to the visible world were in sync with the knowledge of nature discovered by the natural philosophers of the day. In giving his Inleyding the subtitle “The Visible World,” Van Hoogstraten was telling his readers that the painter’s subject is not the world understood on some metaphysical level, or the supernatural world, but the world as it is visible to us.

  But that does not mean that the supernatural has nothing to do with art. Empiricism, as Van Hoogstraten understood it, bestowed a divine justification not only to the role of the natural philosopher but also to the role of the artist. He quoted Bacon’s appeal to his readers that they should study nature as a means “to unroll the volume of Creation.” Van Hoogstraten exhorted the painter to depict the visible world in order to concentrate the viewer’s mind on the invisible foundation of that world, namely its Creator. This view resonated with the Calvinism of the day; hadn’t Calvin himself written that the created world “stands before us as if it were a mirror, in which we can behold God, who himself is invisible”? Bacon, too, had written that God “[has] framed the mind of man as a mirror or glass capable of the image of the universal world.” Like Calvin and Bacon, Van Hoogstraten proposed that nature was God’s “Second Book,” a book that the natural philosopher should learn to read and that the artist should describe on his canvas. As one English writer observed in 1634, “since [painting] is onely the imitation of the surface of Nature, by it as in a book of golden and rarelimned Letters … wee reade a continuall Lecture of the Wisedome of the Almightie Creator.”

  Like the natural philosopher, the artist, in depicting the book of nature, was coming closer to God. In the Inleyding Van Hoogstraten quoted Calvin’s remark that the art of painting “in the continued mirroring of God’s wondrous works, brings its sincere practitioner, through his sublime contemplation, closer to the Creator of all things.” Painters should learn about God’s book of nature in order to depict it properly; and by doing so, the artist was, in his or her own way, venerating God’s work. As Samuel’s brother Frans van Hoogstraten wrote in the poem that prefaced the Inleyding, “nowadays human sensibility . . . / has begun to sing the praises of the invisible Godhead / through this painting of visible things.”

  Van Hoogstraten began, but never published, a second volume, entitled De onzhichtbaere werelt (The invisible world). The invisible world lying behind the visible world was, for Van Hoogstraten, the spiritual world, the world of God, who created the visible world. But it is tempting to wonder whether he might also have discussed the invisible world soon to be discovered by Leeuwenhoek—the world of beings so small they were invisible to the naked eye.

  Van Hoogstraten’s self-portrait, reproduced on the frontispiece of the Inleyding, makes reference to both the visible and the invisible worlds, by featuring two spheres behind the painter, a common iconography for the two domains. His teacher Rembrandt had similarly depicted himself in the Kenwood House self-portrait (ca. 1660) with two large circles dominating a background that is, art historians think, unfinished. Rembrandt, like Van Hoogstraten, may be representing himself as a painter standing before the visible and the invisible worlds, corporalia and spiritualia, the world that God has created and the Creator himself. The two painters have mapped themselves within a dual reality, the visible and the invisible worlds.

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  In May of 1672, a month before the riots in Delft against the Perpetual Edict, Vermeer was part of a delegation that traveled to The Hague in order to appraise a collection of disputed Italian paintings to determine whether they were real or copies. Besides Vermeer, serving his second term as headman of the Guild of St. Luke’s, the delegation included two other headmen from the guild, and other painters, including Willem van Aelst. One of the artists, Johannes Jordaens, had spent many years in Italy, whereas others, including Vermeer, had never (as far as we know) left the Netherlands.

  In 1671 Amsterdam’s leading art dealer, Gerrit Uylenburgh, had sold twelve pictures and some sculptures from the famous collection of Gerard Reynit to Friedrich Wilhelm, the Great Elector of Brandenburg. Gerrit was the son of Hendrik Uylenburgh, in whose studio Rembrandt had worked, and whose niece Saskia—Gerrit’s cousin—had married Rembrandt.

  Friedrich Wilhelm was the grandson of the Brandenburg elector who had been implicated in the counterfeiting scheme undertaken by Vermeer’s grandfather and uncle in 1619; one wonders whether Vermeer thought it ironic that he was now being asked to determine whether paintings bought by him were authentic or “counterfeit.” These pictures were supposedly the works of sixteenth-century Italian masters, including five by Titian, a Giorgione, a Raphael, and a Michelangelo. At that time Italian paintings were considered the pinnacle of art; only the wealthiest burghers could afford to collect them. Most Italian paintings in the Dutch Republic were in Amsterdam, and some were in The Hague—only very few were in Delft. (Of course, there was much more trade in Italian paintings in the Southern Netherlands, which, being a colony of Spain, had a closer connection to Catholic Italy. Titian, for instance, had worked for the king of Spain.) Because of the rarity of Italian master paintings in the north, Uylenburgh had asked for a fantastic sum. One picture, supposedly a Venus and Cupid by Michelangelo, was priced at an incredible 875 guilders (about $12,625 today). Another, a portrait of Giorgione by Titian, was assessed at 650 guilders ($9,380).

  Uylenburgh’s problems began when the still-life painter Hendrik de Fromantiou, acting as the agent for Friedrich Wilhelm, had declared that the collection, with one possible exception, was made up of “bad copies and trash.” Affronted, the Great Elector returned the paintings to Amsterdam, but Uylenburgh refused to take them back. Fromantiou began soliciting depositions from painters who claimed the pictures were forgeries, but other artists supported Uylenburgh’s claim. Both sides sought painters who had spent time in Italy and would have had more experience viewing Italian pictures than they could have had in the Dutch Republic. The painters Wilhelm Doudijns and Carel Dujardin went through the list of paintings one by one, declaring that most were copies or imitations of the masters to whom they were attributed. Both painters had had extended stays in Italy; Dujard
in had studied in Italy, and Doudijns had been a member of the Bentvueghels, a group of Dutch artists in Rome, for twelve years. But then two of Rembrandt’s most talented pupils, Gerbrand van den Eeckhout and Philip de Koninck, declared that the paintings did have “merit” and deserved to be hung in a collection of Italian art. Another painter who had studied in Rome, Johan Lingelbach, agreed with them. Fromantiou next induced Abraham van Beyeren, Pieter Codde, and Philips Momper to claim the contrary.

  After the Amsterdam art community had weighed in, and Uylenburgh still refused to take the pictures back, they were sent to The Hague, where the collection was hung on the premises of the Confrerie Pictura, an academic club located in the Boterwaag (the butter-weighing house) on the Prinsengracht. The Pictura had been founded in 1656 by painters unhappy with the administration of the Guild of St. Luke in that city. (One of the founders was the painter Wilhelm Doudijns, who had already declared the paintings to be copies or imitations when he saw them in Amsterdam.) Painters from The Hague and elsewhere viewed the pictures and weighed in on the question of their authenticity. Constantijn Huygens went to see the pictures; he supported Uylenburgh’s claim about the value of the pictures, saying that he had examined all of them and found them to be originals, not copies; but he tactfully agreed that “some might be worth more than others.” Jordaens and Vermeer gave their opinion before a notary in The Hague on May 23, 1672, declaring that the pictures

  not only were not excellent Italian pictures, but on the contrary did not deserve to bear the name of a good master, let alone the names of such excellent masters as they are supposed to have been made by, and so were not worth by far the tenth part of the aforementioned proposed prices.

  Uylenburgh was finally compelled to accept the return of the pictures, which catapulted him into financial ruin and bankruptcy proceedings. The Great Elector kept some sculptures from the collection, whose value was equal to the deposit he had paid for the paintings. The rejected paintings were sold at auction in Amsterdam in February of 1673, but there is no record of the prices received for them.

  It is hard to know today which side in the controversy was correct. Did Uylenburgh purposely sell fake masterworks? Were they the product of schools or workshops of the masters? Could they have been originals? Only one picture from the collection is extant today: a Dance of Naked Children attributed by Uylenburgh to Jacopo Palma; it is probably a sixteenth-century painting by the school of Palma, not by the master himself. Two of Uylenburgh’s pictures are known only by engravings of them. These appear to be not by Giorgione and Paris Bardone as Uylenburgh claimed, but by other painters of the period. Vermeer seems to have been closer to the truth than his acquaintance Huygens. Although Vermeer had never been to Italy, and could not have viewed many Italian originals in Delft, he could see with his own eyes that the pictures at The Hague were not masterpieces.

  PART 9

  The Invisible World

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  HENRY OLDENBURG, THE secretary of the Royal Society of London, sat at his desk and opened one of the many letters he received each week from correspondents around the world—so many, in fact, that he sometimes asked people to address them to “Mr. Grubendol,” using the anagram to try to hide from the postal authorities that he was in contact with so many foreigners. By then, in the spring of 1673, war had raged intermittently for decades: against Spain, against Ireland, and against the Dutch Republic—not to mention England’s own civil wars. Spies were everywhere. Even the brother of Francis Bacon had spied for England in France, using, some believe, a cipher devised by the natural philosopher. It was dangerous to be seen as too close to anyone, even a natural philosopher, who lived in a country hostile to England—especially the Dutch Republic. But there was no way Oldenburg could avoid that; his responsibility as secretary of the Royal Society was to be in touch with natural philosophers around the world. Oldenburg must have shuddered to remember the time in the summer of 1667—while the guns of a foreign fleet thundered up the Thames for the first time—when he had been clapped into the Tower of London under suspicion of “carrying on political correspondence with parties abroad, obnoxious to Charles II and the Government.”

  This time Oldenburg’s correspondent was the famous Dutch physician and Delft resident Reinier de Graaf. England and the Dutch Republic were still officially at war, and De Graaf’s letter began with an allusion to that conflict: “That it may be the more evident to you that the humanities and science are not yet banished from among us by the clash of arms, I am writing to tell you that a certain most ingenious person here, named Leewenhoeck, has devised microscopes which far surpass those which we have hitherto seen.”

  Enclosed with the letter from De Graaf was a sheaf of papers addressed to Oldenburg by Leeuwenhoek, dated April 28. Reading Leeuwenhoek’s letter, Oldenburg must have been astonished to realize that this natural philosopher—completely unknown to the Royal Society—reported using a microscope to see what even the great Robert Hooke had not observed. Perhaps the Royal Society secretary had an inkling that the history of microscopic studies was about to take a fascinating turn.

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  The rampjaar and its outcome seem not to have impeded Leeuwenhoek’s work. Unlike Vermeer’s, Leeuwenhoek’s income was not tied to the production or sales of any material goods; he was paid by the city government, which needed to operate in times of war and peace alike. His good fortune was furthered by his second marriage. In January of 1671, when he was thirty-nine years old, he married Cornelia Swalmius, the daughter of the Dutch Reformed minister Johannes Swalmius and Grietje Adriaens Uttenbrouck or Uytenbrouck (probably a relation of the painter Moses van Uyttenbroeck). Cornelia was two years younger than Leeuwenhoek and considered a spinster, as she had never married. Her brother was married to a woman named Margrieta van den Burch; the fact that she shared the same name with Leeuwenhoek’s mother, and that before her marriage to Adrianus Swalmius she lived on the Hippolytusbuurt, near Leeuwenhoek, suggests that she was a relative of Leeuwenhoek’s mother, perhaps a niece, making Margrieta and Leeuwenhoek cousins. It is likely, then, that Leeuwenhoek had met Cornelia through his relative.

  Cornelia’s family was a distinguished one; the Uttenbroucks were wealthy patricians in the Leiden area, and the Swalmius family contained several well-known scholars and ministers. Rembrandt had painted the portrait of the Reverend Eleazar Swalmius (Cornelia’s great uncle), and Eleazar’s brother Dr. Henricus Swalmius had sat for Frans Hals.*1 It is believed that Leeuwenhoek and his wife Cornelia had possession of the Rembrandt and Hals portraits for at least part of their marriage; if so, Leeuwenhoek had pictures by two of the most highly esteemed painters of the day hanging in his house on the Hippolytusbuurt.

  Two years after marrying Cornelia, Leeuwenhoek wrote to the Royal Society of London for the first time. He had already been making microscopes and observing with them for some years. But it was De Graaf who finally persuaded Leeuwenhoek to put his observations down on paper and send them to the Royal Society.

  De Graaf was younger than Leeuwenhoek; born in Schoonhoven in 1641, he was the son of a wealthy Catholic architect. He studied medicine in Utrecht and Leiden. In Leiden he was friendly with his fellow students Jan Swammerdam, Niels Stensen, and Frederik Ruysch. Their teachers included Franciscus Sylvius and Johannes van Horne. All six men would go on to do groundbreaking work in anatomy, especially regarding the organs of procreation. Ruysch invented new ways to preserve anatomical specimens, and—rather repulsively—created dioramas incorporating human parts (his daughter Rachel, the still-life painter, began her artistic career decorating his vast collection of body parts with flowers, fishes, seashells, and lace for the “delicate areas”). Ruysch proved that the lymphatic system included valves and discovered the central artery of the eye. He would eventually become the director of the botanical gardens in Amsterdam. Stensen, also known as Nicolas Steno, would make important discoveries in both anatomy and geology, including the discovery of the human tear duct. He gave up scie
nce completely when he converted to Catholicism and became a priest (he was beatified by Pope John Paul II and is on his way to canonization in the Catholic Church). Swammerdam, who invented unique methods for preserving and studying dissected corpses and organs, also eventually turned away from science to devote himself to theological writings.

  After further study in France, De Graaf settled in Delft, where he met Leeuwenhoek, perhaps through his fellow medical doctor Cornelis Isaaks ’s Gravesande, who lived near Leeuwenhoek’s home. Leeuwenhoek would later report that he had seen De Graaf transfuse blood from one animal to another; this was something that ’s Gravesande would surely also have witnessed. Or De Graaf may initially have met Leeuwenhoek in Catholic circles, if Leeuwenhoek was Catholic. By this time the Catholic community in Delft had diminished, as many Catholics had left Delft for cities in the Southern Netherlands after the purges of the tolerant regents in 1672. By 1700 only 9 percent of the citizens were Catholic, leaving fewer than two thousand adults and children of that faith in Delft. Catholics tended to know each other through the two houses of worship. (This suggests that De Graaf might have known Vermeer too.) De Graaf buried a young son in 1673 and died soon afterward.