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

by Laura J. Snyder

  That debt now belonged to Leeuwenhoek. Without consulting Catharina or her mother, he publicly announced a sale of some of the paintings he had retrieved from Stevens, including The Art of Painting. Maria Thins protested the sale of The Art of Painting, arguing that it belonged to her, not to Vermeer’s estate. Leeuwenhoek contended before the court that the sale must take place, since he had paid the money to retire the debt for her daughter. On March 15 Leeuwenhoek auctioned off that painting, and the others, at the meeting hall of the St. Luke’s Guild. Unfortunately, no record was kept of the other paintings sold that day, or the price that was paid for any of them. Decades later, after the death of Leeuwenhoek’s daughter Maria, his own microscopes would be auctioned off in the very same meeting hall, the gold ones sold by their weight for melting down.

  The hardest part of dealing with Vermeer’s estate was arguing with Maria Thins about how the debts should be repaid and what property belonged to her and not her daughter. This bickering interfered with Leeuwenhoek’s scientific pursuits. It is not surprising that he wrote no letters at all to the Royal Society in December or January, and only two in February. For these months, a not insignificant amount of Leeuwenhoek’s time and energy was taken up with financial activities and arguments with Maria Thins.

  Finally, a week after the auction of Vermeer’s paintings, Leeuwenhoek was able to get back on track, writing the long letter to the Royal Society in which he answers the fellows’ concerns about his method of computing the number of animalcules he observed with his microscope. He continued his investigations. Then, in November of 1677, he made one of his most astonishing discoveries: the existence of “living animalcules” in human semen.

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  Leeuwenhoek told the Royal Society of a visit paid to him by Johan Ham, a medical student at Leiden. Ham brought Leeuwenhoek a glass vial filled with what he said was semen “spontaneously discharged” from a man sick with gonorrhea. (Probably, it was the discharge symptomatic of the disease.) Ham had seen “living animalcules” in the semen, which he thought had arisen through putrefaction of the man’s semen as a result of the disease. Leeuwenhoek, while giving Ham credit for being the first to see the tails of these creatures, noted that he had examined seminal fluid some years back at the request of Oldenburg and had seen “globules” in it. He had not pursued these investigations at the time because he found them to be “unseemly.” But after Ham’s visit he went back to his observations, deeming it worthwhile to examine the semen from a healthy man. Still, when he reported his findings to the Royal Society, he had his letter translated into Latin, to make it seem more scholarly—and he instructed William Brouncker, president of the Royal Society, to suppress his results if they were judged “objectionable” to the fellows.

  As with his observations of lice and blood, Leeuwenhoek used himself as a subject of investigation. He assured Lord Brouncker, “What I investigate is only what, without sinfully defiling myself, remains as a residue of conjugal coitus.” He examined his own semen “immediately after ejaculation before six beats of the pulse had intervened.” While history does not record what his wife Cornelia felt about this, she may have been game—Cornelia often helped her husband with his experiments, such as the time she carried a small box filled with silkworm eggs “in her Bosom night and day” in order to hatch silkworms for him. Leeuwenhoek observed “living animalcules” moving about in his fresh semen. Unlike Ham, Leeuwenhoek realized that these little animals in the semen did not arise from the decay of the seminal fluid caused by disease, but were present in the seminal fluid of all men. He judged their size to be one-millionth of a grain of sand. Astonishingly, he observed that “they moved forward owing to the motion of their tails like that of a snake or an eel swimming in water.”

  It was one thing to see globules floating in the blood. But now Leeuwenhoek had found self-moving creatures inside the male semen. Were these creatures alive, like the minuscule creatures he had observed in motion in water? Did men have living creatures inside their bodies? The consequences of this notion were staggering. Leeuwenhoek began to devote himself to a study of the sperm (a term taken from the Greek word for “seed”).

  One question Leeuwenhoek puzzled over was how these little animals arrived in the seminal fluid. While dissecting a male hare, Leewenhoek found his answer. He accidentally cut the vas deferens, the duct conveying the semen from the testicles. Leeuwenhoek found that the liquid oozing out of the severed vessel teemed with a multitude of sperm. Over the next years Leeuwenhoek would dissect many other animals, always finding sperm in the vas deferens and testicles. He realized that the sperm originated in the testicles and that producing sperm was their purpose. He would observe sperm in thirty animals in all, including rats, dogs, codfish, pikes, breams, mussels, oysters, hares, roosters, frogs, and even insects: cockchafers, damselflies (dragonflies), grasshoppers, fleas, mites, and gnats. Leeuwenhoek examined the sperm of so many different animals that at one point, when Sir Hans Sloane of the Royal Society asked for further information on his sperm observations, Leeuwenhoek had no idea which type of sperm he desired to hear more about.

  Leeuwenhoek’s discovery of sperm in cockroaches, dragonflies, and other insects dealt a serious blow to the notion of spontaneous generation. He had found that even the lowliest insects do not arise from the muck but reproduce like the higher animals. “I am quite convinced that, just as it is impossible for the Stony Mountains to bear Horses or other Cattle,” or “a Whale to spring from mud,” Leeuwenhoek would exclaim, “so it is equally impossible for any Fly or other Moving Animal to be generated from decaying matter.” He dismissed spontaneous generation as nothing but “old wives’ tales of foolish things.”

  More dramatically, the discovery of sperm transformed the discussions of generation. Up to this point, only human and animal eggs had been observed, leading most natural philosophers to believe—like Harvey and De Graaf—that eggs, perhaps “nourished” by semen, were the source of the embryo. This position was known as ovulism. But now it was clear that sperm must play a crucial role—after all, they, not eggs, could move themselves and seemed to be living beings. Leeuwenhoek embarked on a campaign to prove that the sperm, not eggs, were the essential “instrument” of reproduction. In his second set of sperm observations sent to the Royal Society, in March of 1678, Leuwenhoek declared, “It is exclusively the male semen that forms the fetus and that all the woman may contribute only serves to receive the semen and feed it.” He believed that the sperm was responsible for the formation of the embryo; the egg provided merely its nutrition. He later insisted, “Man comes not from an egg but from an animalcule that is found in male sperm.” Indeed, Leeuwenhoek began to believe that the entire human was present, in some sense, inside the sperm (just as Malpighi had suspected that the chick was present in the fertilized egg). He began to spend hours upon hours trying to see the outlines of the “little man” or “homunculus” within the tiny sperm. Sometimes, he thought he could catch a glimpse of him.

  Nevertheless, Leeuwenhoek reacted with scorn when an article appeared in a French periodical in 1699, authored by a pseudonymous Dalenpatius, who claimed to have seen the complete human body inside the sperm. The article was accompanied by a drawing of a sperm, in which there was a little man, including “naked thighs, the legs, the chest, and both arms, and the skin, pulled up somewhat higher, covered the head as if with a cap.” Leeuwenhoek wrote a long letter to the Royal Society scoffing at this and reminding the fellows that he had observed human sperm hundreds, even thousands, of times, and had never seen anything like what Dalenpatius depicted. He dismissed it as “pure imagination, and not the truth.” Leeuwenhoek himself believed that the human creature is contained in the male sperm, but denied that we will ever be able to see it there. Unfortunately, Leeuwenhoek included the Dalenpatius drawing in his letter to the Royal Society; when it was published in a Dutch edition, the drawing was inserted in the wrong place, where Leeuwenhoek had intended to have one of his own drawings of sperm.
So generations of historians have mistakenly believed that the “homunculus” drawing was Leeuwenhoek’s, and have ridiculed him for thinking he saw the little man so clearly. “Although I have sometimes imagined,” Leeuwenhoek explained, “that … there lies the head, and there, again, lie the shoulders and there the hips, but not having been able to judge of this with the slightest degree of certainty, I shall not, therefore, affirm this as definite.” (Unlike Leeuwenhoek, Nicolaas Hartsoeker would not hold back from publishing, in 1694, an image of a homunculus in the human sperm.)

  Although he could not see the little man in the human sperm, Leeuwenhoek remained convinced of his spermocentric theory of generation. He was swimming against the tide of the egg-based theory of generation proposed by Harvey and De Graaf, and he knew it. In order to prove his case for the primacy of the sperm in generation, he engaged in a gruesome series of dissections. He had a female dog in heat mate three times, afterward killing her. (He did this in his study, and invited ’s Gravesande over to see for himself.) He mentions that his work was a little crude, having never seen a womb being removed except by a butcher. Looking at the uterus with his microscope, Leeuwenhoek found thousands of the little tadpole-like creatures swimming near the openings of the fallopian tubes. He claimed that the sperm swam up to the fallopian tubes, where they would find “little veins” to which they could attach themselves and feed. What Swammerdam and De Graaf had taken to be eggs, Leeuwenhoek argued, were the sperm that shed their tails and would “coagulate into a round ball or globule.” He continued to claim that the only function of the ovary was to provide food for the spermatozoid, declaring that he had discovered “the great secret of generation.”

  But people were skeptical of Leeuwenhoek’s spermatocentric theory. For one thing, they were unwilling to believe that so many sperm were “wasted” in each episode of generation if they were really the life-forming force. Leeuwenhoek had claimed that there were ten times as many “little animals” in the ejaculate of a codfish than there were humans on the face of the earth! (To make this calculation, he said he used a mathematical manual by Adriaen Metius, the author of the book opened on the table in front of Vermeer’s Astronomer.) Leeuwenhoek tried to convince his critics by pointing out that the fig contains many thousands of seeds, yet from it only one tree develops. We do not deny, he reminded them, that the fig comes from the tree. To those who would doubt his claims regarding the vast number of sperm in any sample of semen, Leeuwenhoek delicately pointed out that they should recall how when he “wrote about the great number of living creatures in water, even the Royal Society would not accept it.” Why God creates so many seeds, “we can only guess the reason, which is incomprehensible to us.” The end of the egg-versus-sperm controversy would come only in 1759, when Kaspar Friedrich Wolff’s Theoria generationis described the “germ” of the fetus as the product of both the sperm and the egg.

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  At the same time Leeuwenhoek was developing a new theory of generation, he continued working on Vermeer’s estate. In early 1678, while in the midst of his observations of the sperm of dogs and fish, he had to take care of an inheritance of Catharina Bolnes concerning houses and land in and around Gouda. Catharina had inherited the house in which her father had lived and died in the Peperstraat in Gouda. Leeuwenhoek empowered the Thins family notary to sell the property on behalf of Vermeer’s bankrupt estate, presumably to pay off remaining debts.

  Maria Thins died at the end of 1680, in her house in the Oude Langendijck in Delft, to which she had recently returned. She was buried in the family plot she had purchased years earlier, taking its last remaining spot. Soon afterward Vermeer’s widow and her minor children moved to Breda, near the border with the Spanish Netherlands, which had remained predominantly Catholic after the independence of the Dutch Republic. Catharina spent the rest of her life there, until her death at the end of 1687—which occurred, ironically, while on a visit to Delft. She had returned to see her daughter Maria, and was staying at the house Maria shared with her husband, Johannes Cramer, on the Verwersdijk. On December 30, at the age of fifty-six, she died, after receiving the last sacraments by Philippus de Pauw of the Jesuit Station of the Cross, the same priest who had administered to her mother eight years before. She was buried in the Nieuwe Kerk, across the Market Square from her husband, who had died thirteen years earlier.

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  In the years before his death, while Vermeer was suffering from his most extreme financial difficulties, his style had begun to change. More and more, Vermeer was incorporating abstract elements into his pictures. Vermeer was not alone in this development; many of the artists of the day, including Van Hoogstraten, Van Mieris, Caspar Netscher, and the Delft painters Cornelis de Man and Johannes Verkolje, were moving in the direction of abstractionism, stylization, and decoration. In earlier paintings Vermeer had used stylization to accent compositional elements or to enhance naturalistic effects: for example, the mere squiggles of paint standing in for the bits of thread in the foreground of The Lacemaker. During the 1670s these stylizations took on an independent existence, becoming more important to the painting. In The Guitar Player we find many parts of the picture depicted in a more abstract way, from the design of the rose set into the sound hole of the instrument, the strings that seem to be vibrating, the forearms and hands that are also faintly blurred, as if they are moving too, and the pearls, the picture frame, and the white fur on the coat. This abstractionism is used to augment the optical effects of the painting: in both the folds of the jacket and especially the skirt, “bold and curious patterns” are created from the effect of the light on the fabric. In the satin we have lost all sense of texture and form, perceiving only patches of light and dark.

  At the very end of his career Vermeer painted two works with a similar subject, works that may have been intended as pendants: Young Woman Standing at a Virginal and Young Woman Seated at a Virginal. Each depicts a woman near a virginal, a type of harpsichord. They are not the same woman, though they are dressed similarly in a yellow skirt, white puffed-sleeved blouse, and a blue jacket, which is short in the first picture but long in the second. In both paintings the woman looks at the viewer frankly, making direct eye contact—they are quite unlike women in his earlier pictures, preoccupied with their tasks and unaware of the viewer’s approach. Gazing at these pictures, we do not feel that we are eavesdropping or spying on the women; rather, we sense that we are being invited to join them. Indeed, the way the space opens up in front of the chair near the standing lady beckons the viewer to come around it and sit down, and the boudoir lighting surrounding the sitting woman beckons the viewer to come in and engage in another activity altogether.

  Some art historians feel that, in his last works, Vermeer lost the brilliance of his finest middle-period paintings. One Vermeer expert has said that in the later paintings, “the purity of his masterpieces becomes over-refined; the warmth and humanity of his earlier paintings is lost.” In these pictures he sees a kind of flatness, or a slickness of the paint. Another writer has said of Vermeer’s pictures of women at virginals that they feel like “un vin pétillant éventé”—sparkling wine gone flat. To my eyes, however, Vermeer has merely continued his optical experiments, considering the way that different light conditions can be depicted and how they can be deployed to convey different moods. In Young Woman Standing at a Virginal the light is bright, not softly diffused as in many of his middle-period pictures, and the mood is cool and elegant. Vermeer emphasizes the crispness of the light by silhouetting a black ebony frame and the black edge of the virginal’s lid against a white wall. He paints the edges of objects with sharply defined, rather than diffused, contours. Light gleams on the red ribbon on the woman’s right sleeve, the back of her satin skirt, and the gilt frame of a landscape behind her. Young Woman Seated at a Virginal depicts a woman in a darker room; the shade is drawn so that there is little light here, creating a more intimate, even inviting, mood. What light there is lushly illuminates the girl’s whit
e neck, her left sleeve with its touch of white lace, and the folds of her blue satin skirt. The gold ribbon on her left sleeve positively sparkles. In each of the two pictures, a gold gilt frame is seen in different light, accounting for very different styles of paint application between the two, from the carefully depicted intricate carving of the French-style frame in the brighter picture to the more abstract “dabs and dashes” on the gilt frame in the darker one. What these paintings serve us is not flat champagne, but fruit of a mature painter, secure in his artistry, continuing in his optical experiments, pressing the limits of how to represent light and dark, reflection and shadow—experiments that lead him at times to a kind of abstractionism. Who knows where his optical method would have taken Vermeer next, had he had more time?

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  It has been said that it was only after the invention of photography that Vermeer’s mastery could be truly appreciated—that only after the “ubiquitousness of photography” accustomed our eyes to seeing the world differently could people see the beauty in Vermeer’s pictures. Today, our eyes are more “photographic,” attuned to the characteristic look of photographs, in which the focus varies in different planes, contours are softened, highlights glimmer. According to this interpretation, the experience of viewing Vermeer’s pictures in the prephotographic age would have been like that of viewing motion pictures for the first time: unsettling, strange, even perhaps (as for the audiences said to have fled from the 1895 film of an oncoming locomotive) a bit frightening.

  But this is overly simplistic. Other painters had experimented with similar optical effects before; Titian, for example, especially in his later works, brought different parts of his paintings to a more finished look, mimicking the varying focus in different planes of vision. His method of suggesting the glint of light off of pearls resembles Vermeer’s. Velázquez used mirrors and lenses to create optical effects in his works. Closer to Vermeer in space and time was Fabritius, whose painting A View in Delft from 1652 shows that he was exploring ways to challenge the assumption that standard perspective corresponds to our normal manner of seeing; the sweeping curvature of the work and its wide-angled view resembles nothing so much as a photographic panorama. De Hooch and the architectural painters were also infusing their pictures with optical effects in order to create the illusion of a three-dimensional space. Enough painters were using optics in this way in the 1650s and 1660s—especially in Delft—that people were accustomed to seeing pictures depicting the world in an optical way. We know that people were buying these paintings and enjoying them in their homes. The widespread interest in lenses and practical optics might have had something to do with this. Someone like Leeuwenhoek, who had already viewed fabrics through convex lenses, would have particularly appreciated art that was using lenses to see the world in this optical way. One can’t help but wonder whether seeing such paintings inspired Leeuwenhoek’s interest in using lenses for more than just assessing the value of fabrics.