Michael White takes in the Rijksmuseum’s show on the life, work and faith of Johannes Vermeer.
Within the world’s great art collections, Titians, Rembrandts and Picassos come as standard. But to have just one Vermeer gracing your walls is something else: a prize beyond compare. Perhaps the most exclusive and elusive painter of the first rank, there are only 37 recognised Vermeers known to survive. And though they’re generally small, quiet evocations of the same idealised Dutch interior, their jewel-like quality gives them a treasured status. Which is why their owners rarely lend them, and you never find them brought together for big international exhibitions. Until now.
The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam has just done the impossible in netting 28 out of those 37 works for what has to be the art event of the year. It sold 200,000 tickets before even opening. And seeing all these celebrated images – The Lacemaker, The Girl with a Pearl Earring, Woman in Blue Reading or The Milkmaid – begged in from the Louvre, the Frick Collection or wherever, is a powerful experience. Johannes Vermeer himself never had sight of so many of his paintings in one go. And yes, it’s revelatory.
But putting this exhibition together has also prompted new research about Vermeer that’s revelatory in its own right. And a subject it addresses is Vermeer’s religious loyalties. Like most people in mid-17th-century Delft where he lived and worked, he was raised in the Dutch Reformed Church; but he seems to have converted to Catholicism after marrying into a Catholic family in 1653. And according to one of the Rijksmuseum exhibition curators, Gregor Weber, Catholic teaching was a greater influence on his work than anyone had previously thought, affecting not only the handful of overtly religious pictures he completed but also his core output of apparently secular ones.
To understand the significance of this, it helps to know something about religious life in Vermeer’s Delft. A Protestant community, it tolerated Catholicism but only up to a point. Public celebration of the Mass was forbidden, although it took place privately in so-called “Hidden” churches, usually run by Jesuit missionaries. And while Catholics were barred from many jobs, they nonetheless made up a substantial minority of the town’s population: around 5,000 within a total of 23,000. After Vermeer’s marriage he shared a house with his avowedly Catholic mother-in-law (her sister was a nun) in a quarter of Delft known as Papenhoek: Papists’ Corner. And right next door was one of these “Hidden” churches, run by Jesuits with whom he could hardly fail to have connections.
As a teenager his engagement with Protestantism seems to have been limited: his family never made the formal profession of faith that would have made them full members of the Reformed Church. But as a married man he suddenly started to paint religious canvasses like Christ in the House of Mary and Martha or Saint Praxedis. And though that line of work soon gave way to the luminous, contemplative, contemporary Dutch interiors for which he’s better known – usually inhabited by solitary women writing or receiving letters, attending to domestic chores or momentarily interrupted as they play musical instruments – Weber argues that these pictures are in fact loaded with Christian, and specifically Catholic, symbolism. Dutch baroque art tended to didacticism, telling you how to live. And Vermeer’s mysterious ladies, it’s suggested, do likewise – as images either of purity (the milkmaid at her work) or vanity (the women with their pearls, staring in mirrors) or covert sexuality (the letters indicating lovers) or spiritual inquiry (gazing out of windows).
Very often in the background is an overtly religious painting hanging on a wall, intended as a comment on what’s happening in the room. And the room itself isn’t the representation of real space it appears to be. There’s admittedly an evident relationship with Vermeer’s own house and, as becomes obvious from seeing so many Vermeers together in this exhibition, the furniture, fabrics, clothes and people tend to be the same: recurring elements just slightly re-arranged, picture to picture. But the room itself is an ideal, its calm serenity a wistful fantasy (with something like a dozen children running around, Vermeer’s house wouldn’t have been calm). And hand in hand with this idealism runs the sense of Christian allegory.
On a more practical level, Weber thinks that the Jesuits, whose educational initiatives were strong on natural science, introduced Vermeer to their own discoveries about optics and to the 17th-century camera obscura: a box with a pin-hole lens that could project an image onto a flat surface, like a camera but without film. There are good reasons to think that Vermeer used such a device to fix the perspective in his pictures, not least from their contrasted areas of sharp and fuzzy imagery. The human eyes makes adjustments in how it reads information from distant to close. The camera doesn’t.
But for a perhaps definitive statement of Vermeer’s indebtedness to his Jesuit neighbours, you need only look at one of his last pictures: a strangely awkward and uncharacteristically theatrical painting of a woman in ecstasy, clutching her breast as she gazes at a glass sphere suspended from a ribbon. Beside her, on a table like an altar, are a crucifix and chalice. Under her right foot is a globe. And on the floor is a half-eaten apple, with a nearby serpent crushed under a stone.
Called Allegory of the Catholic Faith, its implications have always been pretty obv-ious – apart from the glass sphere, which is perplexing. But Weber thinks this another example of Jesuit symbolism, emblematic of the human soul in the way it reflects every-thing around it, able to grasp the ungraspable truths of creation by means of faith. He comes up with some fascinating Jesuit texts that illustrate the glass sphere. And it isn’t hard to be convinced: Vermeer was steeped in Jesuit learning and would not have been so but for genuine conversion to Catholicism.
But not everyone agrees. As I stood looking at this picture on press day in the Rijksmuseum, I found myself next to the art historian Andrew Graham-Dixon (an ex-colleague at the Independent) who told me there wasn’t a shred of evidence that Vermeer converted, and that far from being a statement of Catholic fervour, this Allegory was an attack on Catholicism – the glass sphere representing the longed-for simplicity of Protestant belief as against the frippery of Roman paraphernalia that turns the rest of the picture into gaudy theatre. As Graham-Dixon is currently writing a book about Vermeer, with probably a TV programme or two to support it, this view may gather traction. But it’s not the view of people at the Rijksmuseum. And I venture it won’t be yours, either.
Vermeer is at the Rijksmuseum until June 4
This page is available to subscribers. Click here to sign in or get access.
Areas of Catholic Herald business are still recovering post-pandemic.
However, we are reaching out to the Catholic community and readership, that has been so loyal to the Catholic Herald. Please join us on our 135 year mission by supporting us.
We are raising £250,000 to safeguard the Herald as a world-leading voice in Catholic journalism and teaching.
We have been a bold and influential voice in the church since 1888, standing up for traditional Catholic culture and values. Please consider donating.