Vermeer of Delft, as he is often called, is one of the more enigmatic figures of art history and many theories and scenarios have been constructed around him. Perhaps in some ways, his art invites it - particularly by its scarcity, since only 30odd of his paintings survive. Indeed, for almost two centuries after his death his name itself scarcely survived, and his pictures were attributed to various other artists of Holland's Golden Age, in spite of their marked (to us anyway) individuality and subtlety. The revival began in France in the mid-19th century and later in that century Van Gogh was a strong admirer of "Jan van der Meer," as he called him. But it took the 20th century to elevate him into probably the most admired Dutch artist after Rembrandt. We have a good Vermeer here in our National Gallery, by grace of the late Alfred Beit, which remains in good shape in spite of recent robbery and the inevitable marks of time. Vermeers are mostly small (sometimes, indeed, almost miniatures), miraculously finished, steeped in light, and with a curious sense of arrested time which links in with our modernist time-and-space obsessions. They are nearly all of people in interiors, with the exception of the "View of Delft" (incidentally, James Joyce's favourite picture) and the early, religious paintings executed under the influence of the School of Utrecht. Vermeer was a Catholic, a difficult thing to be in an aggressively Calvinist culture, though he suffered no obvious persecution for it.
This apparently limpid art was created very, very slowly and with considerable artifice, which is the theme of the present book. Delft in Vermeer's era was a centre of avant-garde experiments in light and composition, much of it based on scientific optical studies. The 17th century was an age both of religious obsessions and of scientific discovery, two elements which now seem to us contradictory, though people did not think so then (Rubens, a firm Catholic and a pupil of the Jesuits, was also a strong amateur scientist who corresponded with the intelligentsia of Europe). The acknowledged leader of the School of Delft, Carel Fabritius, was a radical experimenter in perspective and other fields, though his early death in a disastrous powder explosion cut this short. But Philip Steadman argues convincingly that the real source of Vermeer's quasi-scientific interest in optics was the scientist and thinker Constantijn Huygens, member of a remarkable family, who probably had personal contacts with the painter. In spite of Vermeer's posthumous obscurity, he was well known in his rather short lifetime, not only in Holland but in Europe at large. He was a respected artist in Delft at a time when professional and guild jealousies were strong, and buyers from several countries travelled there to buy his work - sometimes finding that he had no pictures available, because of his slow working methods. He inherited an inn and a picture-selling business, and he also married well, yet when he died in his forties he was bankrupt and his widow could not prevent his surviving paintings from being sold by auction. (Probably this was not because of business mismanagement, but because the French invasion of Holland in 1673 ruined the art business for years.) To the casual viewer, Vermeer's pictures are outstanding essays in meticulous Dutch domestic realism, coupled with a rare feeling for light and an indefinable poetic atmosphere. In fact they are intricate and indirect, giving rise to all sorts of theories, likely and unlikely. Philip Steadman's thesis is that they are based technically on the cumbrous device known as a camera obscura, which would explain both Vermeer's notoriously slow working methods and the oddities which for years critics and scholars have detected in his work - wide angles of perspective, tricks of lighting, strange effects of focus, etc.
It is certainly true that his work as a whole gives a curious feeling of detachment and impersonality, as though the painter were observing life from one remove. This still, silent, almost hermetically sealed world is unique in Dutch art or indeed in most European painting for several centuries; it is in stark contrast to the bulk of Dutch and Flemish genre, which winks, nods and figuratively thumps you in the ribs to emphasise a situation or a moral, or to illustrate some popular proverb. Vermeer's style is almost aristocratically aloof, cool, refined, self-contained as a piece of music (and in fact, several of his pictures do depict musicians).
Philip Steadman has carried out extensive research and he knows the exact topography of Delft (which seemingly has changed relatively little since), where Vermeer lived and where he worked. His thesis on the use of a camera obscura is not new; a few years ago a controversy was fought out both in Europe and America on this very issue, with what seem to me inconclusive results. Other painters are thought to have used the same device, including Canaletto rather later, but Steadman constructs detailed diagrams in support of his claims and has a close knowledge of the period's scientific theories. Being scientifically illiterate, I am out of my depth here, but it is worth mentioning that more than 20 of Vermeer's pictures have been found to contain pinhead perforations - alleged to prove that he used the pin-and-thread method of perspective, which is fairly well known.
VERMEER'S interiors used to be seen as examples of Dutch middle-class refinement and prosperity at a time when Holland (or more accurately, the United Provinces) was at the height of its fortunes, and it was assumed that he painted things more or less as he saw or found them. Not so, it seems; he moved objects about, sometimes distorted perspective, played various tricks of depth and distance, in short turned his own provincial domestic setting back to front and inside out. We are dealing with a very strange man and artist; the "Sphinx of Delft", as this valuable book calls him. But can the fact that he laboriously worked in the method described, or something resembling it, be called on as the final explanation of that strangeness? Personally, I doubt it.
No doubt science and mechanical devices can help artists considerably, as Degas used the camera or as certain contemporaries use computers, or even as Renaissance painters used the new mathematics. That in itself, however, does not define them or their innate originality or the ichor they poured into their work. Vermeer painted as he did because he was Vermeer, mastering and using the latest advances in optics for his own poeticintimist ends. In the end, it is the quality of his own mind and vision which makes his paintings unique and marvellous, though he was lucky in living in a scientific age and milieu which gave him the technical means to realise these so fully.
Brian Fallon is an author and critic
