Vermeer's Hat (2 page)

But I start my story in Delft rather than Shanghai for a particular reason: the extraordinary portfolio of paintings of Delft
by Johannes Vermeer. Dong Qichang left no such portfolio of paintings of Shanghai, from which he fled as soon as he could
afford to move to the prefectural capital. Vermeer stayed home, and painted what he saw. When we run our eyes over his canvases,
we seem to enter a lived world of real people surrounded by the things that gave them a sense of home. The enigmatic figures
in his paintings carry secrets we will never know, for it is their world and not ours. Yet he paints them in a way that seems
to give us the sensation we have entered an intimate space. It is all “seems,” though. Vermeer had such control of painting
technique that he could fool the eye into believing that the canvas was a mere window through which the viewer can look straight
into the places he paints as though they were real. The French call such deception in painting trompe l’oeil, fool the eye.
In Vermeer’s case, the places were real, but perhaps not quite in the way he painted them. Vermeer was not a photographer,
after all. He was an illusionist drawing us into his world, the world of a bourgeois family living in Delft in the middle
of the seventeenth century. Even if Delft didn’t quite look like this, though, the facsimile is close enough for us to enter
that world and think about what we find.

We will linger over five Vermeer paintings in this book, plus two by fellow Delft artists Hendrik van der Burch and Leonaert
Bramer, a painting on a delftware plate, looking for signs of Delft life. I have chosen these eight paintings not just for
what they show, but for the hints of broader historical forces that lurk in their details. As we hunt for these details, we
will discover hidden links to subjects that aren’t quite stated and places that aren’t really shown. The connections these
details betray are only implied, but they are there.

If they are hard to see, it is because these connections were new. The seventeenth century was not so much an era of first
contacts as an age of second contacts, when sites of first encounter were turning into places of repeated meeting. People
were now regularly arriving from elsewhere and departing for elsewhere, and as they went, carried things with them—which meant
that things were ending up in places other than where they were made, and were being seen in these new locations for the first
time. Soon enough, though, commerce took over. Moving things were no longer accidental travelers but commodities produced
for circulation and sale, and Holland was one such place where these new commodities converged. In Amsterdam, the focal point
of their convergence, they caught the attention of the French philosopher René Descartes. In 1631, Descartes was in the midst
of a long exile in the Netherlands, his controversial ideas having driven him from Catholic France. He described Amsterdam
that year as “an inventory of the possible.” “What place on earth,” he asked, “could one choose where all the commodities
and all the curiosities one could wish for were as easy to find as in this city?” Amsterdam was a particularly good place
to find “all the commodities and all the curiosities one could wish for,” for reasons that will become clear as we proceed.
Such objects came to Delft in lesser numbers, but still they came. A few even ended up in the household that Vermeer shared
with his mother-in-law, Maria Thins, to judge from the inventory of possessions that his wife, Catharina Bolnes, drew up in
the course of filing for bankruptcy after he died. Vermeer was not wealthy enough to own many nice things, but those he did
acquire reveal something about his place in the world. And where we will see them in action is in his paintings.

To bring to life the stories I want to tell in this book, I will ask that we examine paintings; or more exactly, objects in
paintings. This method requires suspending some of the habits we have acquired when it comes to looking at pictures. Chief
among these habits is a tendency to regard paintings as windows opening directly onto another time and place. It is a beguiling
illusion to think that Vermeer’s paintings are images directly taken from life in seventeenth-century Delft. Paintings are
not “taken,” like photographs; they are “made,” carefully and deliberately, and not to show an objective reality so much
as to present a particular scenario. This attitude affects how we look at things in paintings. When we think of paintings
as windows, we treat the objects in them as two-dimensional details showing either that the past was different from what we
know today, or that it is the same, again as though a photograph had been taken. We see a seventeenth-century goblet and think:
That is what a seventeenth-century goblet looks like, and isn’t it remarkably like/unlike (choose one) goblets today? We tend
not to think: What is a goblet doing there? Who made it? Where did it come from? Why did the artist choose to include it instead
of something else, a teacup, say, or a glass jar?

As we gaze at each of the eight paintings on which this book has been draped, I want us to ask just these sorts of questions.
We can still enjoy the pleasures of the surface, but I also want us to duck past the surface and look hard at the objects
as signs of the time and place in which the painting was made. Such signs slipped into the picture as it was being painted
largely unawares. Our task is to coax them out, so that we can in effect use the painting to tell not just its own story,
but our own. Art critic James Elkins has argued that paintings are puzzles that we feel compelled to solve in order to ease
our perplexities about the world in which we find ourselves, as well as our uncertainties as to just how it is that we found
ourselves here. I have recruited these eight Dutch paintings for such service.

If we think of the objects in them not as props behind windows but as doors to open, then we will find ourselves in passageways
leading to discoveries about the seventeenth-century world that the paintings on their own don’t acknowledge, and of which
the artist himself was probably unaware. Behind these doors run unexpected corridors and sly byways linking our confusing
present—to a degree we could not have guessed, and in ways that will surprise us—to a past that was far from simple. And if
there is one theme curving through seventeenth-century Delft’s complex past that every object we examine in these paintings
will show, it is that Delft was not alone. It existed within a world that extended outward to the entire globe.

The first place we will look for a second door is in the harbor. The Kolk handled boats traveling to and from Delft on the
Schie Canal, which ran southward to Schiedam and Rotterdam on the Rhine. Tied up at the quay in the foreground to the left
is a passenger barge. Built long and narrow in order to pass easily through canal locks, horse-drawn barges like this operated
on fixed schedules and linked Delft to cities and towns throughout southern Holland. Several people have gathered on the quay
near the barge. Their dress and demeanor suggest that they will take their places among the eight first-class passengers who
paid to sit in the cabin at the back of the barge, rather than jostle in among the twenty-five second-class passengers in
the front. A hint of breeze ruffles the water, but otherwise nothing is moving. On the other two sides of the harbor, all
the boats are tethered or out of commission. The only suggestions of restlessness are the jagged skyline of buildings and
the shadow cast by the huge cumulus cloud hanging at the top of the painting. But the overall effect is one of perfect tranquility
on a lovely day. There are other boats tethered around the Kolk: small cargo transports tied up beneath the Schiedam Gate,
and another four passenger barges tethered beside the Rotterdam Gate. The two I want to draw our attention to, however, are
the wide-bottomed vessels moored to each other at the right-hand side of the painting. This stretch of the quay in front of
the Rotterdam Gate was the site of the Delft shipyard. The back masts of these two vessels are missing, and their front masts
partially struck, which indicates that they are there for refitting or repair. These are herring buses, three-masted vessels
built to fish for herring in the North Sea. Here is another door to the seventeenth-century world, but it requires some explaining
to open.

If there is one overwhelming condition that shaped the history of the seventeenth century more than any other, it is global
cooling. During the century and a half between 1550 and 1700, temperatures fell all over the world, not continuously or consistently,
but they fell everywhere. In Northern Europe, the first really cold winter of what has come to be called the Little Ice Age
was the winter of 1564–65. In January 1565, the great painter of the common people of the Low Countries, Pieter Bruegel the
Elder, did his first winter landscape showing hunters in the snow and people playing on the ice. Bruegel may have thought
he was painting an anomaly that would not return, but it did. He painted several more winter scenes in the following years,
starting the fashion for winterscapes. Vermeer never painted skating scenes, but we know he went out in them, as he bought
an iceboat rigged with a sail from a Delft sail maker in 1660, for which he agreed to pay the considerable sum of eighty guilders.
His timing was not great, for the canals of Holland failed to freeze for the next two winters. Then the cold returned. Temperatures
elsewhere declined too. In China, heavy frosts between 1654 and 1676 killed orange and mandarin groves that had been producing
fruit for centuries. The world would not always be this cold, but this was the condition under which life was lived in the
seventeenth century.

Cold winters meant more than ice sailing. They meant shorter growing seasons and wetter soil, rising grain prices, and increasing
sickness. A fall in spring temperature of just half a degree centigrade delays planting by ten days, and a similar fall in
the autumn cuts another ten days off the harvest. In temperate climates, this could be disastrous. According to one theory,
cold weather could induce another evil consequence, plague. All over the world in the century from the 1570s to the 1660s,
plague stalked densely populated societies. Plague struck Amsterdam at least ten times between 1597 and 1664, on the last
occasion killing over twenty-four thousand people. Southern Europe was hit even harder. In one outbreak in 1576–77, Venice
lost fifty thousand people (28 percent of its population). A second great epidemic in 1630–31 killed another forty-six thousand
(a proportionately higher 33 percent of the then-diminished population). In China, a harsh run of cold weather in the late
1630s was followed by a particularly virulent epidemic in 1642. The disease raced down the Grand Canal with shocking speed,
annihilating whole communities and leaving the country vulnerable first to peasant rebels, who captured Beijing in 1644, and
then to the armies of the Manchus, who founded a dynasty (the Qing) and ruled China for the next three centuries.