Vermeer's Hat (30 page)

Bramer was the senior painter in Delft throughout Vermeer’s life. Born there in 1595, Bramer spent a decade learning his craft
in France and Italy before returning home in 1628 and establishing his practice as a fine painter. He was also an excellent
sketch artist: porcelain painters in town transferred his drawings to delftware. Bramer was a friend of the Vermeer family,
perhaps through Vermeer’s father, who dealt in art and may have sold some of his work. Some have suggested that Bramer could
have been Vermeer’s first painting teacher. Born there in 1595, Bramer spent a decade learning his craft in France and Italy
before returning home in 1628 and establishing his practice as a fine painter. He was also an excellent sketch artist: porcelain
painters in town transferred his drawings to delftware. Bramer was a friend of the Vermeer family, perhaps through Vermeer’s
father, who dealt in art and may have sold some of his work. Some have suggested that Bramer could have been Vermeer’s first
painting teacher. Vermeer’s craftsmanship points to a strong technical education, making Bramer, thirty-seven years his senior,
a reasonable candidate. At the very least, the elder painter was the young man’s mentor if not his actual teacher, for he
was one of the delegation of two who called on Maria Thins on Vermeer’s behalf to ask her to give up her objection to a marriage
between her daughter Catharina and the twenty-three-year-old painter.

When a writer or painter tells a story, especially a religious story, he selects from a large treasury of such stories. In
the case of a painting, he must also choose one part of the story to tell. One scene must convey the whole story. So when
Bramer decided to represent the birth of Jesus, he had many decisions to make. He could have painted the story in the Gospel
of Luke about the angel Gabriel appearing to the shepherds rather than the story in Matthew about the three magi, for example;
or he could have painted the magi in the more conventional posture of presenting their gifts to Jesus in the manger, rather
than carrying them en route to Bethlehem. Given the choices Bramer had to make, we have to ask the question that Renaissance
historian Richard Trexler asks again and again in his history of the cult of the three magi. What was emerging or evolving
at the time the story of the three wise men was being told “for which the magi story provides a discourse”? To focus on Bramer,
what was he trying to talk about by choosing to depict the journey of the magi in this way? Or, to return to the device I
have used throughout the book, where are the doors in this painting, and down what corridors do they lead?

Underneath the robes and turbans, however, are the people wearing them. This is where we might begin to detect what Bramer
was trying to express when he produced this picture: people of many origins thrown together on a journey and heading toward
an outcome that is not yet in view. The ethnic variety of the convoy is signaled most vividly by Balthasar, the black African.
Theological reasoning had long accepted that Balthasar might have been black, but the iconography of the three kings only
caught up to the theology in the 1440s, when the first African slaves were arriving in Lisbon. In no time, European artists
were painting Balthasar black (some were even painting over the white Balthasars in older paintings). In Bramer’s painting,
the black king is difficult to see. He is turned away from us. A black servant is next to his camel, but he too is indistinct—which
may reflect a lack of Africans in Delft that Bramer could use as models. Perhaps he had to make these figures up from his
memory of the Africans he saw in Italy. As for the other two magi, Bramer makes the ruddy-faced Caspar look completely and
hopelessly Dutch (was he working within the tradition that allowed an artist to paint in his patron as one of the magi?),
but he has exoticized the bald and bearded Melchior, giving him what could be read as Jewish or Armenian features. Two attendants
reacting to a rearing horse look so Dutch as to be straight out of Rembrandt, but the white-skinned angels are of indeterminate
ethnicity.

Are we as viewers supposed to notice these details? If the whole point of the painter’s artifice is to make us think that
what is happening in the picture is actually happening, we are not. The last thing a realist painter wants to do is to leave
any of his tools lying about the scene, a badly drawn figure, say, or an anachronistic detail that couldn’t belong to that
place and time. Such details disrupt the viewing experience and remind us that what we are looking at is just a picture. But
every picture, not just a poorly executed one, is attached to the place and time of its making. No picture can escape the
tension between what is going on inside the frame and what is happening out in the world—which is, after all, where the artist
and his viewers live—and what was happening in Bramer’s time was an unprecedented mixing of people, hence the multicultural
odyssey in his painting. The scene may be biblical, but the artist was not abandoning his social experience and common knowledge
when he assembled these figures. Nor need we abandon ours, which is why it is worth paying attention to the ethnic signs of
the characters in the painting and suspecting that the variety of people we are seeing is a variety that Bramer experienced
in his own time.

The ostensible purpose of a three kings painting is to celebrate the recognition of Christ’s birth and reinforce the viewer’s
pious adherence to the truth of that recognition. That is the first meaning of the painting. But the second, lived meaning
of a three kings painting belongs to the place and time the painter made it, and that second meaning keeps shifting as we,
the viewers, move through place and time and look for doors that we can open. This is especially so with a painting from four
centuries ago. An artist of our own time wouldn’t paint the story in this style, so the details catch our eye, hinting at
secrets now lost to us.

What we see in the painting—people of different cultural origins who have banded together to journey through a dim landscape
toward the promise of a future that remains unrevealed—is I think not a bad description of the world in the seventeenth century.
It may not have been what Bramer intended, yet he too lived in a real world, and in that real world the defining boundaries
of cultures were perforating under the pressure of constant movement. People were journeying around the globe, from the wealthy
few merchants handling high-value commodities over long distances, to the impoverished multitude of transport workers and
service personnel who followed in their wake.

This is the knowledge that retrospection gives us as we think about the three kings painting that hung in the main hall of
Vermeer’s home. Our urge to place it within a wider historical context sends us well beyond Vermeer’s intentions. Perhaps
he hung the painting for an entirely devotional purpose: to make a Catholic version of Christian faith daily visible, at least
to his mother-in-law. If the painting really were by Bramer, he might have hung it in honor of the mentor who convinced Maria
Thins to let him marry her daughter. But why stop at the first door, when we have the knowledge to step right through the
painting and come out the other side into the town of Delft, where well-dressed men who traded in precious metals, exotic
manufactures, and spices worth their weight in silver brought with them a ragged multitude of Europeans, Moors, Africans,
Malays, possibly even the odd Malagasy picked up in Sancta Lucia—all of whom improvised their way as best they could into
survival.

Here is one of them now, attending his mistress as she entertains her gentleman caller in an upstairs room in Delft: a black
boy, who never meant to be where he was, who will never find a way back to his place of beginning, and whose descendants most
likely will end up blending into Dutch society as though he had never been black.

When Donne wrote this passage, he was meditating on the state of his soul, not on the state of the world. He feared his own
death, but with that fear found himself struggling with the spiritual responsibility for the welfare of every lost soul, not
just his own. To a historian looking back on 1623, the metaphor of island and continent—an intentionally resonant choice for
English islanders who, among other threats, feared attacks from the continent—stands out more powerfully than the theology
on which it rests. The language Donne has chosen to use is the language of geography, one of the rapidly changing new fields
of seventeenth-century research. The trend within that academic discipline at the time he was writing—which was to assemble
a global system of knowledge of the oceans and continents coming to European attention, and to compile an ever-more complete
map of the world—gives him a model to think about the spiritual links that every member of the human community has with every
other, extending outward in a universal web. As his spiritual world was filling, so too more and more of the mundane world
was coming onto the map. The metaphor of island and continent would have occurred naturally to Donne at this moment, when
Europeans were moving across the face of the globe in ever-greater numbers and bringing their new knowledge back to Europe—or
to Asia, for that matter, where seventeenth-century cartographers in China and Japan also began drawing surprising new images
of the world.

Donne’s imagination in 1623 fixed on other timely images as well. One he employs in the same meditation is the image of translation.
He declares that death is not a loss but a translation of the soul into another form. “When one Man dies, one Chapter is not
torne out of the booke,” Donne writes, “but translated into a better language; and every Chapter must be so translated.”
Death comes in many forms, and so “God emploies several translators”; not only that, but “God’s hand is in every translation.”

Donne’s point was theological, but he was a poet who thought in images that rose to his attention from the age in which he
lived. The translator was one of those images. Within the space of Donne’s own life, the English and Dutch had organized East
India companies, the EIC and the VOC, to mount trade expeditions all over the globe. Wherever their ships and people went,
as Bontekoe put it on arriving at Madagascar in 1625, they had to “have speech with the inhabitants.” Fortune, even survival,
depended on someone on board knowing how to speak to the local people. Donne declares that God employs many translators; so
too these trading corporations had to hire many translators to interpret between the needs of one side and the demands of
the other, and often to move among several languages at once. The number of translators can only have increased as networks
of trade expanded and their experience of trading in disparate locations deepened. By the 1650s, over forty thousand people
were departing decennially on VOC ships for Asia. Thousands more were leaving on other ships. Many of them picked up at least
one form of local pidgin in the places where their travels dumped them. Many of them became translators.

Sometimes the accidents of travel forced a sailor such as Jan Weltevree to become fluent in a foreign language without his
ever being given a choice in the matter. Others actually chose to study a foreign language so that they could translate themselves
into new contexts. When the Italian missionary Angelo Cocchi crossed from Taiwan to Fujian at the end of 1631, he took a Chinese
translator with him. Cocchi had studied Chinese in Manila, but he anticipated the cost of failing to communicate his message
once he got to China, which was, at a minimum, expulsion from the country. For translation is not just about knowing the right
words for things in another language; it is about transposing ideas between languages, and knowing how to shape the expectations
that words create.

And what about Cocchi’s Chinese translator? How did he come to study Spanish? Was he a long-term resident of the Parián who
picked up the language by virtue of living in the Spanish colony of Manila? Did he convert to Christianity and learn Spanish
in the course of his contact with missionaries? Did he actually study the language, or was it something he acquired through
daily use? However he mastered the language, he ended up translating into Chinese, not for a Spaniard but for an Italian,
who in turn had learned that language while at seminary in Salamanca. By 1631, no trading company and mission could do without
“several translators,” many of whom were adept at shifting among multiple languages.

There is one other metaphor in Donne’s seventeenth meditation that stands out to readers today. Donne was a man obsessed with
his own sinfulness, which he sought to use as a goad for climbing to faith. To work this transmutation, he advises himself
and his readers to reverse the values they normally assign to things like contentment and affliction. “Affliction is treasure,” Donne tells us, and the more one has of it, the better. But it must be properly channeled to be of any use. And here he
interprets this unsought treasure as silver. “If a man carry treasure in bullion, or in a wedge of gold, and have none coined
into currant Monies, his treasure will not defray him as he travells. Tribulation is Treasure in the nature of it, but it
is not currant money in the use of it, except wee get nearer and nearer our home, Heaven, by it.” The only thing that convinces
us to convert the silver bullion of our affliction into the coin of religious understanding, says Donne, is the sound of the
tolling bell, the prospect of death.

How intriguing that Donne should turn to the relationship between bullion and coin for a metaphor for tribulation and redemption!
Silver was constantly swapping forms as it moved through currency zones around the globe. In some zones, such as China, bullion
was the form in which silver was wanted. In other zones, silver by law had to circulate in what Donne calls “currant money.”
In Spanish America, it had to be in the coin of the realm, the real. In the Dutch Republic, as we have seen, the coin of several
realms could circulate, from the real to the guilder, depending on supply. In the trading zone of the South China Sea, silver
could be traded in a mixture of bullion and Spanish reals. When Willem Bontekoe asked two Chinese on the Fujian coast to bring
pigs to his ship on 8 April 1623, he gave them 25 reals and they willingly took the coins. Bullion would have been fine too,
for all they wanted was the silver, but Bontekoe had none. Like most European states, the United Provinces banned the use
of unminted silver so as to control the volume of money in circulation. If you wanted to use your silver as money in Europe,
you had to have it in coin. Beyond these historical particulars, though, there looms the simple fact that in 1623, when Donne
was in search of images to express the accumulation of afflictions that might provoke the sinful to piety, that infinitely
accumulatable substance, silver, was what suggested itself to his fevered mind.

Silver and translation. Isolated islands and linked continents. Donne had no idea he was installing doors to his century when
he composed his text, but there they are: casual openings onto corridors leading us back to his world. Like Vermeer, I suspect,
Donne was so absorbed in making sense of his own existence that he had no reason to try imagining what people in later ages
might like to look for in his work. Both men were struggling with the present, and that was more than enough burden. Neither
was preparing a dossier for the history to come. Of course, we are no different. We are just as absorbed in the present, and
just as oblivious to the doors we are leaving behind for those who come after us and might want to make sense of their world—a
world we cannot imagine—by thinking about where it came from.

The metaphors that have surfaced in traditions all over the world are needed now more than ever, if we are to persuade others,
and even ourselves, to deal with the tasks that face us. This is one motive for this book: knowing that we as a species need
to figure out how to narrate the past in a way that enables us to acknowledge and come to terms with the global nature of
our experience. It is a Utopian ideal—an ideal we haven’t realized and might never attain, and yet pervades our daily existence.
If we can see that the history of any one place links us to all places, and ultimately to the history of the entire world,
then there is no part of the past—no holocaust and no achievement—that is not our collective heritage. We are already learning
to think ecologically in this way. Indeed, global warming in our era mirrors to some degree the disruptive impact of global
cooling in Vermeer’s, when people recognized that changes were afoot, even that these changes were affecting the entire world.
Late in life, the shipwrecked Dutch gunsmith Jan Weltevree reminisced to a Korean friend about his childhood in Holland. He
told him that when he was growing up, the elderly had a saying for foggy days when the cold damp got into their joints: “Today
it is snowing in China.” Even as climate change was turning the world topsy-turvy, people were sensing that what was happening
on the far side of the globe was no longer happening just there but, now, here as well.

The Peace of Westphalia in 1648, which conventionally marks the emergence of the modern state system, involved several treaties
that brought an end to the long-running wars among the newly powerful states competed across the split between Catholicism
and Protestantism, including the Eighty Years’ War between Spain and the Netherlands (one of which banned the Dutch from entering
the port of Manila). The new system established norms of state sovereignty that are regarded as underpinning the world order
today: that states are the fundamental actors in the world system, that each state enjoys inviolable sovereignty, and that
no state has the right to intervene in the affairs of another state. States were no longer the domains of monarchs now but
public entities that concentrated and deployed resources for national ends. We have the global transformations of the seventeenth
century to thank for this new order, if thanks are due.