The Violence in Vermeer
As yet, archival research has failed to substantiate this conversation, although it appears, more or less intact, in the 2003 movie version of Chevalier’s book, with Colin Firth, as a well-wigged Vermeer, issuing instructions to Scarlett Johansson, as Griet. Meanwhile, we have a fresh contender for the role of the girl in the painting. In a new book, “Vermeer: A Life Lost and Found” (Norton), Andrew Graham-Dixon identifies her as Magdalena van Ruijven, the daughter of Vermeer’s most significant patrons, and offers a reason for her parted lips: “Not only does the girl seem on the point of utterance, she has the air of someone about to say the most urgent thing they have ever said.”
The someone, we are told, is another Magdalena—Mary Magdalene, who, in the darkness of early morning, goes to Christ’s tomb and finds it empty. She sees Jesus but believes him to be the gardener. (Is there a more wonderful example of mistaken identity—revelation delayed by human error?) In the words of St. John’s Gospel, “She turned herself, and saith unto him, Rabboni; which is to say, Master.” Virtuous women, it would seem, do open their mouths in paintings. That momentous turning, according to Graham-Dixon, is what we observe in Vermeer’s picture. As the girl looks over her shoulder, we are standing where Christ stood. And what of the pearl? “It is no simple jewel,” Graham-Dixon writes, “but a reflection of the state of her soul, bursting with joy and irradiated with divine light.” Try sticking your head to that.
How, why, and by what right does a person produce tranquil art in the midst, or the wake, of tumultuous times? Well, it helps if you hail from flat, contested northern lands. Think of Watteau, born on the join between present-day France and Belgium, in 1684, six years after the end of the Franco-Dutch War. Twenty-seven miles south lies the town where Matisse grew up and which German soldiers invaded when he was a year and a day old, at the dawn of 1871. (At the far end of his life, the éclat of his cutouts was conjured under Nazi occupation. His daughter, Marguerite, was tortured by the Gestapo.) Matisse’s father began in the textile trade, as did Reynier Jansz Vermeer, who was living in Amsterdam and engaged in the manufacture of caffa, a costly woven fabric, when he met a woman named Digna Baltens. They married in 1615, and it was not until 1632 that their son, Johannes, was born. As befits such an environment, his handling of tactile stuff—not just silk and fur but bread and brickwork, too—never deserted him. The raised ridges of a map, unrolled and hung on a wall, asked to be registered in paint.
There are areas in the life of Vermeer, who died in his forties, in 1675, that have never been mapped. In all likelihood, they never will be. Given how acutely some of his work refers to Italian artists of the previous generation, for instance, it’s not inconceivable that he went to Italy; regardless, no record of the visit exists. To the millions of people who recognize “Girl with a Pearl Earring” or “The Lacemaker,” Vermeer is little more than a name and a place: Delft, where his life began and ended, and where he is buried in the Oude Kerk, or old church. (A sign in the church declares that the coffin of one of his children was laid on top of his.) Beyond the bounds of Delft, the living Vermeer was largely uncelebrated. His reputation, such as it was, went into eclipse, until he was reclaimed and illuminated by French critics in the latter half of the nineteenth century.
