Shadows And Light

By ROBERT HUGHES

The name Johannes Vermeer now carries a vast aura of desirability and sweetness. It has become one of the most beloved way points of art history, like Rembrandt, Piero della Francesca or Watteau. Nothing, it seems, is going to change that, but it wasn't always so. Vermeer's reputation is almost wholly posthumous. One of the reasons why he is so admired and his pictures are so unattainable a goal for collectors is precisely the cause of his obscurity in the 19th century: the rarity of his work.

The first rule of artistic survival is to leave a large mass of output when you die--though this, mercifully in some cases, does not always succeed. Vermeer painted very little--or at least very few of his paintings have survived. The present count is about 34. And because his work had little influence on younger artists, and wasn't much written about even in Holland until the early 19th century, and was seen by so few people, it languished. His reputation didn't really revive until the late 19th century, helped (as old painting so often is) by enthusiasms for new art--for Realism and especially Impressionism. Still, the idea that on the far side of the Atlantic some 300 years after his death, lines half a mile long would form in the freezing cold for a look at his work (as happened in Washington at the 1995 Vermeer retrospective) was unthinkable until quite recently.

Now there is another show in America dedicated in part to Vermeer--this time at New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art. Curated by a team of scholars led by Walter Liedtke, the Met's curator of European paintings, "Vermeer and the Delft School" sets itself the task of filling in Vermeer's immediate cultural background. In the 17th century the Dutch city of Delft was an art center, though not a big one. Its population at mid-century was only about 25,000. It had flourishing trade (much of it luxury goods, like the popular blue-glazed pottery that still bears the city's name), a solid class of well-off burghers and handsome churches but no royal court.

Because art follows patronage, artists who worked in Delft tended to pass through and move on. Towns in Holland were a lot closer together and rather more connected than in Italy or France. Artists circulated with more ease among them, so firmly shaped local "schools" are not so easy to find. But if there was one artist totally identified with Delft in the 17th century, it was Vermeer--the only great painter to be born there, live there and (in 1675, at the early age of 43) be buried there.

What other artists were working in Delft? What effect did they have on Vermeer and he on them? Little enough is known about Vermeer, but presumably he wasn't some sort of lonely angelic visitation, popping up from nowhere. Every artist has aesthetic parents, brothers and sometimes offspring. But genius tends to be unpredictable, and a puzzling thing about Vermeer is that artistically he had no real progeny and no certain parentage. Nobody knows who taught him to paint, and his influence on younger Delft artists is too slight to bother with. He did no teaching, and no one imitated him. Moreover, most of the other Delft painters in his time (with one striking exception) pale by comparison with him.

Delft had one outstanding painter of Protestant churches, Gerard Houckgeest, whose beautifully bare Interior of the Nieuwe Kerk in Delft with the Tomb of William the Silent, 1650, is composed with fanatical, emphatic strictness and gave rise to a whole dynasty of memorial church interiors. There were a few fine flower painters, like Balthasar van der Ast, whose elaborate portrait of variegated tulips in a vase could not, as the catalog interestingly points out, have been done from life. (At the height of the Dutch tulip mania, such rare blooms would never have been cut for a painter; he would have had to draw them in the garden.) One of Rembrandt's more gifted pupils, Carel Fabritius, worked for a time in Delft until he had the spectacularly awful luck to be blown to pieces in the accidental explosion of the town's gunpowder magazine. And then there were minor artists of merely local interest, who are dutifully represented in the show but whom nobody except a specialist would cross Fifth Avenue to see.

So the idea of "Vermeer and the Delft School" is a harmless red herring, a pretext for looking at Vermeer and a few lesser artists who happened to be around in the same town at the same time. There was no distinctive Delft school. In the 17th century the place harbored only one artist whose talents approached Vermeer's--the slightly older Pieter de Hooch (1629-84), who was originally from Rotterdam but worked in Delft for about five years in the 1650s. Vermeer and De Hooch had several things in common, the main one being that nothing at all is known about the personality of either. They left no letters, kept no journals, inspired no memoirs. However, both were visionary homebodies. All their finest paintings are of middle-class family life--images of domesticity and, occasionally, courtship, set in precise constructions of space, bathed in subtle transitions of light.

In the work of both there is often a half-submerged meeting of the sacred and the profane. A beautiful and touching example is De Hooch's Mother and Child with Its Head in Her Lap, circa 1658-60. The little girl kneeling down in that shadowed interior might be engaged in prayer, but in fact she is submitting to one of the commonest hygienic rituals of 17th century childhood --her attentive mother picking through her hair for lice.

Of the two, Vermeer was by far the less eloquent artist. His figures don't gesture for attention; narrative relations between them are never dramatic. They can be curiously self-absorbed and if not passive, then at least quiet to the point of inwardness. They had that character right from the start of his career. Thus the earliest of the 15 Vermeers in this show--because of the massive borrowing power of the Met, it contains nearly half his known output--is his one and only mythological scene, of the moon goddess Diana. The favorite Diana myth among painters showed her bathing with her nymphs (good opening for a painter to show what he could do with pretty nudes) and spied upon by a Peeping Tom of a hunter, Actaeon; whereat the virgin moon goddess, her modesty offended, changed him into a stag. In Vermeer's version, circa 1653-54, there is no Actaeon, no river, no nakedness, and instead of plunging into the stream, Diana is merely having her foot washed in a basin by a nymph--Christian paganism, complete with that image of spiky, untouchable virtue, a thistle, sprouting by her side.

By the time he was in his 30s, Vermeer had developed a unique way of rendering light and texture. Instead of building up forms with continuous movements of the brush, he used tiny luminous highlights, pasty dots and spots bringing more dissolved areas of light into focus. These gave a startling effect of studied, textural distinctness. It's as though you see every crumb in a cut loaf, every thread in a tapestry.

But he didn't let this turn into mere artifice. In Vermeer, everything is subordinated to wholeness and silence. No figures are more self-absorbed than his. That is very much part of their magic: they are so concentrated on what they are doing, and that is never public. A girl plays a virginal, its music unheard. A maid hands a young wife a letter--a love letter from someone other than her husband, we surmise, though it isn't stated. A young woman holds up a pearl to the light from a window.

These scenes aren't necessarily just slices of life. Sometimes they are suffused with symbolic references. A case in point is the exquisite Woman with a Balance, circa 1663-64. A young and beautiful housewife stands at a table on which are scattered her more precious worldly goods--strings of pearls (including a rare set of "black" pearls, which are actually gunmetal gray), gold and silver coins, and boxes that presumably contain more small treasures. She gazes with rapt attention at a jeweler's balance, which has nothing in either scale; she is checking that the empty balance hangs level.

It isn't an everyday scene, like a cook weighing flour in a kitchen. Not many women had baubles like these to gloat over. The clincher to its meaning hangs on the wall behind her: a Last Judgment scene, with the dead resurrecting under the presence of God in the sky. Their souls, the Bible says, will be weighed in the balance, that archetypal symbol of judgment whose tiny relative is held by the woman Vermeer has painted. As it is on earth, Vermeer insists, so it will be in heaven. But he's no spokesman for holy poverty. He is too much in love with the world--its pearly light, its rich surfaces, its densities and textures, and the beauty of the women in it--to pretend to be any such thing.