A major new Vermeer exhibition at Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum displays the artist’s evocative and serene paintings of everyday life – but they contain hidden, symbolic messages, writes Matthew Wilson.
This month, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam will host the largest-ever retrospective of Johannes Vermeer, featuring 28 of the artist’s 37 surviving paintings. It’s an intelligent, well-curated, and stylish exhibition, as well as a truly once-in-a-lifetime event. The exhibition’s first impression is of Vermeer’s incredibly realistic painting technique, particularly his ability to depict light. How it gives objects shape and volume, and how different types of sunlight, filtered through windowpanes and tinged by cloud cover, alter the colours of objects and make textiles sparkle.
Vermeer’s art, on the other hand, is like an ice-covered lake with hidden life beneath its deceptively cool and crystalline surface. Another dimension exists within the artist’s beautifully constructed visual reality: an invisible reality of ideas spoken in the language of symbols. “Symbolism was crucial for Vermeer,” one of the exhibition’s co-curators, Pieter Roelofs, tells BBC Culture. One of the curators’ interests is how symbols functioned to communicate religious ideas in Vermeer’s art. “They aided in the presentation of his paintings as a sort of virtuous example.”
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Here’s how five seemingly random objects – a curtain, a footwarmer, a jacket, a set of weighing scales, and a glass orb – expose the deeper meanings of Vermeer’s paintings.
1. The curtain in Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window (1657-8)
Vermeer painted Girl Reading a Letter by an Open Window when he was 25 years old. It marks a shift in the artist’s career in which he began to focus on intimate, somewhat introverted episodes from domestic life rather than religious scenes. The silent tranquillity of the woman’s reading is at the heart of this artwork. Generations of art lovers have admired the exquisite rendering of artefacts and human character in the painting. But one detail deliberately shatters this perfect illusion.
A rail and brass rings are used to suspend the green curtain, which covers one-fifth of the composition. Paintings were frequently covered with curtains in the Dutch Republic of the 17th century to protect them, and Vermeer appears to have done so. an optical illusion that tempts us to reach out and pull it away.
It also calls to mind a well-known story from Pliny the Elder’s Natural History (published in 77AD). It tells the story of two artists, Zeuxis and Parrhasius, who competed to see who could paint the best. Zeuxis created a still life in which the grapes were so realistic that when the covering was removed from the painting, birds flew down to eat them. When Zeuxis attempted to remove the covering from Parrhasius’ painting, he was astounded to discover that it was actually painted on. Vermeer’s curtain alludes to this famous story in order to symbolise his talent and force us to question art’s exploration of illusion and reality.
2. The footwarmer in The Milkmaid (1658-59)
The room is cold and unprepossessing, with damp spots on the wall and a cracked windowpane. The maid is engaged in one of the most insignificant tasks imaginable: making bread pudding from stale loaves and milk. The footwarmer in the bottom right-hand corner, on the other hand, cleverly transforms the image’s meaning, making it much more than a record of daily life.
Footwarmers were designed to encase hot coals and were worn by women while working at home during the winter months. The footwarmer is positioned in front of a blue-painted tile depicting the love-god Cupid and his arrow of desire in Vermeer’s painting. This combination of symbols had a specific meaning to a 17th-century Dutch audience. Paintings of genre Footwarmers represented lust because they enflamed the lower regions of the body. To represent the sexual availability of milkmaids and female servants, they were frequently shown in conjunction with other euphemistic objects such as empty jugs.
The symbols of passion are present in Vermeer’s painting, but everything else suggests the woman’s respectability: she is looking away from us, her body is shrouded in heavy garments, and she is looking away from the symbols of prurience towards her domestic chores.
3. The weighing scales in Woman Holding a Balance (1662-64)
In a quiet, curtained room, a young woman is watching a set of weighing scales gradually settle their equilibrium. The items on the table suggest that she is about to appraise the value of various coins and pearls, but the presence of a painting directly behind her suggests a more profound unfolding of events.
The majority of the painting is obscured by her head, but the exposed upper section depicts Christ in Judgement. In this painting-within-a-painting, Jesus is doing the same thing as the woman: weighing something. Except his work on Judgement Day is deliberating souls.
Vermeer was deeply religious, and he hid spiritual symbols in several of his paintings. He was a Catholic convert who lived in the staunchly Protestant Dutch Republic. and the scales could be a reference to his minority faith. When praying, good Catholics should weigh their sins against their goodness, according to Jesuit founder St Ignatius of Loyola (1491-1556): “I must rather be like the equalised scales of a balance ready to follow the course which I feel is more for the glory and praise of God, our Lord, and the salvation of my soul.”
Vermeer was involved with the Jesuits in a variety of ways throughout his life, including marrying his wife in a Jesuit church near his hometown of Delft and naming one of his sons Ignatius after the Jesuit founder.
“Catholicism overwhelmed Vermeer,” Pieter Roelofs tells BBC Culture. “He had at least seven daughters, and his paintings could have served as an example to his own children in his own household.”
4. Girl with a Pearl Earring textiles (1664-67)
The Pearl Girl Earrings appear to be another representation of a fleeting, naturalistic moment. It is an example of a “tronie,” a Dutch genre of art that depicted an unnamed figure dressed in an unusual costume. Her headgear was meant to portray her as an exotic or ancient character, and her pearl was meant to represent spiritual purity or earthly beauty. Her jacket is made of an iridescent fabric that appears grey/blue in the shadows and gold in direct light. Collectors rated painters based on their ability to evoke fine materials in art in Vermeer’s day, and the representation of fine material was of particular interest to them. Vermeer’s father worked in the fabric trade, so the artist was exposed to the beauty and significance of fabric at a young age. Vermeer is known to have used the symbolic language of art defined in Cesare Ripa’s allegory book, Iconologia, which was translated into Dutch in 1644. Pittura – “Painting” – is represented in the Iconologia by a shot-silk dress with changing colours in the light. Vermeer’s model is also adorned with the three primary colours that form the foundation of a painter’s craft: red lips and yellow and blue clothing. The young woman in Vermeer’s painting, painted with an open mouth and gazing directly at us to increase her desirability, is turning to disappear into the darkness. Is she a personification of art, whose perfect ideals are always tantalisingly out of reach?