The next is an excerpt from the forthcoming guide Vermeer’s Maps by Rozemarijn Landsman (The Frick Assortment, October 1, 2022).
No different Seventeenth-century Dutch painter devoted as a lot consideration to the rendering of cartographic works as Vermeer. In six of his work, an identifiable map adorns the partitions of a home area. Vermeer adopted the maps’ contents and proportions scrupulously, depicting them with such care that their geography and cartouches, even the compass roses, vessels, and sea creatures, are recognizable. Some lettering is legible, and within the case of Younger Lady with a Lute, the clean strains following the intervals within the maps’ surrounding texts match what we all know from the few surviving copies of the Map of Europe. To breed these options so exactly and translate the works on paper into paint, Vermeer would have needed to research the maps very carefully. However why? What was their enchantment for the artist and his viewers?
Decoding the importance of the maps in Vermeer’s artwork is difficult as there are few clues past what’s offered by the work themselves. Maps, furthermore, are advanced objects, open to interpretation. Think about Vermeer’s depiction of the map in Officer and Laughing Woman. To viewers of his time, this map could have been acknowledged as a mirrored image of the recognition of cartographic work as inside ornament and of the truth that, starting within the 1620s, influential painters like Willem Buytewech had integrated wall maps into their style work. As Walter Liedtke illustrated, Vermeer’s composition with the flirtatious couple suits squarely inside a physique of labor by a number of of his contemporaries: the silhouetted determine, for example, suggests familiarity with The Procuress by Gerard van Honthorst. Likewise, the setting—the nook of a room with a window to the left—was a regularly employed scheme, as in, for instance, the equally dated Two Troopers Enjoying Playing cards by Pieter de Hooch. The association of the figures, in addition to the broad-brimmed hat, recall Inside of a Tailor’s Store by Quiringh van Brekelenkam. Vermeer operated inside a community of Dutch painters who imitated and emulated one another’s compositions. From this viewpoint, by the late 1650s a map on the wall of an inside scene was nothing new; for some viewers, Vermeer’s skillfully painted maps could have been simply that.
Johannes Vermeer, Lady with a Lute (ca. 1662-63). © The Metropolitan Museum of Artwork.
Nonetheless, the extraordinary precision and attentiveness with which Vermeer depicted wall maps and the relative frequency with which he painted them sign one thing extra. Already within the nineteenth century, Théophile Thoré-Bürger famous that Vermeer could have included the maps in his work not merely due to their ornamental worth however as a result of of the artist’s supposed fascination with Asia. Within the mid-Twentieth century, Lawrence Gowing hypothesized a relationship between the map and the officer within the Frick portray, likening it to the recurring motif of a picture-within-a-picture. However it was not till James Welu’s groundbreaking research within the Seventies that critical consideration was given to the precise cartographic objects as they seem in Vermeer’s work. Welu recognized every of the maps, matching them to the few extant examples, and reconsidered the iconography of the work through which they seem. The wall maps have since performed a task in quite a few moralizing and politicizing interpretations of Vermeer’s work, linking his protagonists to themes of affection, warfare, and nationwide identification. However, regardless of Welu’s identifications of the maps, the art-historical dialogue of them has usually been superficial. Many an interpretation is predicated on basic concepts of Seventeenth-century Dutch wall maps, slightly than every map’s specificity or the subtleties in Vermeer’s rendition of them.
The maps’ traits would have been extra simply recognizable to Vermeer and his contemporaries than they’re to us at the moment. The ubiquity of wall maps within the Netherlands by the 1650s didn’t detract from the number of the processes of their making, their features, their connotations, and their supposed audiences. Viewers of Vermeer’s artwork, particularly those that owned or had been concerned with maps, would have been properly conscious of such distinctions and, in all chance, able to recognizing precisely which maps the artist depicted. However to what diploma can we set up how a lot these elements performed into the artist’s resolution to reference the maps? As the next dialogue demonstrates, he should have studied the objects extraordinarily carefully, which means that he had appreciable entry to them. Furthermore, he seemingly loved extended entry to Van Berckenrode’s map by the household of his spouse, Catharina Bolnes. What, then, are we to make of the interpretive worth of the wall maps in Vermeer’s artwork? Was the artist motivated by private or political causes? Was he drawn to their materials properties or intrigued by their fusion of artwork and science? The household’s ties to Van Berckenrode’s Map of Holland and West-Friesland provides a brand new gentle through which to understand Vermeer’s artwork. Though the query of the importance of the wall maps stays largely unresolved, ambiguity is inherent to the work of the Sphinx of Delft and arguably lends his work their enduring, highly effective presence.
Balthasar Florisz van Berckenrode and Willem Jansz Blaeu, Map of Holland and West-Friesland (ca. 1621). Westfries Museum, Hoorn.
Whereas every map rendition bears the hallmarks of the artist’s evolving fashion and his attribute finesse, the variations in his method and compositional selections point out that his curiosity within the objects’ materials and which means was something however static. Vermeer dated only a few of his works, however his stylistic and thematic selections evince clear groupings inside his oeuvre. Due to this fact, it may be claimed that the primary time Vermeer painted a wall map was in Officer and Laughing Woman (ca. 1657).
The three renderings of the Van Berckenrode–Blaeu map, particularly, are revealing, due to its recurrence within the artist’s oeuvre and due to the comparatively wealthy documentation in regards to the making of the map. In Officer and Laughing Woman, Vermeer explored the transformation of a monumental, printed cartographic work on paper right into a painted counterpart. Vermeer’s emphasis of sure options could have corresponded to the coloring of the map’s prototype, and the general whitish background is suggestive of a paper base. Past that, nonetheless, the artist’s painterly impression deviates in necessary methods from what we learn about map coloring on the time. Particularly notable are the brilliant and considerably randomly dispersed highlights, catching the viewer’s eyes as they punctuate the ochres and blue. These are typical of Vermeer’s portray method, not of mapmaking.
The blue look of the land within the map in Officer and Laughing Woman has usually been famous, because it appears to contradict the cartographic observe of utilizing blue to point water. Land was typically outlined with inexperienced, yellow, or pink. Did Vermeer deliberately deviate from the coloring of the unique map, as Welu and others have puzzled, or did a few of his pigments merely fade over time? If Vermeer utilized a clear yellow lake—a notoriously fugitive pigment—over the blue, that space would have initially appeared inexperienced. Nonetheless, a lot of the maze of brilliant blue arteries does, the truth is, correspond to the areas of rivers and waterways on the precise map. As a substitute of a extremely unlikely inversion of coloration undertaken by the artist, the thing’s blue look seems to have been the results of an emphasis on the presence of water within the province, particularly in Delfland, both by Vermeer or by the map’s colorist—an attention-grabbing and revealing selection, given the historical past and function of this map in relation to the district’s water administration.
Johannes Vermeer, Lady in Blue Studying a Letter (ca. 1663). Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.
Strikingly totally different is the looks of the identical map in Lady in Blue Studying a Letter. As Vermeer’s fashion advanced, so, too, did his therapy of the wall maps. Right here, the map appears significantly bigger than that in Officer and Laughing Woman—its giant dimension supposedly prohibiting its being depicted in its entirety. Furthermore, whereas the settings of the 2 work are comparable, the execution of every map differs. The position of highlights is extra deliberate within the later rendition, and there are fewer of them. The place they do seem, they’re much less brilliant and have a tendency to mix with the underlying paint layers. The maps in each work adhere to the map’s geography, however the later rendition seems extra cartographic. In Officer and Laughing Woman, the map’s physicality is indicated by peeling paper alongside the underside textual content; within the later map, Vermeer targeted on the consequences of sunshine on the crinkled and varnished paper floor. Equally, and according to the evolution of his fashion, he substituted the brilliant colours of the sooner rendition with a muted palette of grays and browns.
Vermeer’s disparate pigment selections for his first two renderings of Van Berckenrode’s map—and, later nonetheless, its third look in The Love Letter, the place it’s seen in semidarkness at a pointy angle within the foreground—elevate questions in regards to the unique look of the cartographic prototype and, consequently, the extent to which Vermeer’s selections affected its depiction. The consistency with which he emphasised sure components of the map in all three variations—waterways and sure borders, in addition to polders—means that he based mostly them on the identical instance, following its coloring carefully, even when taking some liberties with particular pigments. It should have been for inventive causes that the artist modified his palette. Nothing sure could be stated in regards to the coloring of Vermeer’s prototype, for little is understood in regards to the coloring observe in Willem Blaeu’s store through the 1620s. Moreover, of the 2 extant examples of this explicit map, one is uncolored, and the opposite, which is in Hoorn, is in such deteriorated situation that almost all of its pigmentation has pale or discolored. The whitish delineation of Rijnland, nonetheless, along with traces of blue alongside the river Maas close to Rotterdam and the brown delineations of areas particularly within the south of Holland, counsel that this work was initially rather more colourful than it’s at the moment. Nonetheless, its unique look doesn’t appear to have matched Vermeer’s renditions of the map.
The alternative ways through which Vermeer rendered the wall maps can also be obvious when evaluating his two depictions of maps of the Seventeen Provinces, one by Hondius in Lady with a Water Pitcher, the opposite by Visscher in The Artwork of Portray. The previous, a comparatively modest map, is recognizable however lacks the precision and delicacy of Vermeer’s different map renderings. The latter, however, represents the climax of his virtuosity and curiosity within the topic. Visscher’s giant and prestigious wall map is seen in its full glory, and its materiality is conveyed with extra conviction than wherever else: several types of vertical creases could be discerned, some indicating a fold, others suggestive of air bubbles trapped between paper and canvas lining; the waviness of its floor conveys a fabric that’s each stiff and versatile; and the folds converge towards middle backside, as if, simply out of sight, a weight is pulling the map downward; the opaque crimson and blue of the cartouches simulates coloring with gouaches; the proper and left edges of the map are, apparently, delineated by gold leaf separating the geographical content material from the cityscapes. Vermeer’s resolution to combine in pricey ultramarine blue within the colder, shadowy elements of his work is noticeable within the sequence of cityscapes on the proper, every of which is painted with such precision that they’re identifiable. The restrained dispersal of specular highlights, subtly various in dimension and coloration, not solely enlivens the image, suggesting the reflection of sunshine because it bounces off the map’s surfaces, however appears to change into part of its geographical content material. On this allegory, the wall map should carry out an necessary activity, as each Vermeer’s dealing with and positioning of it suggest.
Johannes Vermeer, Lady with a Water Pitcher (ca. 1662). © The Metropolitan Museum of Artwork / Artwork Useful resource, NY.
The variations in coloration, dimension, and therapy of the wall maps mirror Vermeer’s general stylistic improvement. The map renderings additionally exemplify how the artist balanced the detailed illustration of objects with a sensitivity to how they enhanced the stylistic traits of his work, usually by modulating their coloring and softening their contours. For instance, Visscher’s determine of a fisherman, accompanying the cartouche within the backside proper nook of the map in The Artwork of Portray, is clearly delineated, however his options are blurred to such a level that he’s solely identifiable when in comparison with the determine on the unique map. Equally, the maps’ therapy exhibits that Vermeer reconsidered compositional selections all through the portray course of, rearranging or eliminating elements of his works. As Arthur Wheelock first famous, the maps in each Lady in Blue Studying a Letter and Lady with a Water Pitcher had been repositioned at a later stage. The Map of Holland and West-Friesland within the Rijksmuseum portray was moved barely upward and to the left. Within the Metropolitan Museum work, the Map of the Seventeen Provinces of the Netherlands was shifted fairly a bit to the proper. A special destiny awaited the wall map that Vermeer initially conceived for Lady with a Pearl Necklace. Whereas the Berlin portray now seems with no map, neutron autoradiography exhibits that there had as soon as been an in depth rendering of a map of the Seventeen Provinces on the rear wall. Vermeer painted it out utterly—a outstanding transfer on his half, although not unusual, because the current discovery of a monumental tapestry beneath the higher paint layers of Mistress and Maid confirms.
We will solely speculate in regards to the methodology Vermeer employed to render giant wall maps at a considerably smaller scale. Did he use a grid or a pantograph, as Wheelock proposes? Or maybe an optical instrument? An optical support similar to a lens or digicam obscura may assist to elucidate sure points of Vermeer’s portray method: his highlights, resembling what is understood in optics as circles of confusion or blur circles; his attentiveness to the conduct of sunshine; his obvious familiarity with modern coloration idea; and the geometry that underlies his compositions. A corollary of this dialogue is the artist’s familiarity with not solely wall maps however globes, sea charts, and measuring units. Vermeer’s obvious curiosity in cartography is suitable with an curiosity in optical units. Expertise similar to microscopes, telescopes, pantographs, and the digicam obscura gained momentum across the mid-Seventeenth century. In Delft, Vermeer matured in a local weather notably open to the fusion of artwork and expertise. The town was house to an energetic circle of scientific practitioners, together with instrument-makers, pure philosophers, and painters. The painters Carel Fabritius and Leonaert Bramer—each of whom could have had a formative influence on Vermeer’s improvement—had been masters at perspectival development, as had been such Delft-based architectural painters as Gerard Houckgeest and Emanuel de Witte. Throughout Vermeer’s energetic years as a painter, the fields of the humanities and sciences had been inseparable.
Whereas some maps, particularly the one in The Artwork of Portray, got pleasure of place, the sacrifice of the map in Lady with a Pearl Necklace alerts that the artist didn’t deem all cartographic objects indispensable. They served each compositional and iconographic ends, and one may outweigh the opposite. By shuffling the maps round and manipulating their therapy, coloration, and dimension, Vermeer additionally formed the iconography of his work. For instance, his placement of Blaeu’s Map of Europe in order that the Netherlands is at its middle could possibly be interpreted as a touch upon the self-proclaimed supremacy of the Dutch in Europe and the world. Equally, the repositioning of the map in Lady with a Water Pitcher—a map that was related to the warfare resulting in the formation of the Dutch Republic—insinuates that its cropping alongside the frontier between the Southern and Northern Netherlands was purposeful.
Excerpt from Vermeer’s Maps by Rozemarijn Landsman. Printed by The Frick Assortment and DelMonico Books, D.A.P., 2022.
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