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History Extra Podcast Host
Johannes Vermeer is now regarded as one of the leading lights of the Dutch Golden Age and indeed one of the greatest artists of all time. But in his own lifetime he was hardly known outside his own circle and made so little money that he could barely afford to feed his large family. In this episode of the History Extra podcast, Andrew Graham Dixon, author of a new biography of Vermeer, chronicles the artist's life and argues that to fully understand the man and his work, we need to explore the religious milieu of the Dutch Republic in the 17th century. He was joined in conversation by Rob Attar.
- [03:06]
Interviewer with Andrew Graham Dixon
In your book, you write that Vermeer has been nicknamed the Sphinx of Delft. Why has it been so hard for people to get a handle on him?
- [03:13]
Andrew Graham Dixon
Because of the strange uniqueness of his life. And it's just been terribly, terribly difficult to get to the heart of it. And having, I believe, got to the heart of it, I think I've also found the explanation for why he was so mysterious, because it turns out that he was essentially working all his life for one family. He produced very few paintings altogether and almost no paintings for anyone else. So if, during the time when he was alive, you didn't happen to know Maria de Knaut or Peter Klaarsoon van Raven, his main patrons, if you weren't friends of that family, you could never know anything about him or see any of his pictures. And this is reflected in the immediate aftermath of his death, when he more or less disappears entirely from view. By 1730, he's completely unknown. In fact, the man who rediscovered him, it was he, Theophile Gautier in the 19th century, who, through a miraculous series of insights and discoveries, managed to piece together the fact that there was once this painter called Vermeer. He called him the Sphinx of Delft, because having found him, he could find nothing else about him.
- [04:24]
Interviewer with Andrew Graham Dixon
So, considering the sources are relatively thin for Vermeer compared to many other, what traces did you put together to build up a picture of him?
- [04:32]
Andrew Graham Dixon
Well, ultimately, I would say that I don't think they are that thin. I think they're quite copious. It's the nature of them that makes them difficult. What we end up with is his network, the people he knew, the people whom he painted for their friends, the people he might have himself known. But we very rarely find a document that gives us Vermeer himself. And he appears in one or two documents, notably when he dies in a fit of terrible, it seems, terrible financial or other form of anxiety at the age of just 43. But other than that, you know, we know him through the fact that we know he had a friend who was a baker, who was very, very rich, who was prepared to let Vermeer run up debts of what would today be a quarter of a million Pounds, you know, for the bread to feed his huge family. We know that he was patronized by this wonderful pair of deeply evangelical Christians, members of the Remonstrant movement. We know that his father's pastor was a Remonstrant. You know, it's a huge jigsaw puzzle. In other words, that was kind of what I spent, I suppose, eight years fiddling with was this jigsaw puzzle.
- [05:46]
Interviewer with Andrew Graham Dixon
Now. But before we dive into the life of Vermeer himself, could you please set the scene for us? What was happening in the Dutch Republic in the 1630s?
- [05:53]
Andrew Graham Dixon
Well, when Vermeer was born in 1632, the D Republic itself has finally arrived at a certain degree of stability. It's achieved independence. It's recognized reluctantly by the monarchies of the great powers of Europe, France, England, and so on. It's reluctantly recognized as an independent republican state. But it's born from war. A large number of its population are refugees who haven't themselves probably experienced atrocity, but their parents certainly will have done, and their grandparents also will have done. They will have experienced the terrors, the horrors of the 80 Years War, which is essentially a war fought out through these terrible sieges, where if a Dutch town held out, it held out. If it didn't hold out, everyone was killed. So really terrible things had happened in the recent past. And indeed, Vermeer's inn in which he grew up is named the Mechlin Inn. It was probably named by people who had fled from Mechlin, which was a town in Flanders which was sacked by the Spanish during the 80s war, where everyone was killed. So these people have probably escaped from that atrocity. He's growing up in an inn that's named after an atrocity in the war that gave birth to the Dutch Republic. And during his childhood, the worst wars in the recorded history of civilization are taking place. They called the Thirty Years War. But they're really numerous wars, a kind of vast, horrible, meaningless, terrible conflict in which perhaps as many as 3/4 of everybody east of the Netherlands, all the way to Bohemia, modern Czechoslovakia, is killed. Maybe 5 million people out of 20 million survive. And these survivors of that terrible war are now flooding into the Dutch Republic. Because in the Dutch Republic, the economy's booming. It's the dawn of what would be called the Golden Age, although it's very much an age of blood as well as gold. And so, yes, it's a fascinating world into which Vermeer is born. It's full of violence, it's full of threat. It's also full of Hope, full of optimism. It's a new republic. It's driven by a merchant economy. It's becoming richer than any country has ever become in the whole history of post Renaissance civilization. And he's living in a town and everybody can read and he's being brought up in an inn and newspapers are circulating, the first ancestors of our modern newspapers. It's this reading culture, talking culture, thinking culture. I hope that gives you some sense of it anyway.
- [08:24]
Interviewer with Andrew Graham Dixon
Yes, it does. And you mentioned that he grew up in an inn. What more do we know about his very early life?
- [08:29]
Andrew Graham Dixon
Yeah, he grew up up in an inn whose parents are innkeepers. I suspect they're also members of the Remonstrant movement. We know that their patron in the Delft Church was the only Remonstrant rebel against the orthodox Calvinists there. And I assume from that that Vermeer himself may well have been brought up in that atmosphere of pacifism and toleration, the sort of liberal atmosphere of the Remonstrance. And I'm encouraged in that belief by the fact that his father was a publican or an innkeeper, because that's a very typical profession for a liberal in Dutch society to take up. You don't find very many orthodox Calvinists running inns or pubs. They're the devil's work. And you have to be kind of tolerationist to run an inn, because anybody can say whatever they like in an inn if you're not prepared, you know, to run a place like that. And it's also very much a place for artists because Vermeer's father is an art dealer as well as an innkeeper. He's trained as a kafer worker originally, which is a kind of damask, kind of silk making. He's in the cloth trade as an apprentice, Vermeer's dad, but he takes up innkeeping as a kind of change of job. But it suggests that he must have been quite gifted visually. You have to be good at drawing to be a kafir worker. And he seems to have been friends with a great many artists. Lots of artists in the Dutch Republic seem to have sent their kids, if they were going off somewhere to foreign shores, setting sail from Delshaven. They would send their kids to the inn of Vermeer's dad. Franz House had a son who went off, you know, with the East India Company on a foreign adventure. And who does he stay the night with? He stays the night with Vermeer's father. And there are many other cases of this. So I think the young Vermeer grew up surrounded by artists and was perhaps encouraged by that to experiment himself in art. He also lived just three doors away from a school that was mainly a school for drawing that was run by a practicing Catholic. And it's only three doors away. And one of the books that was owned by that art teacher, we've got one of his inventories. So I know that one of the books that he owned is actually referred to by Vermeer in a painting. It's one of the sources. So it looks as though Vermeer also studied in this little unofficial school for drawing that was just a few doors down. So a childhood very liberal, very democratic, very much exposed to what's happening in the world. I think that's really important. You know, if you grew up in an equivalent place to Delft in England or France at that time, you might know nothing about the outside world. But if you're growing up in an inn in Delft, you're growing up with the little blue books, as they were called, the Origins of the Modern Newspaper. These pamphlets that touch on all the issues of the day. They're being read out loud, they're being discussed, you know, very much. He would have known what was going on. I think he would have been in touch with the world and he was in touch with these worldly men. A lot of the artists his father knew and gave credit to in the inn were members of an association of Dutch artists who prided themselves on having been trained in Italy. So a lot of these artists had gone to Italy. So yeah, cosmopolitan upbringing, right at the center of things, exposed to a lot of new ideas, exposed to art. You know, I think it must have been a very interesting childhood. Also. He's the only son and he's a good many years like I think eight or nine years younger than his sister. So maybe a little bit the apple of his parents eye, the one who's allowed to get away with not doing the washing up, you know, I don't know. That's speculation. Of course.
- [12:10]
Interviewer with Andrew Graham Dixon
You talk there about the Italian influence. Is it possible that Vermeer himself went to Italy and saw some of these paintings firsthand?
- [12:17]
Andrew Graham Dixon
I think it's very likely on internal evidence that he went to Italy. It would make sense that he went to Italy. We don't know. We can't account for his whereabouts whatsoever between the years of about 1649 and 51, which is when he would have gone to Italy, about that time when he would have ended his apprenticeship and before, in 1653, he gets married and he joins the Artists Guild in Delft. So there is this little two year window when he might have done something like that. And if you look at his early pictures, they are so explicitly indebted in their compositions. Two of them, particularly Saint Praxedis and Christ in the House of Martha and Mary to Italian paintings that are not by famous artists. One of them is by an article, Felice Ficarelli, for example, who's a Florentine artist who's alive in Vermeer's own. Both by minor artists working in Italy, who. And it's very hard to imagine how Vermeer could have come by, you know, engravings or drawings of these paintings. It's much more likely that you would have seen, you know, works of art by Titian that had been engraved or things like that. But I think there's too much Caravaggio and perhaps even, dare I say it, too much Piero della Francesca in some of his work for him not to have been actually in Italy itself.
- [13:32]
Interviewer with Andrew Graham Dixon
So you mentioned there that in 1653 he got married. And this is a really crucial moment for of Vermeer's life, isn't it? Because it introduces all kind of interesting situations for him in terms of money, in terms of religion, in terms of family life. I wonder if you could tell us a bit about that.
- [13:47]
Andrew Graham Dixon
Yes, he gets married in 1653 to the daughter of a very committed Jesuit called Maria Tins, who lives on Papist's Corner. And I think this is what has thrown students of Vermeer a kind of curveball. And they just haven't been able to see round it because it's just created this kind of, oh, he can. He married a Catholic, he must have have converted to Catholicism. And I think it's a preconception that exposes the Anglo Germanic tendencies of Vermeer scholarship. It's a very Anglo Germanic mistake to make because those historical cultures assume Protestant versus Catholic, that's the only way. No, in the Dutch Republic you have to throw all that out the window. Religion is like Eskimo Snow. There are 73 different types and you have to learn all the different types of religion. So what Vermeer does he from originally a family that had been Calvinist that becomes Remonstrant. And then he marries a Catholic. Of course he marries a Catholic. One of the things that Remonstrants pride themselves on is their toleration. And if you read English visitors accounts of going to Holland, they're constantly amazed, you know, because they come from a culture where If a Catholic is discovered secretly preaching, they actually get torn limb from limb. They get publicly executed and tortured to death. So the idea of a Catholic and a Protestant living tolerantly with one another, it's like, wow, amazing, extraordinary. But it's happening. Once you understand that, nothing in my book, I believe, becomes so difficult. You know, that's the big preconception to overcome as, yes, she marries this Catholic, probably she's a young Catholic. She's had a very, very difficult life. She's got a very bossy mother. This really is pure speculation. But I think that she, as a young Catholic, is probably drawn to the open, dissenting, questioning milieu of the Remonstrance. Particularly in the more extreme gatherings of the Roman students who call themselves collegians, women are allowed a great deal of, say, a great deal of voice. I personally think that Vermeer's wife, his future wife, when she's a young woman, when she meets Vermeer, I think she's one of these very independent Catholic women who we know were very attracted by the ethos of the collegiate and the Remonstrant movement. You know, how else otherwise does she meet Vermeer? I mean, he's an artist. He's the son of a publican. She's the daughter of this immensely rich Jesuit woman. Where else is she gonna. I mean, Dove's tiny, of course, so she could meet him anywhere. Eyes could meet across the street at any point. But makes a great deal of sense to think that she's someone who goes to these meetings. Vermeer goes to the meetings himself. That's how they meet. I mean, some. A number of Vermeer's early pictures, the pictures that he paints before he basically signs himself up to paint all his work for one family. The paintings that predate that arrangement seem to me to have the aspect of pictures that could well have been painted for Catholics to help their worship. So, you know, this idea that Vermeer would have had to convert to Catholicism lacks merit at the level of historical analysis of how that society worked.
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- [20:18]
Interviewer with Andrew Graham Dixon
So there's this fascinating detail about Vermeer's career that he spent, I think it was 13 years painting almost exclusively for one family. Why do we think this happened? This is not a typical thing for a painter of this time. What's going on here?
- [20:32]
Andrew Graham Dixon
Well, I mean, I'm the first person to really say that it definitely happened. It seems to me that it's obvious from the documents. John Michael Montias, who was the great pioneer of Vermeer's studies, who turned up an awful lot of detail. I mean, he was pretty convinced of it and was quite shocked, actually, when a leading Vermeer scholar slapped him down and said, no, no, no, all those paintings were not together in that house because they had an arrangement with Vermeer. They must have just had a passion for Vermeer and collected them over the years. And maybe their daughter, of course, which is really a ridiculous kind of put down, because if you look at the documents, it's really, really clear these pictures were all done for one house. And the timing is fascinating because we can be pretty sure that the arrangement starts with a particular document that stipulates a payment that year to Vermeer of 200 Kildas, which is phrased as a loan. But I think it's essentially the beginning of an annual retainer. That would be my interpretation, but it's definitely a sum of money going to be paid by the husband of the couple who commission all the work to Vermeer. And once that's been paid over, it seems, from what we can tell, that every single painting, bar maybe four of his entire life, are painted for that house, which is a situation without parallel in the entire known history of art. No great famous artist ever just did all their work for one place or one person. The nearest equivalent would be, I suppose, someone like Fra Angelico painting all of his holy pictures for the monastery of San Marco or the convent of San Marco where he spent. Spent his whole life. I think it's my view that Vermeer's motivation is religious. Otherwise why would you do this? For example, one of the great books that they read, the Collegians and the Romance, one of the Books they read more than any other was the Imitation of Christ by Thomas a. Kempis. And if you look at page one, page one says, if you want to do the right thing with your life, devote yourself to God. Pay no attention to worldly success or fame, just devote yourself to God. Well, Vermeer's whole life seems to me to be devoted to exactly that proposition. I see his paintings as not being genre pictures. They look like genre pictures at first sight, but they're actually not. But they're religious pictures. They're painted in a spirit of devotion. They're painted with idealism, with spirit, with heart. I think it's one of the reasons they've moved people for so many years without people quite knowing why they were being moved, because they didn't know, as it were, they didn't have the key that unlocked them, which is the knowledge of this remonstrant milieu. But once you do have that key, it's not too difficult, in my opinion, to see that this is what all these pictures are doing. It's a period of immense idealistic optimism among this wonderful group of people who really. They really believe that in the future world that is about to dawn, men and women will be equal. Women finally will get the respect they're due view. They believe that peace will reign throughout the whole world. They believe that tyrants will willingly give up their power. That's what they think is going to happen. So, you know, if you believe that, then you can live the way that Vermeer did. It makes sense.
- [23:50]
Interviewer with Andrew Graham Dixon
And he. He didn't really achieve worldly success, did he? I mean, the fact he was painting for this family, he, like you said, he was in debt to the baker. He never made the money that someone of his talent perhaps could have done.
- [24:01]
Andrew Graham Dixon
No, he made no money and he made no attempt. As far as one can see, he made no attempt to make any money. I mean, it's interesting that if you're looking at the pattern of his behavior, there are two pictures that don't suit the house. We know that they weren't painted for the house. And in each picture, a man is getting a woman drunk with a glass of wine. And these two pictures, we have discovered who they were painted for. And they're painted for some neighbors of his patrons, people who live just three doors away, who don't seem to have been at all part of their religious milieu. And the pictures do actually fit the mold of ordinary genre paintings into which people have so struggled to fit Vermeer's other work because Vermeer's other work don't fit that mould. But these two pictures, okay, so you leave those two aside. He only paints two other major pictures for another client. And who is that client? He is Adrian Patz. Who is Adrian Patz? Well, guess what? This is why I'm so sure that this idea that I have about Vermeer is correct. Adrian Pat is the single most prominent collegiate, the spiritual leader and defender of the collegiate movement, the most radical movement of the remonstrance in the Dutch Republic. And Vermeer paints two pictures for him, as well as the pictures for this other couple who are deeply remonstrant. So just for those things to be coincidence, you're already talking a million to one. You could say it's circumstantial evidence. It is circumstantial evidence, you know, that they're Remonstrants and his pictures seem to be remonstrant. But this other guy's like, he's not just a Remonstrant, he's not just a collegian. He's the leader of the whole thing in Rotterdam. So that's why I think it's so compelling. The chances of it being coincidence are so tiny. A mathematician friend of mine took sort of the three most significant archival discoveries in my book and put them together and said, well, for them all to be coincidence, the odds are 33 billion to one.
- [25:55]
Interviewer with Andrew Graham Dixon
Now, Vermeer was not a particularly prolific painter. Some other of his contemporaries painted far more than he did. Do we know what he was doing when he wasn't creating his art?
- [26:04]
Andrew Graham Dixon
No, we don't. He was possibly running his father's picture dealing business to a certain extent, because we know that one of the reasons why he became depressed towards the end of his life was that his father's picture dealing business, he had pictures that he couldn't sell because there was a war on. And that was one of the reasons that he was stressed and upset. So he does seem to have been dealing in pictures. He certainly traveled a lot around the Low Countries, because this can be deduced from the internal evidence of the paintings. Because there are lots of motifs in his paintings that are borrowed from contemporary artists, contemporaries of his, such as Herhart, Dow and Leiden. There was an interesting exhibition in Dublin not so long ago where it was demonstrated very clearly that Vermeer was actually, you know, he's got this sort of stay at home reputation, because I think his pictures look so stay at home that people think, oh, he must not have traveled much. But no, it seems he traveled a great deal, but we. We don't know what he was doing when he was travelling.
- [27:04]
Interviewer with Andrew Graham Dixon
So this remarkable arrangement he had to paint almost exclusively for one family came to an end after 13 years. Why did that arrangement finish?
- [27:12]
Andrew Graham Dixon
Well, as far as we can tell, for the perfectly practical reason that Peter Klaasoon van Raven, the husband, became unwell and for reasons unknown, they moved to the Hague. And I think the spell was broken with that move. I mean, we know the address of the house for which Vermeer paint all his pictures. In fact, it was, bizarrely, it was the very last thing that I discovered. People always assume it was the first thing I discovered. But no, I'd written a whole book about the link between Vermeer's patrons and Vermeer and the Remonstrant movement. It's only right at the end, having finished the manuscript, that I learned that the house for which all his pictures were painted was actually the porter's lodge to the hidden Remonstrant church in Delft. So, like, oh my God. Well, I think that's part of the 33 billion to one calculation that my friend made. So I think, I think once that house, that place right in the heart of Delft's Remonstrant quarter, once that was sold, once they moved to another place. I assume that with the move, the meetings that used to take place in that house where Maria, who I think was his primary patron, the woman, the collegiate movement was very, very women driven. 80% of the members were women. I think her women friends in Delta, those meetings would have stopped. She lives in a different town now. She lives in the Hague. She's looking after her husband, who's no longer. It's not hard to see how, you know, the circumstances that create this extraordinary house with these extraordinary paintings in them, it's not hard to see how that quite fragile ecosystem would very easily collapse. And when it collapses, you know, Vermeer essentially stops painting. There's only one or two pictures that can securely be attributed to the years after the, you know, the end of that arrangement.
- [29:02]
Interviewer with Andrew Graham Dixon
Yes, and in fact, he doesn't actually live that much longer than that. And he died. He died fairly young. I think he was 43. What do we know about his cause of death?
- [29:09]
Andrew Graham Dixon
The document that spells out his cause of death is a classic case of a historical document that needs to be taken with a pinch of salt because it's a deposition made by his mother in law, Maria, and she's trying to get hold of a whole load of money that Vermeer has actually basically defrauded her of that's been taken away from her. It's a complicated financial arrangement, but she had essentially a financial obligation. She gave it to him to cash in, and instead of cashing it in, he took it to a friend of his in Amsterdam and borrowed a large amount of money using it as security. So she then takes. Buys that back off the man after Vermeer's dead, and she takes this note, she's trying to get the money finally to be paid over over from the charity chamber that holds the promissory note. So she gives this great sob story about how Vermeer's died and he's left all these debts behind and, you know, this and that. No, it's so terrible. And he was so depressed and he was so upset. But it's all about the money and the poor children, the children that can't be supported, which is all nonsense because Maria, who's asking for this money and pleading poverty, she is, we know from a census taken that year, she is the third or fourth richest woman in all of the. So you cannot trust this document. I don't know why he died, is the simple answer. I think maybe she found out that he basically stolen this money from her, and maybe she confronted him with it and she had a sharp tongue. Maybe he got so stressed he had a heart attack. It could be something as crazy as that, as simple as that. I mean, more philosophically, I don't think it's a coincidence that if you look at this group of people, this moment in time, taking a historical view of it, rather than a kind of subjective, granular, historian view, take a bigger view of it. They believe that the world is about to come good. That the thousand years of peace predicted in the millenarian prophecies of the past are going to come to fruition. They really believe this. And then suddenly the Dutch Republic is crushed, the French invade, the English help them. The munsterites are there too. 1672, the year of disaster. Everything falls to pieces. The whole dream collapses. It's like history's come back with a terrible vengeance. And they're just shock of the three leading figures, if you like. In this group of people that I know of, you've got Vermeer, the painter, you've got Peter Claus, Zoon van Raven, the patron, his wife Maria. And you've got Spinoza, the philosopher, who's part of the collegiate movement, almost certainly knows and is a friend of Vermeer. He certainly knows Vermeer's patron, other patron Adrien Patz. And if you look at that little group, spinoza dies in 1675, Vermeer dies in 1675, and Peter Glausohn van Raven dies in 1674. They all die in the immediate aftermath of the year of disaster. And it's almost as if, you know, they're all in their 40s. So to me, it's as if they've almost died of disappointment. I mean, they haven't. You know, we know Spinoza died of tuberculosis. Perhaps Vermeer died of a stroke. You know, Peter Klaus, Owen van Raven, I don't know what he died of. Heart disease. But is it some other malaise that they really die of? If you look at the big history, it does seem a strange coincidence that, you know, 1648, peace arrives in Europe. Finally, peace arrives in Europe. 1655, the collegiate movement, with all its pacifist hopes and millenarian hopes, springs into life. All these women join Vermeer's painting, Maria's commissioning. You know, there's all this hope. Spinoza is writing this wonderful, optimistic philosophy inspired by Christian ideals, you know, the ethics. And then it all comes crashing down. And the lives of these people seem to be bound to that tragic wheel.
- [33:06]
Interviewer with Andrew Graham Dixon
And it was a tragic end for Vermeer. But I think even in the book you describe as a miracle, in the sense that though he wasn't a famous artist, so many of his works remained and survived and still survive today. What do you put that down to?
- [33:19]
Andrew Graham Dixon
Well, I think this is very interesting. I suppose I should preface it by explaining what I think those pictures are. So if you look at, say, two of. Two of the famous ones, the milkmaid, you see a woman pouring milk in an interior. She's wearing a vivid, vivid blue costume that seems to me to evoke religious art, you know, Catholic art, images of the Virgin Mary. That blue is so profound. And then you see, next to that, you see a painting, a woman with a balance, holding up a balance, a set of scales, in front of a painting of the Last Judgment. The women are exactly the same scale in the rooms they occupy. They're doing something deeply analogous to what each of the other is doing. One is pouring milk, measuring out milk into a bowl of bread. She's making bread pudding, a kind of soft meal traditionally served serve to the poor and the indigent and children. The other woman is, I think, by implication, weighing her own soul. So these two pictures, they're utterly beautiful. They are entrancing, they hold your gaze. They don't have that nudge nudge, wink, wink. Quality. That many Dutch paintings that we can fit into the category of genre painting, as we call it, they don't have that quality and yet they look like genre paintings at first sight, but they're not. There's something else going on. What are they actually of? Well, the milkmaid, she represents the active Christian life, what a person should do. She's making food for the poor and she's going to go and distribute it. That's active Christianity. The lady with the balance represents contemplative Christianity, as St. Augustine would put it. The Vita activa and the Vita contemplativa, they are a pair. She is weighing her own conscience. So you have to think about your actions, you have to weigh your actions up and decide, did I behave as Christ would have behaved today? Have I done the right thing? And then in the day, you have to do the right thing. So this is how the pictures work. I can just give that one example. And because they've never been understood, they've been seen as if they were genre paintings. Paintings. The reason Vermeer, I should add, the reason Vermeer did not paint straightforward religious paintings. The reason he didn't paint, for example, Martha and Mary, the active and the spiritual, in terms of traditional Catholic iconography, is because these remonstrance, these collegians, they come out of Calvinism. They don't want paintings of the Virgin Mary and Jesus. That's idolatry. They don't want it. They're very happy to have pictures that make them think of the biblical lessons, but they don't want paintings that are idolatrous, that show the saints and so on, because they still got Calvinism at their core. So that's why the pictures do this trick. They look like genre paintings, but they're not. And that's why it's been so difficult for people to understand them for so long, because the context, the collegiate and romance context, was lost. Once you know the context, you can then deduce the meaning. But I think that the reason to come back to your question in a rather long winded way, the reason why the painting survived, is precisely because they are so entrancing, they are so unlike other Dutch genre paintings that people have always looked at them and thought, wow. And they've looked at them and looked at them and looked at them and puzzled over them and thought about them and haven't been able to just, oh, oh, no, Grandpa wouldn't have wanted us to keep that. We'll let that one go. That can go to the secondhand dealer. No one's done that. That's the amazing thing, that these pictures. And you have to remember that in 1730-1740-1780-1810, all of these paintings are being bought and sold, never by Vermeer. They're never given by the dealer to Vermeer or by the auctioneer to Vermeer. This painting is being sold as a Franz van Meeris. That painting's been sold as a Herattal. The woman reading a letter at an open window in Dresden. One of Vermeer's most beautiful pictures of all, that's being sold as a Rembrandt. You know, what's amazing is that they survive enough. You know, nearly all of them survive. So that Theophile Gautier, coming along in the 1850s and 60s, he could. You can look at these scattered bones, you can look at that foot bone and that rib cage bone and that femur, and you can put it together and say, oh, look, I found Vermeer. And that's because the paintings had it within themselves to survive, because they just are so great, and they are great because they're. There's a philosophical question of what makes art great. I think one of the things that makes it great is authenticity, authenticity of fear, feeling. If something's really felt, we know it. Which is actually something a famous collegiate said. One of my favorite collegiates said that when you know when it's been felt, when it's true, you know the truth. God's put that in us to know the truth. And I think, you know, you can. You can tell when you look at Vermeer's pictures that there's such an intensity behind them. The idea that the collegians had this wonderfully rational idea of what heaven on earth would look like, whereas everyone else said, oh, no, God's going to come down. Christ's going to come down and strike everyone with lightning and separate the good from the bad, and all the bad will go to hell. And they'll, you know, the Galicians said, no, no, it's not going to be like that at all. Everyone's going to be saved. We're all going to be enlightened. Everyone's going to become a better person. And so, you know, when you try to imagine the new millennium, the new Jerusalem, you don't need to imagine a heavenly city actually descending from Earth. Just imagine your own own hometown on a particularly beautiful day, with perhaps two women going to the market and some boats and the sun coming out just as the storm has passed. And the water shimmering, actually, that's what heaven on earth's gonna look like. And I think the message of that painting to me is so moving because it, you know, really, that's all anybody wants.
- [39:06]
Interviewer with Andrew Graham Dixon
You've spoken to us already about quite a few of his works, but I think I will have to ask you about perhaps his most famous work, the Girl with the Pearl Earring. What's your sense of what motivates that, about what's going on in that picture?
- [39:16]
Andrew Graham Dixon
Well, in theory, it's the most mysterious of Vermeer's paintings, and it's always been touted as that. So in some ways, I've been. I think somehow I've cast myself as the person who sort of spoiled the Enigma party by saying that it's really not actually that mysterious, and you don't need to keep oohing and ahhing. There's a different reason to ooh and ah, which is the beauty and the precision of it, really, and the directness of it. Because one thing we know about collegiate women is the. That they venerated Mary Magdalene. There's a wonderful series of transcripts from the Classis in Rotterdam, where you've got the Rotterdam Calvinists. Bring in some collegiate women and interrogate them. Say, why are you having the meetings in your house? Why do you think it's all right for a woman to speak the word of God to other people? It's only men who are meant to evangelize in this way. You should not be preaching, you should not be talking. You should not be speaking. It's outrageous and so on. And there's one wonderful woman who I love, who's also called Maria, actually. And she replies to this, and she says, oh, really? You think we shouldn't speak, we women? Well, let me ask you this. Have you read the Gospel of John? Do you remember the bit in the Gospel of John where Jesus Christ is dead and the three Marys go to the tomb to try and find his body because they want to anoint his body with oil, and they can't find his body. And then they see the angel, and the angel tells them he's gone, he's gone. And only Mary Magdalene on her own, she goes outside and she goes into the garden and she tries to find Christ, and she can't find Christ. She sees this man and she realizes he's the gardener. And then she said, oh, no, you're no good. You don't know where he's gone. And then the gardener says, mary. And she turns towards him and he says, she realizes it's him. It's him. And then this woman says, you know that story, right? You know that story. Well, what if Mary Magdalene, what if she had kept quiet about that? What if she had shut up about that? Then what would happen to the salvation of mankind? None of you men would ever have known because Christ showed himself first to a woman. Now, that was the great collegiate female response. In fact, I think it's the great response by any female Christian who's being shoved into a patriarchal cubbyhole by men who don't want you to speak or talk. But the point is that we know that in the family of Maria de Knaut, Magdalena was a family name. They venerated Mary Magdalene at the level of the name. So what name did she give to her daughter? Magdalena. Magdalena van Raven. Magdalena van Raven would inherit all of the paintings in the house, including the girl with the pearl earring. But the point is, the girl with the pearl earring is a picture of her. She would have been 14, 15, maybe 16 when that picture was painted. Just the time when you would do full body immersion baptism if you were a collegian, because they didn't believe in child, infant baptism, because you had to be of sound mind. You know, you had to be of mature mind to devote yourself to Christ and to God. So I think the picture is painted on the occasion of her baptism. And it's a painting made by Vermeer to remind her forever of why she has been called Magdalena. Because what it shows us, in the words of the auction catalog of 1696, when the painting was first sold, it shows us a trunje, which means a portrait of somebody in biblical fancy dress. So we know that she's wearing a costume taken from the Bible. So who could she be, this girl? She's Mary Magdalene. At the moment when Christ said Mary, she's gone to find him in the garden. She can't find him. She's turned away. And he says, mary, she turns back. She turns back. And that's what the girl in the painting's doing. She's turning back. And it's the moment when she sees his face. And she realizes with a mixture of awe and reverence and love and wonder that she is seeing the living creature, Christ. And of course, when we look at her in the house of the couple, or as we do now in the Maurits house in the Hague, the picture makes us into Jesus, if we're a man. So the picture is telling us how to behave. It's telling her how to behave for the rest of her life. Always imagine that this moment when you saw Jesus in your namesake form. Always imagine that you're seeing Him. You should see him every day in your thought, in your mind. This is exactly what their handbooks and words of recommendation would counsel. All that I'm saying comes straight out of Remonstrant Worship and Remonstrant Texts.
- [44:01]
History Extra Podcast Host
That was Andrew Graham Dixon. Andrew is an art historian, author and broadcaster whose latest book is Vermeer A Life Lost and Found, published by alan Lane in 2020.
- [44:25]
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- [44:56]
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- [45:23]
Andrew Graham Dixon
hey mama.
- [45:24]
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Thanks for making all my favorite recipes.
- [45:27]
Andrew Graham Dixon
Hi Ma.
- [45:27]
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Thanks for your unfiltered advice.
- [45:30]
Carrington College Announcer
Hi Mom.
- [45:31]
Andrew Graham Dixon
Thanks for always being by the phone. Hey Mom. Happy Mother's Day.
- [45:36]
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