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Have We Finally Solved The Mystery of Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring? With Andrew Graham-Dixon
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- [00:00]
Conor
Hi everyone. I'm Conor, head of Programming at Intelligence Squared. As we head into the festive season, what is for many of us, a time of comfort, celebration and gatherings round a table. Most of us won't think twice about the clean water running from our taps that make it all possible. But for millions of people around the world, this is something they simply don't have. That's why here at the Intelligence Squared podcast, we're proud to partner with WaterAid, a charity working to change this and to shine a spotlight on something that connects us all. In a special episode of our podcast, journalist Coco Khan speaks to Amica Godfrey, Water AIDS Executive Director of International Programs. Amica has spent more than 25 years working across the world in the water, sanitation and hygiene sector. She shares powerful stories about how clean water keeps children in school, helps mothers support their families or run businesses and and unlocks potential for entire communities. To hear the full conversation, just search Intelligence Squared wherever you get your podcasts and listen to the episode titled Everything Starts with water released on 17th December. Listen to the full episode now on the Intelligence Squared podcast. Right now, there are talented people out there who could take your company to the next level. Do you want to hope they see your job post before your competitors or do you want to match with them with Indeed Sponsored Jobs Hiring Indeed is all you need. Stop struggling to get your job post seen on other sites. Give your job the best chance to be seen with Indeed sponsored jobs. They help you stand out and hire quality candidates who can drive the results you need. Sponsored Jobs Boost your posts for quality quality candidates so you can reach the exact people you want faster and it makes a big difference. According to Indeed data, sponsored jobs posted directly on indeed are 90% more likely to report a hire than non sponsored jobs because you reach a bigger pool of quality candidates. Join the 1.6 million companies that sponsored their jobs with Indeed. When we're hiring, we find being specific about what we need really matters. With Indeed sponsored jobs, you can set detailed requirements such as experience, level, skills, industry background and actually get candidates who meet them. Instead of sifting through applications that don't fit, we end up with people who've done the work before and can prove it. That precision is what makes the difference for us. Plus, with Indeed sponsored jobs, you only pay for results. No monthly subscriptions, no long term contracts. Just a boost whenever you need to find quality talent fast. People are finding quality hires on Indeed right now in the minute I've been talking to you. Companies like yours made 27 hires on Indeed. According to Indeed Data Worldwide, spend more time interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Less stress, less time, more results. Now with Indeed Sponsored Jobs and listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit to help get your job the premium status it deserves@ Indeed.com IntelligenceSquared just go to Indeed.com Intelligence Squared right now and support our show by sending saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com intelligencesquared terms and conditions apply. Hiring do it the Right way with Indeed.
- [03:45]
Mia Sorrenti
Welcome to Intelligence Squared, where great minds meet. I'm producer Mia Sorrenti. Johannes Vermeer is one of the greatest painters in history, yet the man himself remains an enigma. But have we finally solved the mystery of one of his most famous paintings? On today's episode, art historian Andrew Graham Dixon joins us to discuss his new book, the A Life Lost and Found, a bold reappraisal of the life, beliefs and the artistic vision of one of history's most mysterious painters. In conversation with Hannah Kay, he explores Vermeer's relationship with the religious debates of the Dutch Republic and shares his new interpretation of Girl with a Pearl Earring, shedding fresh light on a painting that continues to captivate the world. Let's join our host, Hannah Kaye, now with more.
- [04:34]
Hannah Kaye
Welcome to Intelligence Squared. I'm Hannah Kaye. Andrew, first of all, congratulations on the fantastic new book. For anyone not familiar with Vermeer's 36 surviving paintings, can you describe them for us?
- [04:46]
Andrew Graham Dixon
They seem to be very tranquil. They have a meditative quality. Many of them are. Most of them are set in interiors. Unusually for a Dutch painter, he seems to focus almost exclusively on painting women. When we look at his pictures, we see women in interiors who seem to be profoundly thinking about something, but we certainly can't tell at first glance what that might be. A very atmospheric tantalizing, I would say.
- [05:18]
Hannah Kaye
Vermeer has been described as the Sphinx of Delft. He's considered to be one of the greatest painters in history, and yet almost nothing is known about his life was forgotten for 300 years after his death. Tell us how he was rediscovered and why so little is known about him compared to other great painters?
- [05:37]
Andrew Graham Dixon
Well, he was rediscovered in the mid 19th century by a disaffected French revolutionary, a man called Theophile Touret, an intellectual who participated in the 1848 revolutions, was exiled from France, went to live in the Low Countries and became deeply interested in the painting of the Low Countries and found this series of pictures that he was fascinated by. And he had the sense that they were perhaps all painted by the same person. And eventually, by piecing together what evidence he could amass, including one or two, but only one or two signatures he managed to recreate will create find a body of work that he attributed to the painter Johannes Vermeer. It was one of the great, you know, one of the great acts of art history in its infancy. It's a still a relatively new discipline in the 19th century. And. But he was mystified because he said, well, you know, why is there no evidence of this painter in history? He's. Dutch art had its Vasari figure, its chronicler of the lives of the famous artists of the Low Countries, a man called Arnold Haubrachen. And yet, if you look at his lives of famous artists of the Low Countries, you'll find, of course, Rembrandt, you'll find Franz Haus, you'll find Franz van Mieris, you'll find Herard Dow and Pieter de Hooch, but you won't find Vermeer. So it seemed like a great mystery, especially because, as Torres said, you know, this Vermeer seems to be every bit as great, not as prolific, but every bit as great as, you know, the most famous of them all, Rembrandt's.
- [07:20]
Conor
Who.
- [07:21]
Andrew Graham Dixon
Why have we never heard of him? What's his art all about? To which he answered, I don't know. And he called him the Sphinx of Daft, and, you know, it's a great name, great nickname, and it stuck. And the reason, as my research and the research of a man called John Michael Montias, who preceded me and did extraordinary work in the archives in the 1980s as he discovered, the reason for this is actually not so hard to find. That Vermeer was not actually known in his own lifetime because he painted essentially just for one group of people, a particular religious sect to call it. The term's a little misleading, but that's essentially what they were. And all his pictures, nearly all of his major pictures, hung in the house of one particular husband and wife who had a single daughter named Magdalena. So the pictures were never very widely disseminated, never very widely known. They were just made for this one house, which, of course explains, you know, why Vermeer became the Sphinx of Delft, because nobody really knew where he'd come from. And this information has only really emerged, say, 130 years after Torre, and not very much was made of that discovery by Montius, I must say. And that's where my book begins.
- [08:49]
Hannah Kaye
Yes. Can you tell us a little bit about this radical Protestant sect that you associate Vermeer with. Who were they and what did they believe?
- [08:57]
Andrew Graham Dixon
Well, it turns out that Vermeer and his family's connections to this religious sect go back to before when he was born. They go back to his father's time. It's hard to put in a nutshell, but I'll try. In the 1610s, dissident groups sprung up within orthodox Calvinism, the Church of the Reformed Dutch. And these people who were themselves Calvinists, but they were dissidents within it, they said that Calvinism, as it then was, was too warlike. They hated the doctrine of predestination, partly for the reason that it was an age of high infant mortality. And according to this very severe doctrine, every single human being has been predestined either to go to heaven or to go to hell. And this includes babies. And most people, by the way, are predestined to go to hell. So as the dissident Calvinists, these are Raymond Strands, as they were called, pointed out. We are trying to minister to these grieving mothers of, you know, babies who've been killed by the plague in Amsterdam, and yet we're having to tell them that their child is almost certainly on their way to hell. So not only do they have to confront the awfulness of the death, but they've also got to, you know, try to stomach this terrible doctrine. So they rebelled against that. And in fact, they also, they weren't trying to split the Church. What they were trying to do was to unite the Church and just make it a little bit more forbearing and forgiving. And they even dreamed of putting an end to the difference between the Protestants and the Catholics. They wanted to see, basically, they wanted world peace. That's what they wanted. They were good people. They said Jesus Christ would look at his Christian followers now and he would be disgusted. You know, there's an army going to war under the banner of Jesus Christ against another army with the banner of Jesus Christ, neither of them realizing or remembering properly that Christ said, love thine enemy and never kill anybody. So they were pointing out fundamental truths of the Christian faith, but they were treated as pariahs, and they were all thrown into exile, driven underground. And there's very strong evidence that Vermeer's father, when the movement was an underground movement, he was part of it. His pastor, a man called Johannes Taurinus, after whom I believe, Johannes Vermeer was named, because it's a very unusual name for a working class boy from a family of tailors. He should have been called Jan but no, he's called Johannes. His parents, by the way, are living virtually next door to this Johannes Taurines, leader of the Remonstrant movement in Delft. Likewise, if you look over the other side to Vermeer's patrons, his future patrons, their families too, are part of this movement. Peter Claus und van Raven, who will be Vermeer's, as it were, main male patron, although it's his wife really, I think, who's the driving force behind getting Vermeer to paint pictures for them and their house. But he, his father is almost bankrupted by the size of the fine that's imposed upon him for sheltering a Remonstrant preacher during the Dutch Civil War. So wherever I looked when I was researching my book, wherever I looked into Vermeer's circle, into his life, into his past, likewise that of his patrons, it seemed very clear that this was what they had in common, this Remonstrant pacifist, and also, I should have added, extremely feminist. These people believed proto feminist. These people believed in the absolute equality of men and women. So this is what you have to understand. This is the background, I believe, that you have to understand in order to, to understand why, you know, why Vermeer's paintings were done for this very particular environment, why they were never widely known and, and of course, what it is that they mean, what it is that they say, the beliefs that they enshrine.
- [12:53]
Hannah Kaye
So these Remonstrants, they had these ideas about equality and particularly the prominence of women. And it's very likely that they shape Vermeer's thinking. But you argue that they actually hold a clue to the meaning of Vermeer's paintings. So how did you make that leap?
- [13:11]
Andrew Graham Dixon
It was quite late on in my research. I suddenly found, with great deal of help from my friends in Rotterdam, I found the address of the house in which Alvimir's paintings hung. And the address of that house turns out to have been 106 Oude Delft. And of the several thousand houses in 17th century Delft that we can today identify, it's the only one that is directly in front, as in the relationship of a porter's lodge to a university college. It's directly in front of the hidden Remonstrant church in Delft, which seems to me to be, given that I had already concluded that what joined Vermeer and his patrons was a mutual attachment to the ideals of Remonstrantism. That seemed to be a truly amazing coincidence. That is not a coincidence at all. And it prompted me to take very seriously the idea that perhaps all of these pictures painted for that house in some way reflected the practices of remonstrance and remonstrant women in particular. We know that there was. And by the way, the dates are astonishingly congruent with this whole thesis. In 1655, 1656, which is exactly when Vermeer started to paint for his patrons, or a year before, a female driven movement called the Collegiate Movement suddenly went from strength to strength in the Rotterdam and Delft area. And what that meant was that a whole series of women in groups began meeting in their houses in order to practice what they saw as a form of uncorrupted Christian gathering, uncorrupted even by the idea of a church. Because these women had concluded that churches themselves were perhaps part of the problem. And they were very interested. They were very learned, clever, bright, feisty, intelligent women who'd, you know, probably a lot of them very frustrated at not being able to express their intelligence and their spirituality openly. And so they embraced this new movement with fantastic enthusiasm because it basically created a space in the front room of a woman's house where people could meet women, above all, women could meet and they could talk about what they believed in. They could read the text that mattered to them more than any other, the New Testament. They could draw conclusions from it, discuss them without the interference of male priests or men telling them what to think, what to do. It's a light motif. It's not me imposing that on them. That's actually what they said when the Calvinist authorities said, how dare you meet on your own in houses to discuss the teachings of Christ. You should be coming to church and listening to what we tell you. They said, well, we're sick of listening to what men tell us, thank you very much. You know, put that in your pipe and smoke it. And, you know, that's one of the favorite parts of my book is a part where I gather some of these women's testimonies. It's very precious, these documents where they're called in. And so we've actually got written down what they said and what they were asked and how they were ticked off and they ticked off back. So that's one of my favorite bits. But we know that, that these women were meeting in groups. We know that this was happening under the benevolent patronage of a very enlightened man called Adrian Patz, who was the head of the Collegiate Movement and lived in Rotterdam. Very powerful, important man, head of the Dutch east, one of the directors of the Dutch East India Company. But he supported these women's groups and often would send people from his own circle to help them with books or to help them with ideas or to help them have a trip to somewhere particularly holy if they wanted to go and visit some. So we know that he was involved, and we know that he was a friend of Vermeer, and we know that he was friends of. Friends of Vermeer's patrons. So it all begins to look very convincingly like a circle. And when you look at the paintings themselves, you know, they do seem very, very much to be geared to the contemplation of one of those. One of these groups. And from what we can tell, we can't tell exactly how they were hung when they were in the house of Vermeer's patrons, but we know that they left them all to their daughter, Magdalena. And we've got her death inventory. And we know that she hung, can you believe it? When she lived herself in a different part of Delft, she lived on the great Market Square and the golden abc. The house is still there. It's above a restaurant now, Little House Printing Establishment. She lived there quite modestly with her husband. But guess what she had in her front room at the time of her death? 11 paintings by Vermeer, three of which the notary added, were displayed in boxes, which to me suggests, and there is a record of this elsewhere, that those boxes, they were not storage boxes because she died, then the pictures had been crazied up. No, they were boxes that could be opened and closed like the wings of a portable altarpiece, which suggests to me there were no other paintings. Well, there's a landscape and a seascape probably at either end of the room. But imagine a big, beautiful Dutch front room with 11 Vermeers in it, some of them displayed as if they were altarpieces. Now, that to me suggests that the daughter of the patrons, Magdalena, just as her parents had done, preserved her front room as a space where women would gather and worship. And these pictures would be there in ways that we cannot, cannot sadly reconstruct. But in some way, these paintings were there to aid them in their devotions, perhaps to serve as role models. Some of the women, you know, most of the women, seem very virtuous, full of their thinking, good thoughts. They're being responsible. I think the pictures were there to. They believed a lot in charity and in doing charitable good works. I think some of the paintings were there to encourage that, to remind them of their duty. It'd be wonderful one day to make an exhibition of Vermeer's major pictures, perhaps just focusing on the ones that were once owned by that family to try and perhaps have a little play with seeing how they might have, you know, hung together. A number of them, I think, seem to invite being displayed in pairs. You know, compare and contrast.
- [19:47]
Hannah Kaye
Yes, we'll certainly come on to that. Just on the subject of the patron's daughter, Magdalena, who had these 11 Vermeer paintings in her room, her room on her death. She plays a very significant role in Vermeer's most famous painting of all, the Girl with the Pearl Earring. Can you tell us about that? How is she associated with this painting?
- [20:14]
Andrew Graham Dixon
Well, Magdalene van Raven, that was her name. She was the daughter of Maria de Knaut and Peter Klaas von van Raven. She was their only surviving child, I should say. She owned all 21 of the paintings that were in the Van Halven collection. She just happened to have 11 in her front room. And I suspect perhaps Those were the 11 that were most helpful to her in her worship with her friends. I'm assuming that she met in a group like the others did. One of the things these people were very much in a mild and rational way. They were Christian fundamentalists in the sense that they wanted to cut through all of the divisions that had been made by the establishment of this or that church. They wanted to go back to a time before Christianity was riven by dissent and division and discord to its pure source. And the purest source of all would be the community of Christ and his apostles. But of course, cause none of the apostles are male. These women identified very strongly with people in his female entourage, if you like. And above all, they identified with Mary Magdalene, who had as close a relationship with Christ as any woman, barring Mary, mother of God herself. And she wept over him, she anointed his feet with oil, she dried his feet with her long hair, and so on and so forth. And she was venerated by the collegiate women. We know this because they talk about it a lot. She's very important to them, not only spiritually and that she was close to Christ. And they aspire themselves to be very close to Christ or to the memory of what it might have been to be close to Christ, not only that, but she was politically important to them. We know this because when the Calvinists said to the collegiate women, why are you speaking about God when you shouldn't be speaking? Don't you know women are not supposed to talk? And they're not supposed to talk in church and never Mind that. It's a house church. You shouldn't be talking about God at all. It's up to us men to talk about God. Their response, and we've got a very feisty example of it. They would say, oh, really? Women are not supposed to speak, are they? Well, what about Mary Magdalene? It's called the Mary Magdalene Defense of Women Speaking and Women Ministry. They would say, well, what about Mary Magdalene? Because after all, Christ showed himself resurrected to one human being after he had risen from the dead. And that human being was a woman. It was Mary Magdalene in the garden, he showed himself to her. So if she hadn't told the apostles, we would never have known about the resurrection. Mankind would not have been saved. So don't tell me that women are not supposed to speak. So she was hugely important. In addition, we've got very strong evidence that Mary Magdalene was personally venerated by the van Raven family, that the Maria de Knautz family. She's the mother of Magdalena. Her mother was called Magdalena. She gave Magdalena as a name to her daughter. So you can see. And a number of Vermeer's early pictures clearly allude to the figure of Mary Magdalene. So she's a really strong presence in the imagination of these people. And I think when you. I remember sort of shivers going down my spine because I've got two screens here, I've got one there. And one day I was researching the book here, sitting in this chair, and I happened to have the account from the Gospel of John of Mary Magdalene going to the tomb to try and find Jesus. And to try. And, you know, she wants to anoint his. She wants to do her duty by Christ's corpse, and she can't find the body. And I'm reading that passage, and I've got the girl with a pearl earring on the screen. And I'm looking at it and I'm thinking, I get to the part where Mary Magdalene, having spoken to the angels in the tomb and having gone into the garden, she's confronted a gardener and said, where? Where? Where is the body of Christ? Where have you laid him? Where have you laid my master? And she thinks, oh, he's never going to tell me. He's just a gardener. He doesn't know anything. She turns away. And then the gardener, who is Christ, says, mary. And she turns, and it's at that moment she turns and she realizes that she is looking at the risen Christ. And I suddenly thought, of course, that's what the picture. That's what the picture is. Here's this. It's a picture of. It's a portrait of Magdalena van Rauven. But. And this was a Dutch tradition, you would have yourself portrayed in the character of someone else. Rembrandt did it all the time. Rembrandt painted himself as Aristotle, for example. He painted himself as a Turkish presentate. He took on characters. It was a particular type of portrait called a trogna. And in the auction of the girl, when the girl with the pearl earring was sold, it's described as a trogna in historical fancy dress. So, of course, historical fancy dress, she's wearing this sort of headdress of turbans, a headdress of scarves that had been folded together to make a turban, exactly the kind of costume that you would give to a character in early biblical legend. And there she's got her large, liquid eyes. She's. She looks like she's just been shedding tears, but has now suddenly turned in wonder. And it was. To me, that was a, you know, eureka moment. Very moving, actually. And I. And I just thought, my goodness, I had to go. I think I had to go for a run, get rid of my excess energy. But, yes, I mean, people may question it, but the only thing that I would say is that even if I didn't know how much the collegiate and collegiate women cleaved to the personality and the legend of Mary Magdalene, how much weight they gave to her, because, of course, Vermeer painted Martha and Mary, who. We think of Mary in the Martha and Mary story as being Mary of Bethany. That's modern theology. But in those days, they thought that. That Mary was also Mary Magdalene. So Mary Magdalene is all over Vermeer's paintings. It's all over this world. So for her to be called Magdalena and, you know, it just. I hate to say it just makes so much sense, and there are so many different angles from which you can come at it, and. And it makes sense from all those angles. It's not just, oh, that's an ingenious interpretation, if you like. There's so much in the stories of these people to, you know, to substantiate this idea that it would be Magdalena, you know, and the portrait would forever be there to remind her of her duty to act like Mary Magdalene, to be repentant and humble and give to charity, be charitable. And that's what they all did. Her whole family did that. Her mother gave a third of her money to the orphans of war. They were really good people. Her father, Peter Klausehen van Raven, prepared he was head of the charity chamber. He would have overseen the preparation of just that dish of bread crumbled into milk that we see the milkmaid preparing. And she's certainly preparing it to give to poor people, people, children or old people, people who haven't got very strong te. There's this. It all adds up. Once you get to know these people and get to know what they believe in and how they behave, the pictures, I believe, suddenly really fall into place and make sense as a coherent ensembler. That would have been in this house performing a number of very helpful spiritual tasks, if you like.
- [28:19]
Hannah Kaye
Is that why you have the pearl earrings at the end of the book? Because I read an advanced copy and it had no illustrations, no index, and I was going through the book thinking, yes, yes, well, what is Andrew going to say about the girl with the pearl earring? So it's almost the climax of the book when suddenly, you know, this revelation is made. I'll be honest and say initially I really wasn't quite sure, Andrew. But the more I've thought about your book and looked at the painting, it's as if your idea has seeped into me and, and I feel much more open to it now. And I also like the idea that actually it's a feminist painting. I think that's really interesting as well.
- [29:04]
Conor
Hi, everyone. I'm Connor, head of programming at Intelligence Squared. As we head into the festive season, what is for many of us, a time of comfort, celebration and gatherings round a table. Most of us won't think twice about the clean water running from our taps that make it all possible, but for millions of people around the world, this is something they simply don't have. That's why here at the Intelligence Squared podcast, we're proud to partner with WaterAid, a charity working to change this and to shine a spotlight on something that connects us all. In a special episode of our podcast, journalist Coco Khan speaks to Amica Godfrey, who water AIDS Executive Director of International Programs. Amica has spent more than 25 years working across the world in the water, sanitation and hygiene sector. She shares powerful stories about how clean water keeps children in school, helps mothers support their families or run businesses, and unlocks potential for entire communities. To hear the full conversation, just search Intelligence Squared wherever you get your podcasts and listen to the episode titled Everything Starts with water, released on 17 December. Listen to the full episode now on the Intelligence Squared Podcast.
- [30:20]
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Mia Sorrenti
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Andrew Graham Dixon
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- [32:34]
Hannah Kaye
You've talked about Vermeer's pairing of or creation of paintings in pairs. Can you tell us a little bit more about that? Perhaps in particular the milkmaid and the woman holding a balance, which is its pair. And you just referred to the milkmaid.
- [32:48]
Andrew Graham Dixon
Well, I think just going back to what you touched on, you know that it's in quotes, a feminist reading or it's certainly a woman's perspective, looking at the pictures from a woman's perspective that I would say in a way that is the biggest shift that I'm trying to sort of engineer in the interpretation of the pictures because they have for a Very long time. The assumption about them has been that they are paintings of women painted for men to look at. So, you know, there was the girl with the. I think this is part of the shock and the strangeness of these new ideas is that this beautiful girl with the pearl earring who's been the subject of a film in which she becomes the obscure object of desire. You know, she's a young woman who's, you know, very sexually desirable and all that. It's very much from a male perspective. Well, I know that novel was written by a woman, but it's seeing her from a male perspective and seeing her as a woman of a certain age. And actually she was probably, in my interpretation, around 13 years old. And the picture is probably done for when she was going to be full immersion baptized, because that's what the collegians did when you're an adult, because you have to take responsibility for your own Christianity. You can't just be baptized into Christianity when you're a baby because you've got no say in it. It has to be that you choose it, but that it's very, very germane to this. Because if you look at. I mean, for the milkmaid would be a classic example, actually, in the past, the milkmaid has just been seen as if it were a genre painting, like any other Dutch genre painting, done essentially for the open market, done for the male gaze, you know, a sexy kitchen maid. Hard to believe, but that if there is a consensus view that mine displaces, it would be that the milkmaid is a sort of sexy kitchen maid painted for. Painted to titillate men who have these sort of fantasies about, you know, having affairs with their. With their servants and so on, which of course, I would say, of course is mad. But if you. If you. If you see it suddenly from a woman's perspective, and these pictures are painted to help women to pray and help women to articulate their values and their beliefs and how they should behave and so on, suddenly it becomes totally different. And all that other stuff, frankly, begins to look a bit toxic, in my opinion. And one of the side effects of this is that once one does see them through this perspective of early women's rights movements, if you like, or women choosing. Taking responsibility for their own prayers and their own spiritual life, then you can also see that these pictures pair up with each other. So the milkmaid actually has a pair in the form of a painting that's never, as far as I know, been actually hung next to it. But it's a painting in The Metropolitan Museum in New York called A Woman With a Balance. When we look at the two pictures, we could see that on the one hand, we've got a woman weighing. She's got weighing scales. She's got a painting of the Last Judgment behind her. There's actually nothing in the scales. What she's weighing is her conscience. She's thinking about. And maybe I didn't say this in my book, but maybe also she's pregnant. She's thinking about, you know, the fate of her child's soul and how that might relate to her own conduct as a mother. But I haven't put that in the book, but it has occurred to me since writing the book, but that might be going on. So you've got this woman who is thinking, meditating, contemplating, and then on the other side, exactly to the same scale, same transverse light, very similar scale, room. The picture's the same size. You've got a woman measuring out milk, preparing a dish of bread and milk, which is what you traditionally give to the poor. But pouring out milk is also associated because of a biblical reference to the milk of the Word. She might be taking her faith evangelically out of the room, out of the house. You know, along with the dish of bread and milk, she might be spreading the word. So on the one hand, you've got the active, outward spiritual life, and on the other hand, you've got the inward, contemplative, spiritual life. And to sort of literally nail down my absolute certainty that these pictures are a pair, Vermeer has made it inescapable for us visually by including in each painting a nail in the wall at exactly the same place, at exactly the same angle, banged into the wall to exactly the same depth. And the nail has an established meaning in such context, in devotional contexts, in Dutch art, what a nail like that stands for. The fact that these women are thinking always about the fact that Christ died for us. He sacrificed himself on the cross. His hands and feet were nailed to the cross. And that nail symbolizes the fact that these women will never forget that, and their knowledge of that and their eternal memory of that is the wellspring for all their actions. So you can see from if one travels from the previous consensus idea about particularly the milkmaid as being a kind of sexy kitchen maid painting to what I think it is, you can see there's really quite a gulf has opened up. And I think essentially the best way to express that gulf would be that I'm saying to people, well, let's just forget the male gaze if you like, for these pictures, let's think about what the female gaze might give us. And I think it's. I think I. Again, whether I'm right or wrong, one must always be humble. If one's, you know, talking about such wonderful pictures, you can't say I'm right. It's not about being right. But I hope that gives this alternative way of seeing the pictures, which I feel is. Is much richer and more respectful for women. It didn't come from. Honestly, didn't come from any desire to be right on and feminist in my work. You know, it came as a result of. Oh, my goodness. That is really what I think these pictures mean. I mean, it was what they told me, not what I told them.
- [39:01]
Hannah Kaye
To me, one of the other things you talk about a lot in the book is this sense of sort of millenarian hope in the Dutch Republic in the 17th century. And they thought that 1666, because of the 360, is associated with the devil that was going to be the year of the second coming. And you describe. You interpret a lot of Vermeer's paintings in terms of this sort of millenarian hope. Can you tell us a bit about that? And also, some of these paintings were in the collection of the Van Ravens. So it'd be interesting to hear how that fits in with your interpretive scheme in general.
- [39:41]
Andrew Graham Dixon
Well, we know I mentioned earlier the figure of Adrian Patz, who's the spiritual leader of the Collegiate movement, which is this very extreme version of the Remonstrant movement. He's also a Remonstrant. These people have feet in different camps. But Adrien Patz is publishing in 1665, he is overseeing the publication of a collegiate text by a writer called Daniel de Bruyne about what will happen at the end of days. So this isn't an abstract interest in millenarianism. It's very concrete, very precise. We can say that at just the time that Vermeer is painting this picture for Adrian Pats friends, and Adrian Pats is his friend, is a picture such as the View of Delft, which I think is his ultimately beautiful millenarian painting of what a perfect world might look like when Christ comes back to rule on earth. You know, these ideas are more than in the air, and they're in the air across Europe and indeed the Middle East. Millenarianism is rife in the Middle East. It's rife among the Jews of the Middle east, and it's rampant in England among Puritans and other Protestants. Someone did an estimate based on analyzing the letters of Protestant ministers in Britain in the 1650s and 60s, and they came to the conclusion that about 90% of them genuinely believed that we were on the brink of the last days. So it wasn't at all a fringe belief. But what was unusual about the Collegiate, you know, the Jesuits had this belief that lots of different people had thought Christ was going to come down again. But most people believed that Christ was going to come down for them and them alone. So the Calvinist said, yes, when Christ comes back, only us Calvinists, everyone else will go to hell. We'll be saved, we'll all live to 500 years old and it'll be a thousand years of peace here on earth and Christ will talk to us, but everyone else will. They'll be off. Likewise, Catholics believe. But the collegians said, no, no, no, it won't be like that. It won't be like. It's not going to be divisive. It's not going to be only some will be saved. No, what's going to happen? And this is what Daniel de Bruyne says in his book, and it's such a beautiful idea. He says, you may not even see Jesus Christ. In fact, you probably won't. He's going to come down in spirit. And he explained what he meant. What he meant was that everybody gradually would, you know, literacy levels are very high in Holland, which is also partly why they had these hopes and they felt, everyone will be able to read. And when everyone will read, everyone will be able to read the New Testament and they'll be able to read Socrates. They'll be able to read, you know, the great wisdom of mankind. And everyone will of course realize that war is pointless and mean and cruel and there'll be no such thing as wars where entire cities are bombarded, where innocent children are killed and hospitals are blown up. That won't happen anymore. No, of course it won't. Peace will come down because a sort of reverse version of Pentecost, where the fire of the Holy Spirit lit up from the head of each bottle. No, it'll be the other way around. Each and every individual receive the Holy Spirit into themselves, and we will all just become naturally peaceful. And before we know it, if you like, almost without us noticing, the world will just become a better place. And to those people there, this is the other aspect of it, which I think is actually very sad, which makes me cry when I think about it, is that they. They had lived, These people had lived through the worst wars in all recorded history, the Thirty Years War was without question the worst war that has ever been described and ever been measured. And it was, believe it or not, far worse. Far worse. Not just a bit worse than the Second World War, even given the terrible things that happened with the Holocaust and that and the Second World War, it was just. It was six times more damaging to the civilian populations of Europe. So they had known just apocalypse beyond apocalypse, terror beyond terror. And so they naturally concluded, because they are living Vermeer, and he's painting all these pictures for these people in this time when for once, Europe is at peace. The peace treaties have been signed and they think, well, the dates stack up, 1666, it must be that this peace is permanent. This is the beginning of the thousand years of peace on earth that we've been told about. They actually believe it, and the collegians believe it in this very beautiful way. And it's my belief that the view of Delft is an expression of that idea. This is what the new Jerusalem. This is what peace on earth. This is what it will look like. An ordinary town on an ordinary day, just after a storm has passed. The sun shining. The storm is the storm cloud of all those wars. It's passed, They've passed. Now we've got sunshine. And this is what heaven on earth will look like. A woman going down to the quayside with her baby to chat with some other women while they wait for the bus, the water bus. That is what peace on earth will look like. It won't be, you know, there won't be fanfares and angels coming down from heaven and, you know, like a baroque painting. No, it won't be like that. And I think that's very, you know, it's a very touching. I remember years ago seeing one of the mothers who was trying to bring an end to the troubles in Northern Ireland, saying, you know, what do you dream of? Somebody asked her and she said, I just dream of a day when I can go shopping, you know, and Protestants and Catholics alike can go shopping in the same street. And, you know, there won't be barbed lawyer and we won't be worried about someone shooting our sons. We just want. It just can be ordinary. Thank you. And I sort of always remembered that. And when I was looking at Vermeer and his relationship to these ideas of what heaven. Because they are, that is what they want to build, essentially. Adrian Patz and these collegiate women and the men of the movement too, that's what they want to do. They want to build peace on earth. They want to. And I think that's what the other beautiful architectural painting of Vermeers, the Little street, which I believe is a depiction of the corner of Delft where he and his patrons worshiped. We see the Remonstrant church just behind the house of his patrons. We see. But again, it's a sort of vision of heaven on earth. And there's a lot of emphasis on the brickwork in that painting. And you can see where the brickwork of one house has been mended, perhaps by the people who live in the other house. And I think that's a very deep idea. It's like saying, well, if I mend your house, and you mend my house, and I respect your house, and you respect my house, whether you're a Jew or a Muslim and I'm a Christian or what kind of a Christian am I? It doesn't matter. Whoever we are, if we mend each other's houses, we can live together and then we can build this heaven on earth where the children play peacefully and two women go about their, you know, their needlework and their washing. But this is. This is. This is what we are trying to. To dream of. And very interestingly, they cleave to a particular passage. One of their favorite passages is from Paul's epistles to the Corinthians, where he's talking about people coming together to read the Bible and to spread the word of God and to sustain each other. So if one person doesn't have enough money, someone else will give them the food and so on. And Paul at the end of it, says, let all things be done for edification. Edification meaning in. Well, in Hebrew, I believe, as it does in Latin, as it does in English, meaning simultaneously education, support, but also building, literally building. And this is how we build a world. And I think that's what Vermeer's paintings, contrary to what Ruskin said. Ruskin said, oh, Dutch art, it's just ditch water and bricks. No. Well, yeah, but they're very meaningful bricks, those bricks.
- [47:52]
Hannah Kaye
Andrew, that's a really beautiful interpretation. But tell me, if your reappraisal of Amir's paintings is correct, why were they coded? Why for so long have we seen them as genre paintings rather than overtly religious paintings? Which is how you see them.
- [48:09]
Andrew Graham Dixon
That's a good question. Of course, that's. You know, that's a big question. If all these pictures are religious pictures, as I say, well, why. Why aren't they explicitly religious pictures? Why aren't they depictions of the actual Martha and Mary which Vermeer did paint in one of his earlier paintings, probably done for a very liberal Catholic, I imagine, as I said at the beginning, these remonstrants and collegians to whom Vermeer was so close and in fact he was part of, they grew up within Calvinism. And Calvinism, right from the beginning was very anti image, anti religious image. They were very suspicious and wary of idolatry. Calvinism announced its arrival in the Low Countries with what was called the BildenStorm in the 1560s, this great sort of outbreak of destruction of churches, mobs going into churches and pulling down statues and smashing stained glass and paintings and so on. So they'd always been very suspicious of that aspect of art. And so what they. And they didn't rebel against that. The collegiates or the Romancents, they supported that. So they didn't want to look at images of Jesus Christ. They wanted images from Vermeer that were paintings of everyday life, such as were common in the Dutch Republic. But they wanted them to be given this religious twist. So they. It's fine to look at yourself in the role of Mary Magdalene as a perpetual reminder to yourself that you must live up to her example. But what you don't want is a picture of Mary Magdalene herself anointing the feet of the dead Christ. That's beyond the pale. They're very avant garde, these people, and so they've invented, essentially with Vermeer, a new kind of painting. And it's possible also that there's an element of deliberate disguise involved, because religion, as you know, in this time, is an immense cause of trouble. And just because the trouble's not on at that moment in the 1560s, 1660s, doesn't mean the trouble can't come back. And indeed, Vermeer lives with his Jesuit mother in law. And the Jesuits, they have a mission to Holland. And the dream behind that mission is that one day Spain will reconquer the Northern Netherlands, put the Netherlandish people under their thumb again, and everyone will be forcibly converted to Catholicism or killed as heretics. So Vermeer, that's the dream of Vermeer's mother in law. So, you know, he doesn't want any Jesuits, for example, going to the house of his patrons. We know that because the Jesuit does turn up and ask to see some paintings, and Vermeer says, I've got nothing to show you. So he doesn't want to take the Jesuit there. But also, you know, he's possibly there possibly imagining some future in which the Jesuit thought police might Be turning up and saying, well, what are these pictures? What are they? What are they all about? They seem suspiciously religious. No, no, no, no. They're just genre paintings.
- [51:16]
Hannah Kaye
Andrew, one final question. If you were being sent to a desert island and you could take one Vermeer painting with you, which one would it be?
- [51:24]
Andrew Graham Dixon
That is the view of Delft.
- [51:26]
Hannah Kaye
The view of Delft?
- [51:27]
Andrew Graham Dixon
Well, because then if I had the view of Delft on my desert island, you know, I imagine desert islands are quite hard work and I imagine the desert island is. If Robinson Crusoe is anything to go by. Most of life on a desert island involves hard labor and waiting for help that maybe comes along once every 25 years. There's a lot of salt water and, you know, hardship. So it's not a perfect world. But if I had the view of Delft as long as I had, I'd obviously be very responsible and create an extremely temperature controlled hut. But I'd look after it very well. I promise.
- [52:04]
Hannah Kaye
As you build your mud hut with your little mud bricks, you'll be thinking of the brickwork on the view of Delft. Yeah, something like that, yeah.
- [52:12]
Andrew Graham Dixon
Good.
- [52:13]
Hannah Kaye
Well, Andrew, thank you so much for your time today. Your book, Vermeer A Life Lost and Found is a fabulous read. Do buy it for yourself or for anyone who's interested in art. It's available online and in all bookshops. I'm Hannah Kaye. You've been listening to Intelligence Squared and thank you for joining us today.
- [52:32]
Mia Sorrenti
Thanks for listening to Intelligence Squared. This episode was produced by me, Mia Sorrenti and it was edited by Mark Roberts. For ad free episodes and full length recordings. Become a member at intelligencesquared.com forward/membership. And to join us at future live events, head to intelligencesquared.com attend to see our full events program. You've been listening to Intelligence Squared. Thanks for joining us.
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Andrew Graham Dixon
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