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- [00:01]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Want to walk the halls of Anne Boleyn's childhood home or explore the castles that made up Henry VIII's English stronghold? With a subscription to History Hit, you can dive into our Tudor past alongside the world's leading historians and archaeologists. You'll also unlock hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a brand new release every single week covering everything from the ancient world to to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com subscribe.
- [00:35]
Sponsor/Advertisement Voice
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- [01:43]
Andrew Graham Dixon
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- [01:59]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Hello, I'm Professor Susannah Lipscomb and welcome to Not Just the Tudors From History. Hit the podcast in which we explore everything from Anne Boleyn to the Aztecs, from Holbein to the Huguenots, from Shakespeare to samurais, relieved by regular doses of murder, espionage and witchcraft. Not, in other words, just the Tudors, but most definitely also the Tudors. Some 350 years ago, a girl with a pearl earring looked out from her shadowy background, her lips parted, her eyes luminous. Who this beautiful young woman was and what caused her to glance round are mysteries locked into the paint by the superlative Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer. She would outlast him and everyone who had known her name. Centuries would pass before the painting enjoyed worldwide adulation she would become the subject of Tracy Chevalier's bestselling novel in 1999, and would be played on screen by Scarlet Johansson in 2003. Generations since she was painted have speculated endlessly about her identity, one of art's most tantalizing mysteries. Until now. In his book Vermeer A Life Lost and Found, the renowned art historian and television presenter Andrew Graham Dixon has brought to light an entirely new understanding of Vermeer as a man deeply embedded in the most radical religious and political movements of his age. Against a background of unprecedented violence, Vermeer created paintings, a minute number of which survive, each each one of them timeless images of such profound tranquility that they are almost subversive. His domestic interiors, depicting women reading letters or pouring milk, were not simply recording reality. They were creating an idealized vision of serenity that Vermeer's turbulent real world rarely provided. And Andrew Graham Dixon also boldly suggests that we might now be able to identify who the girl with the pearl earrings actually was and what she symbolizes. And that is what we're hopefully going to find out today. I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb, and this is Not Just the Tudors. From History hit. Andrew Gome Dixon. Welcome to Not Just the Tudors.
- [04:33]
Andrew Graham Dixon
Thank you.
- [04:33]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Susanna, I'm delighted to speak to you about your work on Vermeer, which is so groundbreaking and exciting. So let's start by thinking about context, because you say that to understand Vermeer's art, we must first of all comprehend the sort of chaos out of which it emerged. So can you give me some sort of context of the world in which Johannes Vermeer was living?
- [04:59]
Andrew Graham Dixon
Well, he was living in a traumatized world. That is one thing we can say for sure. The Dutch nation, the Dutch Republic, was a relatively new creature, and it was a creature itself of a traumatic war. And the only way that the Protestants, who found themselves at odds with their new super Catholic ruler in the world of the 16th century Netherlands, the only way they could resolve their desire for freedom with his total intolerance of the kind of freedom they wanted, was to form a breakaway state north of the great river deltas. And the reason that the Dutch Republic, it was in such a wet place, was the only way that they could survive, because anywhere in open ground in Flanders or Brabant, if they tried to stage a rebellion or revolution there, they would just be exterminated by superior military force. So they hid themselves away into these watery regions where they had these towns that were fantastically well fortified and protected, and they made themselves the world masters of the knowledge of how waters work, and they used water to defend themselves. And they had a bloody war that lasted for 80 years and only ended when Vermeer himself was 16. This is a nation that's been wrung out into existence from these terrible things that have happened. And hundreds of thousands of people have died and been sent into exile. And it's interesting to me that this kind of context, if you reading books about Dutch art generally, or going to museums that have great collections of Dutch art, seems to me an odd fact that this is not very often touched upon. So in that sense, I think context is vital, especially this kind of traumatic historical context.
- [06:41]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Yes. I mean, it's so striking if one thinks of some of the most famous. I mean, pretty much everything Vermeer did is famous. But I was thinking of the view of Delft. It's so calm and calming, it's serene, you know, the tranquility of it, the still water, that beautiful patch of golden roof. Should we be thinking of things like that actually more as a metaphor for the hope or the arrival of peace?
- [07:08]
Andrew Graham Dixon
My own view is that painting is a prayer. A lot of Vermeer's paintings are actually. They are prayers, and that's why he takes so much time over them. That's why they have to look so perfect, because what he's willing into being is a world better than this one. And he actually hopes and believes, as do his friends. And I spent many years examining what they believed and trying to find out what they believed. They believe that they're on the brink of this. They believe they're on the brink of a world where war will be a thing of the past, where women are treated equally with men, where children need never suffer, where starvation can again become a thing of the past, and so on. They think that they're on the brink of. That they're very optimistic, having lived through such terrors and fears. And that's why, I think, in a way, one of the things that my book is implicitly critical of is the extent to which Vermeer studies have become preoccupied with things like the camera obscura, technical devices that he may or may not have used, or extensive techniques that he may or may not have used in order to conjure up what might be termed photographic realism, which for me is, of course, it's interesting what he did and how he did it, but why did he do it? And if it's a prayer, then maybe he's not just somebody trying to take a perfect picture with a camera before Camera's been invented. Maybe that's not really it. And I think what's missing from the modern mechanistic view of Vermeer is the soul, the spirit.
- [08:35]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Well, that's an intensely beautiful thing to have said. So maybe we can start by looking at his home life that was also tumultuous in the context of this talk, torn and traumatized land. It was presided over by his mother in law. What have you discovered about his domestic challenges?
- [08:55]
Andrew Graham Dixon
So it would be absolutely in character for him to marry the daughter of a Jesuit, and it would be absolutely in character for the daughter of a strict Jesuit like Maria Tins to be part of this distinctly rebellious movement among women in the Dutch Republic in the 1640s, the 1650s and the 1660s, where women are joining the collegiate movement and the Remonstrant movement and becoming more and more open minded and taking more power for themselves because these movements accord women much greater right of speech and thought and respect of what they think than the traditional churches, the Calvinists or the Catholics. So I think that his wife, rather like him, was a free floating, dissenting Christian with profoundly good beliefs. And they got together under the frowning disapproval of his mother in law. And that this was inherently very difficult for Vermeer because he wanted to spend his life painting these pictures for which he was going to be paid very little money. And yet how could he do that and support a large family that his wife clearly wanted to have? But how's he going to pay for it? Well, the only way he can pay for it is by knuckling under in the household run by his mother in law. He lives with her. She is one of the richest women in Delft. She is running the Jesuit mission which dreams of extinguishing all dissidents and making everybody by force a Catholic. And if they not a Catholic, they go into exile or be executed. So she is an astro beacon of toleration. Maria, it is a traumatic and difficult home relationship. The deal is, yes, you can marry my daughter, but you have to toe the line. And it may even be that she wanted him to pretend to be a Catholic and go to Catholic mass and show all her Catholic friends that he was indeed really following her views in every way. But we know that he wasn't, in his heart and soul, a Catholic because he painted all of his pictures for his friends in the Remonstrant movement. In a sense, he's a man living two lives. He lives one life on Papist's Corner, which is, to a certain extent, I suspect, A life lived through gritted teeth, and then this other life as a painter, where he is painting what he believes in for people who share his beliefs, for the house next to the Remonstrant Church.
- [11:05]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
That duality perhaps we could say we see in the serene interiors of his art versus perhaps what were slightly less serene interiors of his reality. But I think perhaps if we can delve into this wonderful finding of yours, we need to start by thinking exactly about that question of who Vermeer was painting for. It was always assumed that the wealthy citizen of Delft, Pieter van Ruijven, was his principal patron. But you've discovered it's slightly more complicated than that.
- [11:35]
Andrew Graham Dixon
Well, Werner Oven was the man who signed the contract with Vermeer, which paid him a stipend, a certain number of guilders for a period of 12 months, and it's phrased as a loan. But it seems, given that all of Vermeer's pictures bar a very few, ended up in the house of Peter, Klaus Van and Halven, it seems likely that this is the start of their contract. So the contract is almost certainly made with Peter. But Peter's wife, Maria de Knaut, it was only discovered about 10 years ago, she actually lived three doors away from Vermeer when he was a boy, so she will have known his family from very young. And given that nearly all of Vermeer's paintings are of women, in my interpretation, they are of the kind of moral quandaries or challenges set by life for women. They are paintings of women praying, paintings of women meditating, paintings of women trying to keep their conscience clear, paintings of women trying to do charitable acts. Why would there be so many paintings of women if all of these pictures were painted for a man? In the past, people have got through that apparent paradox by trying to suggest, and I actually remember meeting a few women who were in tears at the Vermeer exhibition at the Rijksmuseum a few years ago, because then they'd encountered this in the texts on the wall. And in order to make those pictures fit the kind of male stereotype, patriarchal model of Dutch art that we've been force fed since childhood, what you have to turn those paintings of beautiful women into innocent, beautiful, meditative women. You have to turn them into kind of sexy pictures painted for Peter. So the milkmaid, if you look at the standard view until my book was published, a little picture like the milkmaid is that. Oh, yes, milkmaids were notorious for loose behavior. And it's well known that aristocratic men of Peter Claus Van Ruypen's wealth and Position. They quite like to fantasize about a bit of frisson with the kitchen maid and all that. And this is the sort of thing that had appeared and it was repeated on the wall in that Rijksmuseum show. I went to that exhibition about 30 times and I remember asking a lady why she was crying in front of a painting. I thought it was because she was so moved by the picture. And she said it was. I can't believe they've written on the wall that she's a prostitute and that she's about to have sex with the man in the painting. She was talking about the girl with the laughing officer from the Frick. And. Or even another lady was really upset because this was being said about the milkmaid, that this is really a kind of smutty picture of a kitchen maid, which is. It's just so obviously not. But once you understand that, actually, because what my book is largely about, almost as much about Vermeer, is about these groups of fantastically interesting, independent. I suppose they are, as far as I know, the earliest forebears of feminists, like my mum, if you like, were these women that we never knew about before, I never knew about them before, who are forming these groups for prayer and for doing charitable actions and saying to men who stop them, we've got every much as right as you to talk about Jesus, because after all, look at Mary Magdalene. She was the first person that Jesus ever showed himself to after his resurrection, and she was a woman. So God's told us that we've got every right to think about Jesus. So they were taking these rights. And I am sure that Maria was part of one of these movements, these groups. I'm sure that she hosted their meetings in her house. And I'm sure that Vermeer's pictures, far from being smutty paintings for Peter, were actually devotional pictures to help Maria and her circle. In their thoughts and their deeds, there were people who did good things as well as thought good thoughts. So it's a sea change. I mean, it's a big change from the way that Vermeer has been looked at up until now. Really?
- [15:21]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Absolutely. Does that suggest to you that Maria had a say in the kind of images that Vermeer was creating? Is she buying paintings that she wants for her own home or for those around her?
- [15:35]
Andrew Graham Dixon
Well, in my opinion, Vermeer's paintings for that house. We can't reconstruct what happened, but I imagine that Vermeer himself was part of this devotional group. He'd know what they were thinking about, he would himself go to meetings. So he paid pictures in the knowledge of the experience they were having, the meditations they were taking part in, the kind of conversations they were conducting. If you think of the so called music paintings, which in the past have been seen as merry companies, well, that's just a square peg being fitted into the round hole of Dutch conventional painting. They might look a little bit like some of the music paintings of the period, but if you look closely, they're so serious, the people in them are so serious, so wrapped, the mood is so meditative. And in my opinion, those are depictions of actually what went on in that house. We know what they did. They would read the Bible, they would talk about what they read very systematically. They would do it for about four, five or six hours. They were very devout, these people. And at the end of it, after everyone had said their own piece about this or that passage in the Bible, the purpose of it all was to bring everyone together in unity and peace and love and harmony. And at the end, everyone said the music was absolutely beautiful. And music, of course, that's the opposite of conversation. In the conversation, each voice is distinct and has its own point to make. This lady has this to say. Maria de Knault has that to say. Ava has this again to say, and what about this? But in the end, everyone sings together in harmony. So Vermeer sees that, and in my opinion, he thinks, well, that's very beautiful, that symbolises what this group is all about. I'll make a painting of that. In fact, I'll make two. And again, that's another thing that emerges from my research. If you begin to look at Vermeer's pictures in the way that I've described, you suddenly see correspondences between them. And suddenly I feel I've realized that a number of these pictures are actually painted as pairs. It's never been recognized before, but they are. They're painted to go together, and that's never been identified previously. But once you see it, you realize, oh gosh, look, the woman with the balance and the milkmaid. The woman with the balance is the contemplative life. She's thinking about her soul. Whereas the milkmaid is a woman who's preparing bread pudding for the poor, something nice and soft that they can get their weak teeth into in the poorhouse of the town, which by the way was administered by Peter van Rauven, and Maria de Knaut contributed greatly to it in terms of giving money. So the connection is not just that they might have been charitable. They were. We know that.
- [18:34]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And you've got one extra piece of evidence for anyone doubting Maria de Knaut's own agency here, because she leaves Vermeer an extraordinary bequest, doesn't she?
- [18:45]
Andrew Graham Dixon
Yes. It's the only example in all of the annals of Dutch art. It's the only example of a patron leaving a bequest of money to an artist in their will. It's the only example we know of. And she leaves it in a part of her will where she's also leaving some money to other people to whom she's not directly related, but they're so close to her, they're part of the family. So it's in this little area of people in her will that we find Vermeer. Not her child, not her husband, but the next closest thing. It's her way of saying Vermeer is as if a member of my family. And very interestingly, she doesn't want a penny to go to Vermeer's Catholic mother in law or his children who've been brought up as Catholics. So if he is to die, the bequest will be annulled. She doesn't want Jesuits getting their hands on it. Because in the end, no matter how tolerant a collegian to a remonstrant is of the Catholics, you can't be limitlessly generous to someone who would, if they have the chance, have you killed or exiled for heresy.
- [20:03]
Sponsor/Advertisement Voice
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- [20:22]
Andrew Graham Dixon
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- [21:07]
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- [21:37]
Andrew Graham Dixon
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- [22:34]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
If we think of the connection with Vermeer's work, two of the major characteristics of his paintings are their tranquility and the centrality of women's lives. So do you think, should we really overhaul our understanding of him, taking him far from the smutty male fantasies about milkmaids into thinking about something that actually is much more allegorical, much more reflective of this profound belief?
- [23:01]
Andrew Graham Dixon
I believe so, yes. I think Vermeer, I say it towards the end of my book. One of the main ambitions of the book has been to give Vermeer back his place in the history of ideas. And one of the aims of the book also is to give the collegiate back their place in the history of ideas. Insofar as a humble art historian like me can do that. In a sense, they're very interesting books about the collegians, but they're not very widely read. And the fact remains that the movement has been to a great extent forgotten, when in fact it's so wrong that they should have been forgotten. Their pacifism, their egalitarianism, their nascent feminism. I hesitate to call it that. It's really a respect of women as people worth listening to. I don't know what you call that, but all of that, combined with these powerful ideas about Toleration which is really their watchword, and everything stems from that. But, you know, they're so important because these people, they make toleration a positive virtue rather than negative. They make toleration this positive thing, which means that they value women for their opinion that comes from toleration. They take everyone, as it were, at face value. They give everyone equal respect. Everyone's soul is as valuable as everyone else's. From a porter on the shore of the Amsterdam, you know, docks, the side of the docks, to, you know, the president of the Dutch Republic, everyone's equal. And interestingly, the man at the center of the movement, the greatest supporter, the bedrock of the Collegiate movement, a man called Adrian Parts. He was a friend of Vermeer. He was a friend of Vermeer's patrons. We know that this has emerged from my research. It's really clear. And not only that he was close to the president of the Dutch Republic. He was an extraordinary man, Adrian Patz, in many ways, just as extraordinary as Vermeer and just as important, probably more important to the history of Western culture, because he was the patron of Pierre Bale, as well as the patron of Vermeer, you know, one of the leading figures of the French Enlightenment. He was the patron of Spinoza. He was the first man ever to read the Tractatus of Philosophico Logicus, in which Spinoza argued the case for the freedom of expression. And guess what? He knew John Locke. He seems to be a friend of John Locke. He took John Locke to collegiate movements. He infected John Locke with the tolerationist bug. And one can trace a line of thought that goes directly from this man, Adrian Patz, the head of the Collegiate movement, Vermeer's Praetram, to Enlightenment ideas about toleration that are spread, copied from him by John Locke, spread to Voltaire, and ultimately leads to the Bill of Rights, the abolition of slavery, these ideas. So that's something I really want to give back to Vermeer and his friends, because the Enlightenment has been written so much from, you know, the English, the French, the German, the Scottish perspective, but the Dutch contribution has just been, as far as I can see, very much forgotten. And it's so early. You know, Adrienne Patz is talking about toleration in the 1660s. Vermeer is painting the ideas of toleration in the 1650s and 60s. This is well before anyone else is thinking about these things. So, you know, one of the problems with this book, where so much in it is new, some things can get lost. You know, and people get stuck on the fact that, you know, for example, the fact that I think I've managed to identify the girl with the pearl earring. That's had a huge amount of press attention. Whereas I would love it if people would really get hold of the idea that the Collegiates have this amazing message that's about toleration, about an end to religious war, which has got so much possibility for us. Those are the ideas that I want as much as the ideas in Vermeer's paintings. It's all of these ideas together that I'm trying to communicate in the book.
- [26:57]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Yes, I mean, that's deeply fascinating stuff. But you do know I am going to have to ask you about the girl with the pearl earring, because actually, your discovery about it comes out of this meticulous research you've done in the archives. It comes out of this renewed understanding of what was going on in people's hearts and minds and souls at this time. So I guess if we were to think about this, we should first of all think about the speculation over the years who have been some of the contenders of the sitter for this painting. Who were people saying before your work came along.
- [27:34]
Andrew Graham Dixon
To be honest, I can't really give you chapter on verse on, you know, on past theories. I think one of the most common speculations was that she was possibly one of Vermeer's daughters, because one of them might have been of the right age. But of course, we know from inventories and from lists and from hard documentary evidence that that painting, from the moment it was painted, was essentially, it was in the Van Raven house where they lived and where Maria had her groups of women coming to meet her. So it doesn't really make sense that this picture, which seems so full of, I would say, spiritual purpose, should be a portrait of Vermeer's daughter. It would make much more sense that it would be a portrait of Maria and Peter's daughter. And they only had one child. Three children were born to them, but two died in infancy. They only had one child, and she was called Magdalena, which was the same name that Maria's daughter had been given. It's a family name for the women in Maria de Knault's family. This name, Magdalena, which suggests very strongly, as another of Vermeer's paintings suggest, in which we seem to find Maria meditating on Mary Magdalene. It suggests that the family had this strong Christian devotion to Mary Magdalene, and many collegiate women did share that Mary Magdalene was one of their heroes, not just because she was one of the early followers of Christ, but because she was a woman to whom he showed favor, in fact, such favor that he showed himself first to her after his resurrection. So the first woman, the first person in the whole of history to see Christ after the resurrection is this woman, Mary Magdalene. So these collegiate women who are constantly being challenged by men about their right to talk about God and things like that, they felt a very strong political attachment to Mary Magdalene. She was, you know, a great exemplar for them because they could pluck her out of the hat and say, well, you know, if women weren't supposed to talk about God, you know, how come Mary Magdalene was shown the resurrected Christ? So then thinking it's a portrait of Magdalene, you know, what could this be, this portrait by Vermeer? It says also in the sales catalogue when the pictures were first sold in 1696, the auctioneer says very clearly that it's a trunje, which is a kind of portrait, a portrait of somebody playing the part of someone else. And it says that it's in historical fancy dress. So who would Magdalena Van Rauven be playing the part of at the age of 13? That is about the age when she would have been baptized. The collegiates believed in adult baptism, full body immersion. So perhaps this picture is painted of her playing the part of somebody else at the point of being baptized. Maybe it marks that moment. So I was thinking about all this, and I was looking at. I've got two computer screens in my office, and I was looking at. On one, I had the picture up on one screen. On the other, I actually have the passage from the Gospel where Mary Magdalene goes to the tomb to find the body of Christ, to anoint the body with the other two Marys. She goes and they encounter the angel at the tomb, who tell them that he's gone. And the other Marys leave, and she wanders into the garden on her own. And I was reading that, and I read that she sees the gardener. She speaks to him, and then she goes away thinking, oh, he's just the gardener. And then he says, mary. And she turns, she turns around and she realizes in that instant that it's him, that this is Jesus. The bodies she's come to find has been resurrected. He lives, and there he is talking to her. And then I suddenly thought, of course, that's the moment in the painting. I suddenly realized that's it. It's Mary Magdalene. It's Magdalena as Mary Magdalene, turning to see the risen Christ with all that awe and wonder and respect and love. You know, all of that written on her face. And this is a painting that's in the past, has been seen as a bit of, oh, I don't know, a kind of glamorous picture of a beautiful young woman. No, it's a painting that lives at the heart of their beliefs. And if you look at it, if you stand looking at it, of course, then if I'm right, then you are Jesus. You or I, whoever's looking at it. So it's putting you in quite a spot. It's reminding you you've got a lot to live up to. Which I think was the whole point of the pictures in that house. Those pictures existed to remind those people of what they had to live up to. That picture itself is there to remind Magdalena herself that she is being called to follow him. There's a reason we gave you the name Magdalena. The picture's there to reinforce all of that, to remind you, Magdalena, to model yourself on Mary Magdalene. So it's incredibly loaded. For years, maybe more than a century, you know, it's been regarded as this great mystery painting, you know, this great enigma. In my opinion, it's not at all an enigma. It's a very direct picture with a very direct message. That doesn't mean its effects aren't profoundly mysterious and beautiful and moving. But in what it's actually saying, I don't think there's any ambiguity. You were called Magdalena for a reason. Behave like your namesake.
- [32:54]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
This is so fascinating, and I'm struck by a parallel, which is that the way that Mary Magdalene has been portrayed over recent centuries, at least probably longer than that, but often depicted as a prostitute, little reference made to the fact that she's the first person that Jesus meets in his resurrected form, or that it is a woman who has that first sighting of him. Parallels the way in which you've noticed the women in Vermeer's paintings being traduced and transformed into sexualized objects. It's almost as if a parallel has taken place. Yet in actual fact, what you're suggesting, if I understand correctly, is that these paintings are devotional items.
- [33:47]
Andrew Graham Dixon
Yeah, that is what I mean. I was recently in Florence at San Marco, and when you look at the. The friar's cells, all painted by Fra Angelico himself, who was a friar in the convent, they have this astonishing power. And I think that for me, that's the closest I can come. You know, Vermeer's paintings were painted for the church that was not a church, a house that was next to the remonstrant. Church, but worshiped in by Christians who, when they were there, felt no need for a church. And I think these pictures are, so to speak, a great fresco cycle painted for the Christians without a church. But they make sense in this religious sense. I think they're one thing. They're as much one thing as are all the paintings by Fra Angelico for San Marco or the pictures on the Sistine Chapel ceiling by Michelangelo or the Arena Chapel by Giotto. They are a single thing which collectively express, in my opinion, a set of beliefs perhaps even more beautiful than those expressed in those other spaces, and even more pregnant with meaning for us in a secular and deeply troubled world.
- [35:10]
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- [36:20]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
You've directed our attention to this startling revelation from your research about Vermeer's connection to the Remonstrance. Why were they so radical, so persecuted as a religious movement at the time?
- [36:34]
Andrew Graham Dixon
Well, at the beginning, when I started writing my book, I felt I was sure that Vermeer was a member of the Remonstrant movement. But I'd assumed that this was something that came relatively late to him. You know, I'd assumed that he met his patron Maria, and her husband Peter, and that's what converted him to the Remonstrance. But then when I dug in deeper, unfortunately, after I'd already written 100 pages of my book, which I then had to throw away, I discovered that Vermeer's parents had been deeply involved in the movement at a time when Remonstrantism itself was the cause of, in effect, a civil war in the Dutch Republic. So this is going back early to the 16 fifteens, that kind of period before Vermeer's born, when his parents are just about getting married. At that time, the established Calvinists hated the idea that anybody could believe what they liked and that that would be accepted by the state. You know, as long as they believed in the basic tenets of Christianity, according to the Remonstrance, that would be enough. But the Calvinists said, no, that's heresy, just as the Catholics said no to that kind of toleration from their own different perspective. So the fact is that the Romans church were arguing for a new form of Christianity which would allow people with very different beliefs to come together, not to make war with each other, even though they necessarily perhaps didn't agree about transubstantiation or entirely believe that the body of Christ was transmuted into the wafer at the Mass and so on. They said, well, why don't we just set these things aside? They can be things for theologians to argue about. The Mass of people don't have to worry about that. Let's not have any more death on account of these quite abstruse ideas about theology. And the fact is that these ideas, which seem to have been believed in very much by Vermeer's parents, were met with absolute contempt by those on the conservative wing of Dutch society, the House of Orange, Prince Maurits. He staged a coup d'. Etat. He sided with the Calvinists. All the Remonstrance were rounded up. They weren't killed. Two of them were, but they weren't killed. The vast majority of them, they were just sent into exile. And those who remained in the Netherlands were driven underground. And Vermeer's parents and their family preacher for several years seem, as far as I can tell, and the evidence is pretty strong. It's in my book. They were part of that secret underground movement. They were Remonstrants. And so, fascinatingly, I think, were the parents and the grandparents of Vermeer's patrons, Maria de Clout. Well, particularly Peter Claude's own, Van Raven. So it began at the level of the parents and the grandparents, before Vermeer was even born, before Peter Clauselone Van Raven was even born. And by the time you get to the 1630s, when Vermeer is born, at the beginning of that decade, Remonstrantism is allowed. You can have a church. You can have a secret church and worship there, as long as you don't ring a bell, as long as you don't put a cross on the front of the building. That is allowed by the Dutch state. By contrast with more or less everyone else in Europe. The Dutch are very tolerant. Even though the Calvinists remained, in effect, the official masters of the official religion of the Dutch, they're not allowed by the state to make total war on anyone who disagrees with them. Total contrast with what's happening in England at the time. And so they reluctantly tolerate these people. So Vermeer grows up as a tolerated remonstrant, just as his future wife grows up as a tolerated Catholic.
- [40:01]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
So what you've given overall is this amazing, radical reappraisal of Vermeer's life, of his religious interests, of his true legacy, the meaning behind his subject matter. And it's an extraordinary revelation. I wonder both how your theory's been received and how you hope it might change understandings of these paintings. How do you think we can learn from it today?
- [40:30]
Andrew Graham Dixon
I was very touched. The author of Vermeer's Hat, Timothy Brook, which is a very interesting, entertaining sort of sideways look at the world of Vermeer, not really a book about Vermeer, but about the world in which he lived, which asked where a hat in a particular painting came from and opened that out into a whole world. Fascinating. Anyway, I was very pleased that the same Timothy Brooklyn reviewed my book in the Times Literary Supplement recently. It was actually published on my birthday, which was very good timing because it was a lovely review. It was a real birthday present. And he was extremely receptive to the book. He said it made great sense. It made, in his view, perfect sense of Vermeer's work, which is, for me, wonderful to read. And he's the first historian to have reviewed it, not the first historian to have read it, because I had it read by a really great historian of Reformation culture and the leading Dutch historian of the history of the Dutch church in the period. But they read it at my request. This just came out of the blue, but it was a reception I couldn't have hoped for. And, in fact, the overall reception of the book has been really open, especially actually from women. Female reviewers have been just so kind and positive about the book, perhaps responding to the fact that so much of it is about these, you know, remarkable women in Vermeer's circle. I'd rather suspected that it would be thought as too adventurous or so different from anything previously written that it had to be wrong, you know, that kind of review. But at some point so far, it hasn't happened. So I'm, you Know, I'm really pleased because I'm. I'm actually personally convinced, I would say this, that my arguments are legitimate and I've done my absolute utmost to ground it. You read it, You've read the footnotes, I assume so. You know, that there's a lot of them and it's based in actual evidence. It's not me flying kites, you know, I don't really know what to say other than that. But, you know, going back to Timothy Brooks review, I was not just pleased that he's positive about the book, but I particularly like the way that he ended his piece by talking about the idea that there might be a loss in Vermeer's pictures and in the beliefs of Vermeer's friends to help us now, you know, terrible period of conflict that we're living through. Towards the very end of writing the book, or maybe just after, actually, I think, you know, all of these terrible events in Gaza began to unfold. And, you know, I couldn't help thinking of the parallels between the period of Vermeer's life, you know, with these awful wars, the thirty Years War and the eighty Years War, where so much life was lost over religious differences. I just couldn't help thinking of the parallels, you know, And I do think that there's a great deal in the texts of these wonderful people of forgotten collegiates, you know, that could perhaps be useful to people trying to resolve the conflicts we have today. I would love to see some of their books republished. I would love to see Adrian Partes on Toleration come out as a Penguin classic so people could rewrite, read what he wrote, because there's so much wisdom there. And they'd experienced suffering at the sharp end, millions of deaths. They knew what it was like to try to deal with people who took a deeply entrenched position to the point that they just wouldn't give up and that war could not be stopped. And yet they didn't give in. They were convinced that they'd find peace. And they did find it. Although it was a short one, they still did find it. And the memory of that peace that they found and the peace that they made and that hope that they found in that, in the hope that it might be possible to bring war to an end. The memory of that lives forever, I think, in Vermeer's pictures.
- [44:01]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Well, thank you so much for sharing your research, your findings, these revelations with us. It sounds very convincing and persuasive to me, and as you say, the book, so is all your workings for those who want to know more. So I hope that it does start to revivify the way that people see these beautiful paintings as being testament to something much grander and much more significant in the history of Europe. Thank you, Andrew Graham Dixon, so much for coming onto the podcast.
- [44:34]
Andrew Graham Dixon
Thank you, Susanna. It's been a pleasure.
- [44:38]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Thank you for listening to this episode of Not Just the Tudors From History Hit. And to my producer Rob Weinberg, we are always eager to hear from you, including receiving your brilliant ideas for subjects we can cover. So do drop us a line@notjusthetorshistoryhit.com and I look forward to joining you again for another episode. Next time on Not Just the Tudors From History Hit.
- [45:14]
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