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The same corner of the same room, the same table, the
same mirror, the same window, the same curtain, the same
use of a banked up blanket and probably the same pearls
appear in another of Vermeer's paintings - "Woman in
Yellow with a Pearl Necklace."
This time, we might think, surely this time Vermeer is
warm-heartedly but unequivocally exposing feminine
vanity. Yet even here we may be being tempted to rush to
judgement where angels fear to tread. The mirror on the
wall does indeed show the lovely girl the beauty she
wishes to see, but it also tells the truth. See how the
expression on her face is changing from bubbling
excitement to deeper reflection, from absorption in
baubles to deeper awareness of herself. That vanity
should prove the emptiness of vanity is one of the
reasons for allowing the young lady her freedom to
discover for herself. But what if Vermeer had placed the
picture of the Last Judgement on the wall behind her?
The effect would have been crushing.
Vermeer, like a great author, does not interfere with
his subject's freedom. He is no friend to Pharisees,
fanatics or legalists who would turn the Christian faith
into a tool for social control. Yet although he always
maintains a fine sense of irony, he never smirks at the
foundations of life. His celebration of free choice and
marriage into a Catholic family probably meant that he
had little time for the narrow end of Calvinistic
theology, and this may explain why his paintings
sometimes have levels which seem to tease his
contemporaries. Yet his work seems informed by
Protestant conscience and is, with one exception, free
of baroque exaggeration. His faith was personal rather
than ideological, and his sympathies broad and
warm-hearted. He could lavish as much respect upon a
serving maid as upon a well-off maiden. He conveys an
affirmative outlook. He dwells on the good of life.
Yet it would not be entirely honest to ignore the
puzzling ambiguities that may remain even in this
beautiful painting of the woman weighing pearls. Perhaps
it is the multiplicity of conflicting possibilities that
give Vermeer his appeal in an age such as our own whose
very idiom is ambiguity. Whilst the pearls on the table
glitter, and the ephemeral flesh of the youthful woman
shines, there is no light coming from the picture behind
her. What appeal has the Last Judgement in the
glittering presence of present pleasures and beauty? It
is hard to understand and harder to accept the truth
depicted in the shadows on the wall.
The woman herself is a treasure and the baby within her
another, but has she really found the divine lover, and
is she really weighing the pearl beyond price, or is she
still seeking, or not seeking at all but dreaming?
Ultimately we do not know. Nor is it necessary that
Vermeer should tell us. Art, like life, challenges us to
make up our own minds. Painting has this advantage over
preaching that the artist need rarely be constrained by
an "either / or" logic. Vermeer, I think, is offering
ambiguity deliberately. The drawn curtain and
semi-darkened room can be understood as a reinforcement
of the vanitas theme - that the woman is doing something
she really knows she shouldn't, although here again I
think that seizing upon a clue to justify a negative
reading quickly leads to a turning of the tables on the
viewer. Firstly the shadows can be seen as an obvious
reference to the woman's pregnancy and imminent
confinement. Psychologically they suggest the need for
seclusion at a time of especial vulnerability, and
physically they symbolise the darkness and mystery of
the womb. They create an atmosphere of privacy in which
the woman is free to concentrate on what she wants to
do. Certainly the drawn curtain shows that she is not
interested in seeing herself in the mirror. Taken
together with the empty scales, the shadows suggest that
the woman's heart is not caught up in worldly finery.
Furthermore the Last Judgement is surely the
consummation of the war between light and darkness, and
whilst the painting strongly contrasts them, most of the
light is concentrated upon the woman's face and front.
She herself is unambiguously shown as belonging to the
light, but not without first overcoming the forces of
darkness which swirl around her. This is a world of
shadows in which we are enjoined to walk by faith, not
by sight. It is hard to imagine Vermeer's contemporaries
looking long at this painting without noticing the
mirror in dark shadows on the wall and recalling Paul's
famous words at the end of the love passage in
Corinthians. "For now we see in a mirror darkly; but
then face to face; now I know in part, but then I shall
know as also I am known." The young woman's humility is
the reflection in her character of her faith as she goes
through the perplexities and pressures of life.
Vermeer's own wife bore him fifteen children and buried
four of them. There is threat around this young woman,
yet if balance is the measure, she is in triumph. In
that men do not bear babies, what we see here is a
psychological and spiritual victory that only a woman
can win.
I do not believe that Vermeer is proposing in this
picture the least irony or superiority over its female
protagonist, as he sometimes does elsewhere. Every clue
of respect is in place to suggest that this woman may
even represent his wife, Catharina, who brought him a
measure of wealth and honour, and birthed him eleven
surviving children. She was 29 years old when Vermeer
commenced work on this painting, which seems exactly to
match the age of the woman we see in it. Despite the
projected fantasies of certain modern novelists and
film-makers, there is every indication that theirs was a
fulfilling partnership. Many women, even foolish women,
Vermeer endows with physical beauty or social grace, but
this woman, and as far as I know only this woman, he
depicts as his spiritual equal. "What I know," the
artist seems to be saying, "she knows." If we are not
looking at a portrait of his helpmate, I think we are
looking at his idea of one, and one who can partner him
in the furthest reaches of his hope and faith and love.
There is too much dignity in this woman's face, too much
serenity, meditation, and humility to mistake her for
the object of any man's casual assessment, let alone an
illustration of a vice. Unlike some other Vermeer
portraits she seems entirely free from parted-lip,
eye-fluttering emotion, or physical self-regard. When
the "vanitas" perspective collapses we are left groping
for a deeper insight and are taken on a journey by
Vermeer which leads, I believe, to something like Paul's
encouragement to the Corinthians. To feminise the text
(which all educated folk in his day would have known) it
reads, "The spiritual woman makes judgements about all
things, but is not herself subject to any person's
judgement." Both aspects of this statement are fulfilled
in Vermeer's painting. And how better to lift the woman
beyond our judgement than by first getting us to
misjudge?
Nevertheless, wherever balance is found it is dynamic.
What you see is what you will get. It is for the viewer
to decide. To be sure, the lady's jacket is blue but it
is a very dark blue after all. Yet on the other hand the
shadows indicate that she is not presuming upon the
mediaeval virgin-mother paradigm. Muted colours
emphasise her modesty. Nor would the message that
saintliness is achievable in everyday circumstances be
effective if she were singled out with special glamour.
In the sight of Christ, it is not her clothes that
matter but simply her person. The pearls, too, are
ambiguous. In the vanitas tradition they immediately
signify an empty search for outward beauty, but in the
mystic Christian tradition of Vermeer's time, they also
signify, "...the oriental pearls of the gospel." (St.
Francis de Sales "Introduction to the Devout Life",
published in Dutch translation in 1616). Even the mirror
on the wall can be read in two opposite ways, either as
a sign of the woman's self-knowledge, or as a sign of
self seeking. If you want it to, ambiguity remains. If
the woman is in obedience to God then her little finger
demonstrates her willingness to put the word into
action, and if she is forgetful, or disobedient, then
the thrust of her little finger against the verticality
of God's will forms a little cross, a tragedy, the
malfunctioning of her precious life, and more Calvary
suffering before she can be freed.
This ambiguity is reflected on either side of the line
that forms the vertical of this delicate little cross,
one black and the other light. The movement of the
woman's finger is from darkness to light, but the
diminutive frailty of the little feminine finger reminds
us that the cross is never an intellectual equation that
we can "come to terms with," as, for example, the yin-yan
symbol. There are no terms to contain the depth of
Christ's suffering and all mankind's. Therefore, in the
Judeo-Christian tradition there is no accommodation
between good and evil, never an intellectual balance
between them, no way of smuggling the obscene into the
holy.
Here, I think, is an ultimate reason for Vermeer's
ambiguity. Deeper than irony, deeper than the
sophistication of 17th century poetic conceit, deeper
than the rational paradoxes of systematic theology,
deeper than any ideological formulae, Vermeer's art here
reaches out to the horizons of reason, and presents us
not with a ready-made religious answer, but with the
only answer that can actually help us: our own
discernment and decision. It is important, I think to
bear in mind that in this picture Vermeer is not overtly
glorifying the gospel in a painterly fashion. The
picture of the Last Judgement is not merely shadowy but
thoroughly conventional and boring as a painting. And
the chequered symbol of the cross allows here an
ambiguity that includes atheists in the debate. Is the
cross the salvation of the world or as Bertrand Russell
thought merely a monstrous human invention, a weird
projection of a primordial fear of a punitive tyrant in
the sky? If the picture of the Last Judgement pronounces
a vanitas message against the young lady, would we
rather not rebel against such a gloomy doctrine than
denounce such a lovely woman?
By way of reply Vermeer does not give us dogma but, in
modern terms, an existential choice. This would not have
been a debate that could have been conducted openly in
Vermeer's time, but it is the artist's privilege to
communicate through forms that human authorities cannot
control.
To this end, although we are examining a quiet and
seemingly safe interior, he does not sweep all life's
problems under the carpet. Only the tip of the woman's
finger emerges from the dark side of the little cross
into the light. Maybe her life is oppressed by many
difficulties. This shut-off curtained corner of a dark
room does suggest the suffocation and confinement of
many well-off women of this time, recently removed from
cottage and field to suburban confinement, and boredom,
in a social system that gave them no vocation except
that of motherhood and housekeeping, locked into their
town houses under masculine authority and inflexible
moral rules, and where the husbands were often away on
business for long hours in a man's world, at sea or on
the other side of the world. No wonder Vermeer suggests
in many of his portraits of women of this period that
the only release from this domestic imprisonment might
have been in liaisons dangereuses, rather as two hundred
years later Flaubert described the predicament of Madame
Bovary. Indeed, several of his paintings, whilst holding
vice up to condemnation, also, in typical 17th Century
Dutch fashion, seem to invite sly explorations of
salacious themes; adultery, flirtation, and seduction.
Although none of these aspersions are in the least
appropriate here, nevertheless the dialectic of dark and
light is hard to resolve.
How then can we come to terms with the painting? The
first possibility is the one I have so far proposed,
that the list of positive clues outweighs the negatives,
and in fact trumps them one by one. But even though
Vermeer may bring a man to the water by this method, he
cannot make him drink. One man sees the glass half full,
and the other half empty. There is nothing to be done
about it. Except this - that beauty comes to the aid of
goodness and truth and gives a verdict that can be
understood and appreciated by all of us. Although in
view of the shadows and the pearls the action of the
woman may seem (at least to the suspicious) to be
equivocal, we can discern that it is in itself
beautiful, and exactly balanced by her little finger.
The geometric structure of the painting that centres on
her little finger is aesthetically perfect. And by the
magic of Vermeer's art we see that the woman herself is
not merely possessed of outward beauty, but the inward
substance. She is at peace with herself. She has, "the
unfading beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit." We
appreciate that her loveliness is not conditional upon
"outward adornment, such as braided hair and the wearing
of gold jewellery and fine clothes." The very shadows
that cast suspicion upon her, have obscured the bright
garments to enable us to see what is really important.
Through Vermeer's eyes we are "won over without words... by the purity and reverence of her life." In this
little masterpiece the young woman's innocence shines
from her portrait and refutes every suspicion against
her.
This is the test Vermeer brings us to. The question
takes us to the heart of the ancient conundrum
concerning art. Does it only present us with surface
appearances or can it convey truth? Outward beauty alone
could be the cover and even the occasion for wrong
doing. It can sometimes be a hard struggle to discern
correctly. Vermeer's contemporaries were well aware that
"Satan himself masquerades as an angel of light." So the
reliability of female beauty (or male professions of
love) - a perennial question in Western art and
literature - is a theme that Vermeer often explored. But
there would be nothing to discuss unless all of us deep
down were agreed that where there is beauty there ought
to be goodness and truth, and that if the ought is
avoided, disaster will eventually follow. But if we can
discern inner beauty as with the woman here, we
encounter integrity which signifies innocence. In this
small painting Vermeer has succeeded in uniting the
Catholic tradition of depicting the purity and innocence
of the Virgin Mary with the Protestant understanding
which takes these spiritual gifts down from a religious
pedestal and assimilates them by faith into ordinary
human life.
On the rock of this iconic dimension of the picture the
vanitas interpretation founders. Nevertheless, the
message of the last judgement is upheld. Probing the
ambiguities of human behaviour, as Vermeer often does,
is absolutely not the same thing as pronouncing an
ultimate ambiguity at the roots of existence. Indeed it
is only by laying hold of one point of infinite
stability that any accurate perspective on instability
can be formed. Vermeer has aimed high for the Woman
Weighing Pearls, seeking and finding a place at the
heart of the Western canon of art, and in the hearts of
many viewers ever since, by giving the painting a
spiritual centre. The woman's forehead lies exactly at
the fulcrum of the divine balance in action behind her.
Moreover she who so diligently holds a balance in
imitation of Christ establishes a divine connection
between reason, goodness, and truth. She unites them in
her beauty. It is an age old observation that when a
judge weighs evidence with precise reason, impartial
goodness, and perfect truthfulness, those seeking
justice experience a sensation of great beauty. Moreover
justice nurtures life in every community - and therefore
it is not an accident that traditionally the scales of
justice are held by a handsome woman.
When Jesus said that, "wisdom is proved right by all her
children," he almost certainly had in mind words from
the book of Proverbs, and very likely when Vermeer
painted this picture, he did too. In the same way that
the woman in Vermeer's "Allegory of Painting" is now
known to represent Clio the goddess of history or fame,
the young mother diligently balancing her scales in this
picture probably represents Sophia , the woman wisdom of
Proverbs chapter eight... "I, wisdom, possess
knowledge and discretion.... I hate pride and arrogance,
evil behaviour and perverse speech..Counsel and sound
judgement are mine,..." I love those who love me ..I
walk in the way of righteousness, along paths of
justice, bestowing wealth on those who love me ... ..
The Lord brought me forth as the first of his works . I
was appointed from eternity . I was there when he set
the heavens in place . Then was I the craftsman at his
side. I was filled with delight day after day, rejoicing
always in his presence, rejoicing in his whole world and
delighting in mankind.."
Not only does this identification explain the woman's
mimicry of Christ, (from eternity . I was the craftsman
at his side ..etc.), and the scales, (sound
judgement...righteousness...justice), it also
illuminates her pregnancy. According to Jesus, Wisdom
begets children. Furthermore, remembering that Catharina
raised Vermeer's economic status considerably, it places
the enigmatic pearls in an entirely new light
(..bestowing wealth on those who love me..). And finally
it accounts for the picture of the Last Judgement on the
wall behind her. Wisdom ends her self-disclosure in the
book of Proverbs with the exhortation,
"Now then, my sons, listen to me. Whoever finds me finds
life .. All who hate me love death."
Love of the woman wisdom (sincere love that appreciates
the inner beauty of her discretion, humility, and
reverence) is the key to understanding the Last
Judgement. Wisdom can be defined as the knowledge and
application of goodness, beauty and truth in all
circumstances. Those who love life, love wisdom, because
wisdom is at the source of life. And those who hate
wisdom, love death, because without goodness, beauty and
truth there is only death. Rightly wisdom stands between
the living and the dead, and that is exactly where
Vermeer's young woman stands in relation to the people
in the picture behind her.
If ever we find a perplexing divorce between goodness,
beauty and truth we can be certain that a breach of
reason has occurred. In politics from time to time this
principle becomes obvious. The most unsafe form of
government ever devised is The Committee of Public
Safety. Everyone who has experienced real evil knows
that whatever qualities it uses for disguise, its most
salient characteristic is its unreasonableness, indeed
its deliberate defiance and defilement of reason, its
refusal of honest discourse.
Thus it is no arbitrary tyranny that summons mankind to
the eternal balance, but simply the reasonable word of
the one who has established the way things are.. Those
who exercised wisdom have practised life and shall have
it, because wisdom is life. And those who hated wisdom
have practised death and shall have it, because to hate
wisdom is to love death. In Simon Montefiore's "Court of
the Red Tsar" we learn how Stalin hounded the only woman
he came near to loving, to suicide. Unwilling to face
his own lack of wisdom, he blamed her for rejecting him
and went on to practise death on a million-fold scale.
In the picture behind the young woman, the people who
rise to face the last judgement are naked because before
truth nothing can be hidden, and for the just there is
nothing to be ashamed of. But every child knows that
when evil is exposed, it is ugly.
Thus, although the truth might often be obscured by
surface appearances, and hence may seem to be a shadowy
thing and eschatology a threat to our proper freedom,
because we see the woman doing exactly what Christ is
doing in the painting above her, we can learn from her.
Certainly the woman is beautiful, her balance just, and
her action graceful and precise, but more than this, if
we accept that Vermeer's art illuminates the inward
dimension as well as outward forms, we come to realise
that her character is good. So despite innuendos or
tension caused by religious or anti-religious prejudice,
the good of right reason tells us that whatever she
copies must itself be beautiful, good and true, simply
because she is copying it. Vermeer has achieved an
astonishing reversal of the normal use of a picture
within a picture. Instead of the vanitas theme in which
the painting of The Last Judgement is supposed to define
the woman, here the woman defines our understanding of
the painting. Moreover he has turned the tables utterly
on religious legalists. If you read the picture as a
judgement of the woman you must believe that God is
oppressive. But if you read the woman as the
interpretation of the picture, you arrive at the heart
of the Christian faith. God is love.
Like all good mothers, Vermeer's woman encourages us not
to fear things that are greater than ourselves. If we do
not wrongly judge her, but identify with her, we can
absorb an immensely helpful truth. Ultimate justice is
graceful, nurturing, protective and human. And that is
why it is good. It is by the incarnation that we find
God.
This picture is a meditation about inescapable truth,
the power of reason, and the role of goodness and beauty
in the exercise of right judgement. By a masterly
employment of ambiguity, Vermeer challenges us to
exercise our innate faculties of discernment. They are
the only way out of the maze. Though clouded by cares,
concealed by our own weak sight, in bondage to
tradition, betrayed by false prophets, imposed upon by
controlling authorities, and above all imprisoned by our
own sin, common to all mankind is the intuition of
beauty, goodness and truth. If we will be utterly honest
about our immediate knowledge concerning one of these
invisible well-springs of life, we will eventually get
to the others. But of course this is a big "if". We need
a remedy to the list of problems that beset us. As we
discover the life-giving qualities in the woman at the
centre of this painting we are led on by the precision
of Vermeer's symbolism to the conclusion that they are
in her because she has faith. They are certainly not
found in all the women Vermeer painted, and most of his
other pictures present conundrums that follow from the
impairment of one quality or other. And the impairment
of one is the impairment of all. The association of
goodness, beauty and truth is so close that in Classical
times one word, "kalos," could be used for any or all of
them. In koine Greek the statement, "I am the good
shepherd," also renders the meaning of beautiful
shepherd and truthful shepherd. There is "a light which
lights all men who come into the world," and that is
what this painting of the Woman Weighing Pearls" is all
about. But Vermeer captures us because he has made his
approach from life, and not from dogma.
Vermeer took an opposite tack in his more sumptuous
painting "Allegory of faith," which seems to owe its
inspiration to the Italian Cesare Ripa's "Iconologia."
It is, I feel, the least successful of all his
paintings, and swamped by the baroque exaggeration that
I mentioned earlier. But the Woman Weighing Pearls is
free of religious stuffing. Its simplicity, harmony, and
purity is outstanding and the depths of meaning
generated by so few props is astonishing.
Very quietly but gloriously Vermeer's painting
celebrates the triumph of Christ's love in a homely
setting. Rembrandt and other great Dutch artists, each
in their own unique way, were sometimes able to do the
same. In this picture where religious paraphernalia is
completely overshadowed by the light-splashed presence,
substantiality, beauty and introspective graciousness of
a lovely young woman, we are reminded that a mustard
seed of faith is all that is needed to save us. In this
work of visual genius, just a little finger serves the
purpose. Exquisitely placed at the centre of the
painting, it expresses something of the faith, the
firmness and the frailty of a child of God. The woman's
face is in light and her head and upper body are in
white, she has turned her back on shadows and is
imitating Christ. But the painting presents one more
conundrum. What of her child?
It is surely naive to think that the baby already
kicking inside this attractive woman will be immune from
temptation. The orange curve of cloth on the mother's
belly, signifying fruitfulness, speaks of him or her and
of the passions and pleasures that will be encountered
outside the womb. In pursuing them the child is bound,
at times, to make the wrong choices all human beings
make. And perhaps the young mother is weighing such
thoughts in her mind. Just in front of the baby and a
little above him is suspended a pair of scales, the
centre-piece of the painting. Will the child's life
remain under judgement, or will he learn to judge
rightly?
If Vermeer is the father he can hardly be indifferent to
the answer, which seems to me to be expressed in the
respect with which he has painted the mother. Borrowing
from the late medieval and renaissance tradition of
depicting the beauty, humility and innocence of the
mother of Christ, he invests this portrait both with
mystique and with great tenderness. And he also brings
revelation down from a religious pedestal into the realm
of everyday life. Here the word that has become flesh is
the word that has ignited faith in an ordinary woman.
She it is who holds the scales. And the fact that she
holds the scales surely means that she also holds the
answer. She is the one who will give birth to, and
succour her baby. She it is who will give the first
lessons in justice and mercy. She is the child's first
example of God and of goodness. There is judgement, but
the judge is fair and gentle. The baby is not being
given a book, a sermon or a sacrament to save it, but
first of all a mother. Meditating on the relationship
between Christ, the woman and the child in this
painting, it is impossible to determine where the divine
ends and the human begins. God and man are one, not
conventionally at an altar but here in a home. So this
woman, Vermeer seems to be saying, "will be proved right
by all her children." And we who peer into the child's
future can already see both the faith and the training
in right judgement that by love she will impart.
And beyond the woman's beautiful tangible life, the
artist hints at the amazing grace that will use her love
and faith and much else besides, to give the child a
path homeward that honours the exercise of his
free-will, as we have been allowed by Vermeer to
exercise ours. For we do not have to believe any of
these things.
No-one can prove the meaning of a parable. Perhaps
Vermeer was at heart a materialist and merely painted
what came before his eyes. Perhaps what we see is merely
a suburban closet with a housewife preoccupied with her
appearance and her wealth. Perhaps the deliberate
religious connotations are there only because Vermeer is
teasing the world he lived in and the womenfolk around
him. Yet I think most historians of culture would say
that such sophisticated cynicism is a much later
development.
The most likely explanation for the mysterious ambiguity
of this painting is that it partakes of two worlds. The
medieval mindset that understood the all-encompassing
lordship of Christ, is there, and so is the beginning of
the so-called Age of Reason, the Enlightenment. The
picture is spiritual because it draws meaning from
faith, but it is also thoroughly material because it
survey's the world in the light of reason. The realms of
faith and reason are here equably joined. And that is
why I like the picture so much.
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