Vermeer's Mania for Maps

I did a seminar on Vermeer and one of the topics was Vermeer and cartography well like you I've always loved maps I thought this is this is made for me but I do remember coming back to Boston and giving a lecture probably to a similar audience well not no not a similar audience but I'll never forget a woman coming up to me afterwards and first of all probably saying where are you from and I would say Iowa as we do and she said oh we pronounce that Ohio out here and then when you then when you say that you say no I mean Iowa are you sure you don't mean Idaho you know you just give up them in any case we know it now because we have the caucuses but it was a bust Sounion like that who said to me and what was your dissertation topic I mean how many times do you get asked that at a cocktail party it had to be a New Englander and I said Vermeer and cartography oh she had a big sigh she said oh don't tell me he had heart trouble now tonight we're going to talk about Vermeer and his love of maps which I know you have as well I'm gonna take you to the wonderful town of Delft unaware of Vermeer spent his whole life 1632 to 1675 not a long life and this is the the great painting in the Moritz house which became the mecca for the Impressionists in the 19th century to go see particularly how he captured light this very luminous quality which you'll see in a lot of his other paintings as well this was the Golden Age of Holland the Netherlands this was the time in a way a forerunner of America where people came from all over the world for economic freedom for a religious freedom all these great opportunities and a real melting pot in fact Holland had so little to offer so it shows you the talents coming together made it the word Holland comes from the Dutch word help LAN which means woodland and there are no trees there when most people came in the 17th century most them were cut down to make those masts for the ships that we know sailed the Dutch around the world in any case it was a golden age of painting as well and this is where for the first time the chief client of the artists were people like you and me no longer the church in the state Calvinism was the dominant religion but it was the people who were becoming very wealthy through all these new industries etc in the Netherlands and they wanted works that they can relate to and often they were religious subjects or historic or methought mythological themes but what became very popular were scenes of everyday life which we call genre scenes and that's what Vermeer became a master at capturing these moments in our everyday life in such a beautiful way he really made it a perfect world and I think one thing you'll see in when we study the maps in his paintings how much he edited his works it isn't just as he saw it he would craft them very carefully he also used very expensive pigments he wasn't it appears painting for the open market like like a lot of artists were doing he seems to have had his clients that he could have spent many many many hours on one individual painting and these are the kinds of paintings he did of the working class the wonderful milkmaid the the painting that is in the Rijksmuseum becomes sort of a symbol of Holland and these edited is so carefully that you just almost can hear the trickle of milk coming out of the pitcher there all your attention goes on to the focus which is the focus of that young woman there so carefully crafted or the same thing in this great painting from the Louvre of the lace maker and he does not give us a literal image in fact I almost hate to tell you but he has exaggerated the head of that woman her Harris that is going up to get a more beautiful design think about it it doesn't really make sense three dimensionally but two dimensionally it does work well and this is the crafting of his works and I should point out right from the get-go that many of these works are rather small some only this big well Vermeer died in 1675 as I mentioned and from there from then on until the middle of the 19th century few people knew of him you do find his name in auctions when his works are being sold but he was not the household name is today the person who first put him on the map for modern times is Tory Berger this art historian Frenchman in Paris who started collecting his works he owned those three works that you see on the screen next to a photograph of him and he published the articles that really made the world look at these works while there are not many works by Vermeer when he was first published in the nineteenth century they thought they would find many many more so you are probably where the fun megaron scandal where Omega and imitated Vermeer was caught during World War two so some have come to light but not any in recent times in fact there are only about 34 paintings by Vermeer now probably the beauty of him being discovered late is that a major portion of those are in America that's that's because the Americans had the money during these great industrial boom when we're creating our great collections our museums etc and we have about a little over a third of those works to look at of course there was one in Boston which sadly was stolen has not been retrieved yet the concert when he was taken away from the Gardner Museum in 1990 but today Vermeer is clearly a rock star I mean everyone knows Vermeer like they know Vincent van Gogh and he's in books he's on the big screen some of you have probably read the book the girl with the Pearl Earring although we now wonder if it's really pearl or if it is pewter our historians love to upset the applecart in any case traces valuate did a great job I think of researching the Delft in the 17th century I think Vermeer came up off a little bit like a wuss but anyway really took you back to that wonderful Golden Age Vermeer has since been studied from many different spectres for example the musical instruments which are so well defined in his paintings whether it's a clavichord guitar or you name it he's been studied from the standpoint of religion he was baptized in the Reformed Dutch Reformed Church but he did become Catholic when he married a woman from the Utrecht area which was the Catholic town and apparently was quite loyal to the Catholic religion we'll look at this painting more in depth later on as I said these paintings are relatively small the ones you're seeing here only about this big beautifully crafted and many of them seem to have been depicted as I said painted in the same room and our historians have studied what they think is the room you can see these perspectival drawings of a painting that we're going to look at in more detail because it does have a great map in it you can see the drawing to the right where you have an overview of it and then a side angle and this is quite important as you'll see later because it shows you very clearly that the map which seems to be right over the head of the girl or the young woman is actually about the same distance as that woman is from the man this is an early work by Vermeer and he seems to still be finding his way in fact before I did my research some people identified that map as a an atlas map and you'll see it's much bigger than that another area that's gotten a lot of attention of late is the I should say optical effects that we see in Vermeer's paintings take for example this really small painting at the National Gallery in London in Washington DC if you look for example that the highlights on her pearl earrings or even her lips or the finials of the chair these are highlights that you might associate with photography and some there is this thought that did Vermeer actually use the forerunner of the modern camera the camera obscura which literally means darkroom where if you go into a dark room you put them in the wall what his outside will be reflected upside down on the back wall and of course you start introducing lenses you get a sharper image and we know that they were working with lenses Antony van Leeuwenhoek who invented the microscope was a close friend of Vermeer they're actually they're born in the same year of their their name is entered in lead in the church document on the same page a person who's really run with this is Tim Jenison you may know him from the full-length feature movie Tim's Vermeer where he made a copy shall we say of the painting on the Left which is in the Queen's collection in England and Tim Jenison would be the first to say he is not an artist he was a software engineer who became who made a fortune and had so much money that he could literally create a studio in Texas create the musical instrument in this painting all the things and set it up like Vermeer would have seen it and then have people pose and over a year created this painting using not necessarily a camera obscura but a mirror device and I'm showing how Vermeer got these luminous effects this is still up for a lot of debate but here you can see his work compared to the painting in the Buckingham Palace in any case Vermeer was certainly aware of the camera obscura one of my colleagues who is at the National Gallery who has been there for a long time and did one of the big Vermeer shows Arthur Wheelock when I was at BU he was at Harvard working on the Delft and the optics use of optics and he would probably say that they were probably more imitating the effects they saw through the camera obscura in fact it'd be very hard to get into a dark box and paint a picture not only would you have to stand on your head but the colors wouldn't match when you took them out into natural daylight anyway a lot to think about there and of course the maps I'll never forget thee when I was at Boston University Susan Koretsky who was my professor there who's still at Vassar College her alma mater I did a seminar on Vermeer with her and one of the topics was Vermeer and cartography well like you I've always loved maps I thought this is this is made for me and I took it and then I had the opportunity to go to Holland for a week after that semester and found one of the maps in his paintings and thought if I can do that in a week but I could do in a year and then going from the crest fellowship to do that but I do remember coming back to Boston and giving a lecture probably to a similar audience well not no not a similar audience but I'll never forget a woman coming up to me afterwards and first of all probably saying where are you from and I would say Iowa as we do and she said oh we pronounce that Ohio out here and then when you then when you say that you say no I mean Iowa are you sure you don't mean Idaho you know you just give up then in any case we know it now because we have the caucuses but it was a bus Sounion like that who said to me and what was your dissertation topic I mean how many times do you get asked that at a cocktail party it had to be a New Englander and I said Vermeer and cartography Oh she had a big sigh she said oh don't tell me he had heart trouble no anyway it was actually Tory Berger who was the first to comment on what he called Vermeer's mania for maps and maps do appear in about a third of his works of art and all of these maps and pictures coincide with the great age of Dutch map making I know you're well aware of that it was an amazing time for the Dutch who were literally charting the world it's just incredible to think about going out on these ships not knowing if you're ever going to get back going way around the world I think the only thing that we can equate it with is probably what we're doing in outer space and I don't think we're aware of what we're doing out there you know zillions of miles away we collect some of that photography at the Worcester Art Museum and when our curator tells me the number of light years or whatever I just want to go home and take a nap I mean it's just unbelievable well somewhat similar in 17th century Holland their ships were all around the world bringing back information that made these great maps that we see the map makers using here and of course Amsterdam became a major city for the production of maps now a lot of this information was under lock and key as some of you know they talk about discovering a river in Africa in the 18th century and we know that the Dutch knew about in the 17th century it was on one of the Dutch East India Maps but it was under lock and key they were everywhere around the world here for example you can see in Indonesia Batavia these great colonies which the Dutch had or up into the Arctic and these are these great paintings that would be done at the same time bringing the world home this wonderful aerial view of Amsterdam is like a map I mean you think they had airplanes back then but they didn't in fact they couldn't build tall buildings in Holland because much of the land is reclaimed from the sea and was the when the City Hall was built in the 17th century is called the 8th wonder of the world it was amazing but they could only do that by putting a lot of pilings underneath sort of like Boston actually and I'd like to show you this aerial view of Holland of Amsterdam Nellie because for me the maps were produced there but also because so much of that land was reclaimed from the sea and that's important because that contributes to maps being getting out-of-date very quickly just as the information coming from around the world adding new information maps get outdated quickly and that's something we'll a focus on when we're looking for mirrors maps well one of the areas that I've done a lot of work on his world as wall maps and very sadly there are very few that remain today some estimates may be only well over 50 well preserved and most of them are not preserved well this is one that I located in a the sacramental library in California and only one edition at the time known Peter Fonda cares wall Memphis 1611 and a talk that I've given some time ago is in many ways these are like the world wide web that we know today because if you go back and look at them you have the world there but you have all these windows all around the map taking you into different countries showing you the people showing you their capital cities etc a great resource almost like um maybe when we were growing up a set of a home set of encyclopedia but of course we now have our computers and our internet that bring the world to our desktop as I mentioned Vermeer capitalized on map making as a subject in his paintings he wasn't the only one to use maps they appear in many Dutch pictures in fact that was my dissertation to focus on all the map makers all the painters who use maps in their paintings but no one no one does them as detailed and as specifically as Vermeer well let's start with one of his earliest paintings it's a painting that many of you probably have seen at the Frick Collection in New York the officer and the laughing girl an early work and there you see on the back wall this large map that looks rather small because it seems to be closer to the woman in front of it you could identify this map by just looking at his painting because there's a Latin inscription that close up you can read and it says new and accurate map of Holland and West Friesland but many people today might not recognize Holland Andrus Friesland why do you think North is not at the top North is to the right north at the top is after all only a convention if mapmaking would have taken off in Australia we'd be looking at ourselves from the bottom up yeah hard to think that but in any they put these maps in more of an artistic way in a way or how it made sense to put the land formation and for the Dutch the North Sea would be at the top that would be at the top of you were doing a landscape for example the wall or the ocean be at the top of the painting if you look out to the North Sea let's look at that map closer well there it is and you can see all the ships and the season which they say all the names are given there and here's the original map you can see it's very accurate in fact the only map that we know of that exists and this is the case with most of painting the maps in Vermeer's paintings maybe only one two or three but not more original survived there's only one that survives today that was put together it's in a museum in North Holland in Hoorn the museum there and it's in not great condition as you can Madison it's faded there's little holes in it where I think silver fish have eaten part of the paper etc just imagine if you had a wall map in your grade school it probably doesn't exist today where as atlas maps are much better preserved well you here can bring that diagram back and you can see that it is much further back on the back wall now let's look at the map close-up because this is made up of many different sheets the central part is from engraved copper plates okay how many do you think make up that central part of the map quite a shot 22 engraving plates and they're about this big yeah so you can imagine if a map maker is going to put that much effort into engraving these copper plates he's got to produce lots of wall maps to get his money back his return right and you will see as we go on maybe these copper plates got in the hands of other map makers later on and got updated not always geographically actually more often decorative which also will tell us something and then this map includes text on three sides Dutch French and Latin and that's printed on paper as well so these different sheets of paper would be mounted to a canvas glued on and then a hand colored and then varnish okay and often put on rollers and the reason for rollers you could roll them up but also the rollers would keep it away from the wall so humidity and that would not be so much a factor is there anything else you might as map people notice about that wall map it's something that I commented on early on in the 70s but no one had ever thought about and it just amazed me the land is blue I don't think ever does the net maker use blue for the always for the water not for the land well it resident originally blue it was probably green and Vermeer used a blue and then put a yellow layer over it to make green but over time that yellow that he used was rather fugitive and we see this in a lot of Dutch paintings we see it in one of Vermeer's two outdoor scenes for example the little street in the Rijksmuseum if you look at the foliage there you can see that it's turned blue it was originally green we call that blue sickness you see it in a lot of still lifes from 17th century Holland well Vermeer used this map another time in this painting at the Rijksmuseum and you can see here the map looks entirely different in fact you may not think it's the same map but trust me it is I've scrutinized that painting and you can even see little wrinkles and folds that he captures on that's the paper surface that correspond with the other painting let's bring the map back and one of the reasons it looks somewhat different is it's a only about half of the map is showing but he's orchestrated it in such a way that is now reduced to ochre tones that complements his blue and yellow scheme that is so popular in many of his paintings just like this rectilinear design is so such a favorite of Vermeer it's this map that he used a third time can you find it it's off to the left there here you'll see it you're seeing the lower right portion actually it's on a stained wall you can see the stains coming down and here you have a woman not reading a letter but about to receiving a letter under a landscape and a seascape now one questions did Vermeer own this map because you think about it it's in one of his earliest works about 1657 it's in this painting from mid-career and this one toward the end of his career well in fact we don't know if he owned it or if he borrowed it and there is an inventory none of Vermeer's estate when he died in 1675 it doesn't mention any Maps no cartographic material but it does mention a lot of paintings by other artists as well because he was even an art shop and here to bring to show you a small sketch by the under Brian painter you can see in this shop which is something you like you might find in Sturbridge Village today where they sold everything a general store you can see they're looking at paintings on the wall they're selling everything from fabric to you name it and up on the back you see cartographic material so Vermeer could have bought and sold maps another map of the Netherlands that and this is the first one that I was able to discover so many years ago now this is a painting in the Metropolitan Museum in New York I still remember seeing this in a one of my readers in grade school and I loved Dutch painting then I guess but I always wondered wonder if that map could be identified it looks so real so specific well it is a real map and here it is and it's the Netherlands it's the North and the South this is showing North to the right and of course the Netherlands a very interesting country at this time because the southern Netherlands by the end of the 16th century remained loyal to Spain Catholic whereas the north through the eighty years war broke away and became Protestant and became the new Dutch Republic the seven provinces versus the ten provinces from the south now here's where we get to see and you can see how specific it is you can identify the map mainly by the cartoons but if you look there if you look closely you have what we call in our history some pentimenti the singers Pentimento it comes from the Italian word Penta right which means to repent or change your mind it's basically when an artist covers up an original and earlier design because he wants to improve the painting art historians love discovering pentimenti because it usually means not absolutely sure but usually means you're not looking at a copy but you're looking at the original well what happens is that those under designs because paint becomes more transparent over the years sometimes those under designs come through and you can see them without using x-ray or infrared photography and there are a couple pentimenti in this painting can you find them I'll help you out I've outlined them in white you can see the map was originally behind the woman's head and there was a chair in the foreground think about it and here I'll show you a a modern version someone did a black and white illustration working from that x-ray and everything can you imagine doing all that detail on the map and then moving it he was rather a no yeah you're not about to do that right yeah you leave it as it is but you would not have the powerful picture that he has look at that how he edited that it's so powerful this is that beautiful world the world in which yes there's a woman but the real protagonist is the light in the painting and we know that Vermeer was using very expensive pigments on that back wall he was using lapis lazuli which is an ultramarine blue that comes from Afghanistan can you imagine the cost of getting it up to north-holland it's rarely used in paintings and usually in religious paintings only for the Madonna because she's so special but he obviously had clients or was redoing these works on retainer yeah well Vermeer is not the only one to use this map you see it in this painting by Pieter de Hulk another Delft painter contemporary Vermeer who went off to Amsterdam to work and you see it on the back wall there here you see it a little differently in that it has a little text underneath it they're sort of hard probably to make out in the slide but this is an interesting map to discuss because it was first published by Jacques Han Dias in 1630 and then the copper plates were taken over by another mapmaker hull collar and reissued the man who had reassured it again in 1671 now if you could see all the geography in great detail you would discover that there were no changes in the geography and there should have been because they were whole during that was going on at that time but there is a change in the ornamentation and the major change is the main cartouche you can see in homelesses map is a Mannerist design it's an old-fashioned design it's a really a style of the 16th century one wonders if he didn't get the place from someone earlier even and how collar updates it and puts a much more baroque style design more nationalistic and more naturalistic that's interesting and something I'm paying more attention to because as you will see many of these maps that Vermeer uses date much earlier in the 17th century which invites us to think about why is he using these maps why do we use maps we use them for decoration a lot too right well let's we'll get into that Vermeer used other subjects besides the Netherlands I think this is very obvious to you it's the map of Europe this is a painting in the Metropolitan Museum in New York the lute player moon with a lute and it's a great wall map that um was first published by yokas Han Dias in 1613 and then Yellin blah took it over reissued the map again and the only thing he did was change his name the and of course the date is now 16:59 long time in between now premieres painting is very detailed but even in Vermeer's painting we can't see the name of the author here otherwise we could say which Edition it is there you see the the map and this is one of the remaining examples you can see it's not in great condition the first time I saw the original map of this was at the British Museum there were three great atlases were put together in the 17th century as political gifts and one went to the King of England and they were made up of wall map so it's a huge book and I remember the pleasure I had when they rolled it out on a big wheeler and then opened it one page at a time and I was able to see this map of Europe since then other editions have been found well the most ambitious map that appears in Vermeer's painting happily appears in his most ambitious composition and the saw work that's been written about a lot this may be some of you've seen it how many have seen this this is in the Quinta storage Museum in Vienna it was confiscated by Hitler the Nazis put it in the salt mines it survived and it's just one of the great treasures of the 17th century let's look at the map this map had been identified before I start working on it and it was identified the central part only which you can see here it's a map of the Netherlands I think you're getting to know the country with north of the top north to the right West at the top and it's made into a very elaborate wall map with all this decoration on the side and we do know that there were catalogues at this time saying that you can get a map made up in any way you want you want a French text Latin Tet Dutch attacks do you want side views do you want courses on the top you want you know royal figures you name it Vermeer was not the only Dutch painter to feature this map in his paintings it appears in three paintings by Jakob octave Ellen and I'm very grateful for the fact that octave alt used maps in his paintings because this was the dissertate he was the dissertation of my mentor Susan Kraske and that's why she put maps in that Vermeer seminar because she was fascinated by the maps and because of them in Jakob Bach develop but you can see in his paintings it's just this simple version of that map sometimes with the text in these cases it's a framed map but not the elaborate that you see here you can see better than map but let's go back to Vermeer's painting and we're gonna reconstruct this now in fact it's says something about Vermeer's detail that through his painting i am able to reconstruct a lost wall map a map that doesn't exist in its entirety anymore in any case I did do research and put that all together and then my colleague in how and so you may know gunther shielder who's done tremendous work in Holland the great special Sun doctor cartography many years later he found I couldn't I remember so well when he probably didn't email me then that sent me a letter I found a version of that map in a in skull cluster Sweden and then in a drawer I'm gonna show it to you one to show you how much these maps have suffered there you see a black and white photograph of it it's in it's in pieces there at the bottom what I couldn't wait to see us the town views or wouldn't you know it included only ten on one side doesn't include ten on the other side it doesn't also include men on horseback at the top so it's more elaborate in that sense that map has since been restore you can see it here but thanks to researched it was able to put together all the own views on the side the thanks to the detail of Vermeer's painting let's look at that central part more closely because rather fascinating it's made up of nine copper or nine sheets in printed from a copper plates we're gonna focus on this one it was my pure luck when I was doing research one day at the the University of Amsterdam library in their map room and I came across the map the sheet on the Left which is the only sheet we know of from the original version of this map and it's by the Yun fender to come and look at the date 1594 now class Johnson Fisher takes over those copper plates and produces a map we think about 1630 okay and the interesting thing is that the only difference between the sheet on the left and the one on the right is the cartouche no changes in the typography yeah and you'll see that the cartouche on the right is much more nationalistic with its lion or Leo Belkis the symbol of all the seven provinces and naturalistic whereas you got all that strap work much more Mannerist in design now this would not affect us so much because we say they're both good-looking but the work on the left would have been considered very old-fashioned by the 1630s think about if you were living with material that your grandparents had on their walls you'd probably want to update it a little bit if there's no master painting you would keep it I'm sure in any case we're gonna look at another cartouche and it's up at the upper-left corner look at it in detail here because it tells you a lot about map making in the 17th century it was both a science and an hour you can see the science part represented by the woman holding a measuring stick compass etc and then on the right you see a woman with a palette painter's palette a maul stick to study her hand and then also a with a town view on it not so different from the town views you see on the sides of the map so it is so wonderful that in Vermeer's most complex and one of his largest paintings that he preserved for us this great map from the 17th century well this map might have been featured in another painting we think and that is this painting you don't see it today but it probably was in there originally an x-ray show as we can see on the left here there was a map behind that woman and even in spite of all the detail that went into it he painted it out again the maps tell us a lot about his editing and here I'll bring back that map here you can see I think make out a little bit the town views on the left or bring back the reconstruction I made you can see it there here again if you look at the painting you can see he not only got rid of the map but he also got rid of the musical instrument on the chair this is the beauty of her mirror I'm always remember one of my teachers said if I had more time I'd write you a shorter letter editing editing reduction reduction you get that's very get to the beauty as I tell my students writing is difficult but it's only the right word in the right place yeah don't use so many words premiere that's the beauty of his paintings well one might wonder about the maps and his paintings are they more than just decoration we do know that many art historians have talked about not just for Mir but documented that many of the background objects are symbolic in these paintings take for example this painting by Vermeer in the National Gallery in DC there's a woman holding a balance and immediately behind her is a painting of the Last Judgement I think anyone could make the connection between the two here that um he's making a comment on the idea of justice and also temperance the Dutch used paintings to teach Calvinism permeates these paintings they suck you in with a very secular subject and it might be a subject like a bordello or a whorehouse and they'll teach you about moderation in all things this is how they worked in any case we might want to look at the paintings of her mirrors with his maps to see whether the paintings are symbolic well first of all what is this painting all about it's not a portrait of Vermeer in the studio it's an allegorical painting someone suggested by the the drapery pulled back is revealing actually something from the past and the the costume that the painter is wearing is ver Gandhian it's from the 16th century in fact when I finally got to Vienna to see this painting I noticed something that people had not looked coming on that the the blocks are two different colors in his dress and probably detect that in slide but he's just cobbled together here a costume which for him is from the earlier days the woman in front of the map is no ordinary woman she's an allegorical figure she is Cleo the muse of history and that's why she's holding a trumpet and holding the book of Thucydides the father of history and a nice little detail here is that she's wearing a crown of laurel leaves why laurel because Laurel always remains green right people who are should be famous should be famous forever in history and I wish we did know history better today than we then some people do but the irony of it here is that the blue the leaves are now blue it's a good example again of that blue sickness where they were originally green but the yellow has disappeared well what about the map in the painting is a symbolic I think it is I think and most art historians have interpreted the painting as this is the artist looking at history and is through history that we are able to capture the ideal you know it's like Monday morning quarterbacking it's when you step back you see what's really important history yeah don't send that email immediately think it over look at it even one minute later you might want to edit it in any case this is the concept behind this painting well the map is perfect because the map is a map of the seventeen provinces in which gradually divided during the late 16th and 17th century and one of the bloodiest wars in the history of mankind the eighty years war already by the early 17th century the Dutch at the were considered independent from Spain but it really wasn't concluded until 1648 with the Treaty of Minster and a little detail that I think is probably not by accident knowing how careful Vermeer is that there's a crack in that map as you can see and it happens to go right down the middle of that map going right through the town of Breda which is one of the strategic cities during the eighty years war separating the north from the south well there's one map or one painting in Vermeer's paintings that we know was used allegorically and this is an an allegory somewhat similar to them you've just looked at with a curtain separating it from us it's called the allegory of faith it's at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and I know the next time you go there you're going to scrutinize that globe as I have and Vermeer here it was Catholic at this time basically followed a recipe book and these books that painters use would tell you how to depict an allegorical figure and in this book by Jason Ripa and says if you're going to depict the figure of faith she should have her foot on the earth well for Vermeer who be none other than a real terrestrial globe right and I'm going to show you that close-up the globe and a real globe by your danke Schoen Dias photographed at the same angle which is important now you can have to bear with me but this is shows you some of the detail in Vermeer's work this globe was published in three editions first in 1600 and then in 1617 the Dutch discovered the coastline of Australia and put that on this globe and other maps as well and then in 1627 prince Marit of orange passed away and that large cartouche which is right in the center there was removed from the globe because he was deceased well we can date this globe specifically because if you look closely and don't get too close the guard will probably chase you away from this painting but you can see the coastline of Australia in Vermeer's painting yeah it's that detail yeah and that's nice because now we have more evidence that he's using older older cartographic material and as I said the cartouche was removed does he put that upfront for us because it's a symbol of transitoriness of life you know one of the most common theme in Dutch painting is the passing of life a vana toss if you will that even if you're the head of the country you will die someday sort of a memento mori kind of symbol also Vermeer puts the foot of faith on Asia which at that time was considered outside the Christian world yeah okay well if the globe is maybe is is symbolic what about the other maps it's more difficult to come up with a real answer I spend a lot of time writing on this but let's think about this one you've got a map on the back wall this couple enjoying each other in this light filled room we know that that map appeared in two other paintings one reading a ladder receiving a letter what about these maps one woman looking out the window another woman looking out the window with another watering pitcher but also a musical instrument well they may relate to a very common theme in Dutch art one that dates back to the Middle Ages very popular among the Dutch and German artists called FRA veldt or lady world and this print which comes with a large text I'm only showing the print which explains this particularly print I'm not making this stuff up you can see there's a young man grasping the arm of the woman and she's got a lot of cleavage she also has a globe on her head an orb and she represents the world I'm sorry for women but they're always the evil people in these older paintings hopefully that's going to change but they are seducing this man and then if you look in the background and the text talks about this you got the old man thing young man be careful of worldly pleasures in fact you don't even you're not even grasping the woman you're grasping her bracelet he's being pretty technical I would say well does the map on the back wall represent worldliness here is this woman a prostitute she could well be she has her hand out maybe she's asking for money we know of many many pings from 17th century Holland of bordellos come to Westeros ium we have a great Dutch collection we have a couple of them out there so that could be the case here's a good example by another painter young means Molinar this is a painting at the Toledo Museum in Ohio and and clearly this is lady world you can see that she has her foot on a skull she's looking in a mirror she's holding a ring and then particularly important in front of her is a boy blowing bubbles bubbles are here today are one second and gone the next and there's all these elements of worldliness now I know that you people would be noticing on the back wall a map but notice how its positioned such that the Western Hemisphere appears right above her head and this is an an original map it's by young Antonius a world map that have been able to identify in any case what about this painting the map was painted out but it is clearly a very tossed picture the woman is looking into a mirror holding a Pearl Earring or a pearl necklace as all about this theme but premier has edited down so much we have to know that but in the 17th century they would know that this is a picture of a nataas well we do know that Vermeer must have had the opportunity to observe map makers making these maps in fact this painting which is in front fern as a beautiful illustration of a man surrounded by cartographic material in his study in his workshop probably the same room that was used for those other works in this case he's staging these people and objects and props but what's important is the man is looking out the window and capturing that world on paper bringing the world home and if you look on the back wall you'll see there's a framed map it is a postcard as they're called here you can see the best one I can connect with it is by Blau and here you see it framed up I'm gonna bring up the detail of it these are often on parchment and the reason I think is that they were often taken to sea because they were designed to be used at sea you can see again West is at the top and you could probably make out Spain and France and Italy and the only thing that's really recorded on this map are all the coastal towns and then all those rum lines that enable people to navigate to navigate themselves around the the Atlantic and the Baltic in the Mediterranean world well we do know from these catalogues that they promoted these maps for framing and hanging up in your home and you can see if you look closely this has tacking edges all around it so it would be probably like the one in Vermeer's painting with a black frame around it you'll notice on the back wall there is a terrestrial globe no surprise it's the same terrestrial globe that we saw in the allegory of faith but now you can see it's not with the cartouche is toward us and it's not it's now in a stand treated like a scientific instrument and interesting enough you have the East Indies facing us very important to the Dutch with their East Indies companies well another painting by Vermeer that were quite sure were pendants when they were painted they may not look the same because the geographer and I know many of you saw this recently because it was at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts for the class distinction show on loan from the the Louvre I first saw it in the Russian collection in Paris I will never forget that because I had to go there to see the original course I was graciously welcomed into this home and remembered my Dutch family who I was living with said do you know that Ross field is like Rockefeller in America yeah ok but and what I did learn is that to get a detailed photographs of that globe I had to use their photographer and I think I spent most of my fellowship getting photographs of that particular globe in any case I was able to identify the globe before I leave this painting I should tell you that this painting still has a very discolored varnish on it I don't know if any conservator or museum won't venture to clean it but I think the two ropes were originally the same colour blue it's probably the same man there have been efforts to identify the man some people say and see if I may of one who it could be just a neighbor of Vermeer we don't know it's probably someone who was willing to stand for a long time in any case or sit for a long time but here we see a close-up and here you can see the globe I was fortunate to get the photographer to photograph this holiest globe in the same position you can make out the constellations they're the Big Bear for example or Lyra etc and if you look you can see that the globe is surrounded by other instruments such as the astrolabe at the foot of it and then there's a compass on the table let's bring that up in detail but what may surprise you and it's only to Vermeer's credit not to mine that I was able to identify the book in this painting not difficult to do actually came back from a year of research in hell and and I was waiting for a book at the National at the front at the National librarian in Washington DC and it took some time to get that book meanwhile I said why don't I go to the card catalog and look to see because I knew there were books on how to use maps and globes and you know card catalogs include the size of the book and I knew how big that book was because I could I knew how big the globe was first card I pulled out was this was this book that's you're gonna see here there it is then I learned that there were two editions of it oh and I had to wait till I went back to Holland about a year later to be able to put the two editions together they weren't in the same library here in America there were two different libraries in Leiden but the the library and I was working with brought them both to the same room and we saw them together and it was great because there was a change on the page that's opened in Vermeer's painting and you can see it the inscription at the top is different and there's a the date 16 14 and 16 21 now lest you doubt me I'm going to show you it here in black and white where you can see there's a astrolabe there that is quite clear in the and the first thing I don't have the sharpest detail there but trust me it's the same book now what's in there you see it in black and white maybe a little clearer what's significant about all this is that so much of the cartographic material is out of date and Vermeer is using it for example the globe 1618 both of them I suspect the the bluff and Burke and wrote a map 1621 the the book about 1621 or 1620 and these appear in these paintings and there's their dates much much later forty years later yeah so one wonders is Vermeer and he is toward the end of the Golden Age and it does come to an end like all golden ages the French become very powerful as he reflecting back on this incredible time in Holland about the great age of mapmaking the great age of everything almost in this new Dutch Republic as a painter who painted the picture that you see on the screen you can imagine him doing that but the beauty is he's painting the everyday world and that's significant because genre painting scenes of everyday life were the one of the greatest contributions of the the Dutch at this time well what about in these two paintings are they allegories well they could well be they were bought and sold together up until the 18th century and just like the paintings the Globes exhibit a pendent relationship terrestrial and celestial Globes were published together and they were expensive a pair of globes like this that size would cost about 32 guilders that would be about them a month's salary of a cloth worker in Delft at that time okay well are these paintings more than John Racine's as the great his art historian horse Gerson said could they be allegories of the application of the human thought to the problems of the earth and the universe certainly the spirit of Investigation that's an evident in all of Vermeer's paintings in which uses maps but certainly in these is captured not only in his paintings but carries over into our own time so specifically he captures the Wonder and excitement of using cartographic material at this time there is a contemporary of premier Samuel fan Hoke Stratton who said about the same time and I love it he said how beautiful a good map is where and you can see the world as from another world thanks to the art of drawing and we're doing that today in outer space this kind of excitement for capturing the world both in time and spirit coincides with Vermeer's fascination with specific maps and globes which certainly has left us one of the richest records of Holland's Golden Age of Dutch map making thank you the question is could it be that the maps out date maps were cheaper and for an artist to have a prop I think you're that it could well be true and maybe something we never can verify that he's actually trying for example you saw how you cobbled together that costume of the painter well I don't know how accurate he would be with the costumes of going back to the early 17th century you see I want to do our research on that because that is fascinating and then there's the whole factor that we know that outdated maps were on these walls that they were being used for decorative purposes right and it's so interesting if you go into a CEO CEOs office and he has them he or she has a map on the wall it's probably an old map right we love these maps and they probably were starting to love those old maps for the same reason you know does Vermeer use wall maps more than other artists I would say yes in that sense of a third of his paintings and so about 34 paintings but you do find them on a lot in a lot of genre paintings and Vermeer also and I haven't focused on those but uses a lot of paintings in his interest and it's very interesting the one that used to be at the Gardner Museum that I showed you the concert the painting on the back wall there is in the boss Museum of Fine Arts it was always so nice to the shore our students we go to that museum you can see it in the 17th century painting and the important point about that is that the painting on the back wall in that musical composition yes from the 1620s as well yeah and probably came down through his mother-in-law who is quite wealthy who came from the Utrecht and it's a by a Utrecht painter so yeah there's a lot of things to answer but you do see for example in the early 17th century people like Derrick Hollis was the brother of better known in France house uses a lot of maps in his paintings and you will see people looking at them and some of his paintings on the back wall but never the map is never as detailed as as they aren't Vermeer's paintings in fact Van Meegeren who faked Vermeer as you know during world war ii he did at least one painting I know a map in and it's clearly not a Vermeer he's just saw a summer Airy summer early it depicts the cartographic material in the painting the the cost of wall maps would you find them in genre painting in general what Vermeer is painting out of the upper class except for like the milkmaid and and the lace maker you do find maps in all kinds of shops like a blacksmith the shoemaker texto not elaborate one so it might be just a sheet map tacked to the wall and we do know that one of the people from England who was visiting Holland said that you could find paintings in every kind of shop they were very affordable in a way yeah unlike Vermeer many artists were paying for the open market and you know they weren't cheap but I mean you could buy two or three or four or five guilders at what we say I'm 32 guilders was the salary of a worker for a month a textile worker but you could buy paintings four five and six guilders so you could have a painting by the type ramírez painting the Dutch are so rich that you could get a client and not have to work for that open market and the beauty of that is then you could use expensive pigments and you could spend more time you could edit you could paint over the map and start over again the for example if some paint to the open market would never use those balloons never in fact most of the things were selling very cheap they are really earth colors whoever it may look more colorful than it is but when you look at its many brown talents yeah this has been studied many for many perspectives premieres on patronage with Michael Mattias the economist at Yale University who did incredible research in the archives in Delft was almost an embarrassment to the Dutch because they had scrutinized those archives but he went in as an economist looking at you know inventories and all that and was able to find that 21 of her Mears paintings that's more than half were in one family in the in the 18th century now we can't verify that that family commissioned all those in fact we can't say that but it sounds like you know he was very coveted as part people loved his work when will you pay high prices you know he had a tough life I'm he had eleven children died his wife gave birth I think 16 children or more but you know paying the Baker's bill was quite a problem and we know that he was sought after the famous men from Paris who went to Holland montanita by heart went to the hague and then went out to Delft to find Vermeer and he couldn't find Vermeer but he did see a painting that was owned by the Baker but people were seeking him out but still his wife you know the struggling when he passed away yeah any other questions okay well thank you very much I really appreciate your attention [Applause] while we do not tend to think of run-run juarez an Orientalist in this period of the 1870s we think of him instead as really a painter who offered us a certain kind of Frenchness in his scenes of countryside and cafe con ser

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Keywords: Boston, WGBH, art, painting, jan vermeer, maps, globes, worcester art museum, boston public library, camera obscura, dutch, holland

Id: Fkwl_lEJDf0

Length: 61min 41sec (3701 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 30 2016