Vermeer's Hat

by Timothy Brook

  Within a few decades, the VOC proved itself to be the most powerful trading corporation in the seventeenth-century world and the model for the large-scale business enterprises that now dominate the global economy. Its monogram also became the best-known company trademark of that age, possibly in fact the first global logo. The company-wide monogram consisted of the company’s three initials with a V (Verenigde) in the middle and an O (Oostindische) and a C (Compagnie) overlapping its two antennae. It was left for each chamber to add its own initial by placing it above or below the VOC initials. The Delft Chamber placed its D (Delft) over the bottom point of the V, producing a monogram that can still be seen today on the façade of the former Delft Chamber offices on the west side of the Old Delft Canal. The chamber acquired this building in 1631. Over time it added other buildings to it, each decorated with the same monogram. The original buildings have long since been converted into private apartments—the VOC went bankrupt in the 1790s and was disbanded in 1800—but its logo is still there to remind us of this history. Universally familiar to the Dutch, it gives the long-defunct company a virtual presence in the Netherlands even today.

  Everyone in seventeenth-century Delft would have known where the Delft Chamber was located. The VOC was too important to the Delft economy for this not to be common local knowledge. If any of them stood with me on the far side of the harbor from the point at which the Old Delft Canal passed under the Capels Bridge between the Schiedam and Rotterdam gates and emptied into the Kolk, they could have pointed out the red tiled roofs of the VOC warehouse and office complex without difficulty. So too they could have turned to point south down the canal in the direction of Delfshaven, Schiedam, and Rotterdam, the town’s maritime ports on the mouth of the Rhine. This stretch of Delft constituted the town’s commercial face, the place from which its citizens traded with the world. Once we have noticed the VOC’s presence, View of Delft begins to strike us as less merely decorative, less casual in its choice of subject, more intentional.

  Despite the VOC’s visibility in the painting, as in Delft, there is no evidence that Vermeer himself had a personal connection with his subject. His grandfather was almost bankrupted speculating in VOC shares in the Company’s early years, after which the family had nothing to do with it. But no Delft family could truly escape the VOC. Vermeer’s father, Reynier Vos (the family had not yet adopted the surname Vermeer at the time Reynier was born), an art dealer and innkeeper, may not have worked for the Company, but his trade depended on serving those who passed through Delft, and most of those came on Company business. So too a painter could well find himself within the orbit of the VOC. In Amsterdam, for instance, Rembrandt van Rijn collected fat fees to paint the portraits of VOC directors. But Vermeer didn’t do portraits on commission, so far as we know. Delft may have been a Company town, but Vermeer never became a Company painter.

  Though Vermeer never worked for the VOC, tens of thousands of Dutch people did. A team of Dutch historians has estimated that in the company’s first ten years of operations, which almost coincides with the first decade of the seventeenth century, eighty-five hundred men left the Netherlands on VOC ships. In every decade that followed, that total progressively increased. By the 1650s, over forty thousand were departing every ten years. Close to a million people made the sea journey from Holland to Asia during the two centuries between 1595 and 1795. Most were young men who preferred a post with the East India Company to staying and making do with crowded homes and limited patrimonies. Asia for them represented the hope of making better lives elsewhere. At least three of Vermeer’s cousins were among these VOC out-migrants. According to the will of his father’s brother, Dirck van der Minne, in 1675, a cousin named Claes was working as a “surgeon in the East Indies” and two first cousins once removed, Aryen and Dirck Gerritszoon van Sanen, Claes’s nephews, were “both in the East Indies” at the time the will was read.

  Not all this million passed through Delft on their way to the East but many thousands did, making their way down the canal to Rotterdam on the mouth of the Rhine. Vermeer would have encountered them while he was a child in his father’s inn and heard the boasts of those going out East and the tall tales of those coming home. To go was not always to come back. Indeed, the odds were against it. Of every three men who took ship to Asia, two did not return. Some died on the journey out, and many more succumbed to diseases against which they had no immunities after they arrived. But mortality was not the only factor that kept men from returning. Many chose to stay in Asia, some to avoid paying the cost of success or the shame of failure when they got home, others because they were able to make new lives in the places where they ended up and had no desire to return to what they had left behind. Despite the heavy toll of mortality on the company’s men, the VOC prospered, and with it the Netherlands.

  THE EUROPEAN CAPACITY TO MOUNT and sustain commercial operations on a global scale depended in no small part on new technologies accompanying maritime trade. The English polymath Francis Bacon in 1620 selected for special notice three “mechanical discoveries” that, in his view, “have changed the whole face and state of things throughout the world.” One such discovery was the magnetic compass, enabling navigators to sail out of sight of land and still guess where they were. Another was paper, which permitted merchants to keep the detailed records needed for multiple transactions and sustain the heavy correspondence that trade over long distances demands. The third discovery was gunpowder. Without the rapid advances arms manufacturers made in ballistics technology in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, European traders abroad would have been hard pressed to overwhelm local opposition to unwanted trade arrangements and protect the spoils of commerce. The VOC took advantage of all three innovations to build a network of trade that stretched all the way to East Asia. “No empire, no sect, no star,” Bacon asserted, “seems to have exerted greater power and influence on human affairs” than these three inventions.

  Bacon, famously unaware that all three discoveries came from China, noted that they were of “obscure and inglorious” origin. Had he been told their origin was Chinese, he would not have been surprised. Thanks to Marco Polo’s colorful descriptions in his Travels of the Mongol court in the later part of the fourteenth century, China held a powerful place in the popular imagination. Europeans thought of it as a place of power and wealth beyond any known scale. This idea led many to believe that the quickest route to China must also be the quickest route to their own wealth and power, and to pursue the search for that route. The quest to get to China was a relentless force that did much to shape the history of the seventeenth century, not just within Europe and China, but in most of the places in between. This is why China lurks behind every story in this book, even those that don’t at first glance seem to have anything to do with it. The lure of China’s wealth haunted the seventeenth-century world.

  The explosion of seventeenth-century migration was prefaced by an attraction for China that already had begun to shape European choices in the sixteenth century. The sixteenth was a century of discoveries and violent encounters, of windfalls and errors, of borders crossed and borders closed, creating a web of connections that spread in all directions. The seventeenth century was something different. First encounters were becoming sustained engagements; fortuitous exchanges were being systematized into regular trade; the language of gesture was being supplanted by pidgin dialects and genuine communication. Running through all these changes was the common factor of mobility. More people were in motion over longer distances and sojourning away from home for longer periods of time than at any other time in human history. More people were engaging in transactions with people whose languages they did not know and whose cultures they had never experienced. At the same time, more people were learning new languages and adjusting to unfamiliar customs. First contacts for the most part were over. The seventeenth was a century of second contacts.

  THE LOW COUNTRIES, ca. 1650

  With second contacts, the dynamic of enco
unter changes. Interactions become more sustained and likelier to be repeated. The effects they produce, however, are not simple to predict or understand. At times they induce a thorough transformation of everyday practices, an effect that Cuban writer Fernando Ortiz has called “transculturation.” At other times they provoke resistance, violence, and a loss of identity. In the seventeenth century, most second contacts generated effects that fall between these two extremes: selective adjustment, made through a process of mutual influence. Rather than complete transformation or deadly conflict, there was negotiation and borrowing; rather than triumph and loss, give and take; rather than the transformation of cultures, their interaction. It was a time when people had to adjust how they acted and thought in order to negotiate the cultural differences they encountered, to deflect unanticipated threats and respond cautiously to equally unexpected opportunities. It was a time not for executing grand designs, but for improvising. The age of discovery was largely over, the age of imperialism yet to come. The seventeenth century was the age of improvisation.

  The changes this impulse toward improvisation evoked were subtle but profound. Consider again Dong Qichang, the artist from Shanghai to whom I have referred. Dong Qichang’s was the first generation in China to see European prints. Jesuit missionaries brought some to China to convey their message in visual form and help converts imagine the life of Christ. In Dong’s own painting, 1597 marks a major shift in style that set the foundations for the emergence of modern Chinese art. It has been suggested that the visual devices in European prints may have impelled him toward this new style. Or take our artist from Delft. Vermeer was among the first generations of Dutch painters to see Chinese painting, rarely on silk or paper, more commonly on porcelain. It has been suggested that his use of “Delft blue,” his preference for off-white backgrounds to set off blue materials, his taste for distorting perspective and enlarging foregrounds (he does both in View of Delft), and his willingness to leave backgrounds empty betray a Chinese influence. Given what little we know of Vermeer, and how well we know it, it is unlikely that evidence will ever come to light that allows this suggestion to be proven or disproven. It is simply an idea of influence, but something that would have been an impossibility a generation earlier. Hints of intercultural influence of this sort, so fine as to be almost imperceptible, are just what we should learn to expect as we go back into the seventeenth century.

  Seen in this way, the paintings into which we will look to find signs of the seventeenth century might be considered not just as doors through which we can step to rediscover the past, but as mirrors reflecting the multiplicity of causes and effects that have produced the past and the present. Buddhism uses a similar image to describe the interconnectedness of all phenomena. It is called Indra’s net. When Indra fashioned the world, he made it as a web, and at every knot in that web is tied a pearl. Everything that exists or has ever existed, every idea that can be thought about, every datum that is true—every dharma, in the language of Indian philosophy—is a pearl in Indra’s net. Not only is every pearl tied to every other pearl by virtue of the web on which they hang, but on the surface of every pearl is reflected every other jewel in the net. Everything that exists in Indra’s web implies all else that exists.

  Vermeer would have appreciated the metaphor. He loved to put curved surfaces into his paintings and use them to reflect everything around them. Glass spheres, brass utensils, pearls—like the lenses he probably used to help him paint—were suitable for revealing realities beyond what was immediately there. In no less than eight of his pictures, Vermeer paints women wearing pearl earrings. And on these pearls he paints faint shapes and outlines hinting at the contours of the rooms they inhabit. No pearl is more striking than the one in the Girl with a Pearl Earring. On the surface of that large pearl—so large it was probably not a real pearl at all, but a glass teardrop varnished to give it a pearly sheen—we see reflected her collar, her turban, the window that illuminates her off to the left, and, indistinctly, the room where she sits.2 Look closely at one of Vermeer’s pearls, and his ghostly studio floats into view.

  This endless reflectivity, writ large, nods toward the greatest discovery that people in the seventeenth century made: that the world, like this pearl, was a single globe suspended in space. It was their burden to confront the idea of the world as an unbroken surface on which there is no place that cannot be reached, no place that is not implied by every other place, no event that belongs to any world but the one they now had to share. It was their burden as well to inhabit a reality imbued with a permanent restlessness, where people were in constant motion and things might travel half the globe just so that a buyer here could obtain what a maker there had made. These burdens forced people to think about their lives in fresh and unfamiliar ways. For some, such as Song Yingxing, the author of China’s first encyclopedia of technology, Exploitation of the Works of Nature (1637), this mobility was a sign of living in more open and better times. “Carriages from the far southwest may be seen traversing the plains of the far northeast,” he enthuses in the preface to his encyclopedia, and “officials and merchants from the south coast travel about freely on the North China Plain.” In the old days, you “had to resort to the channels of international trade to obtain a fur hat” from foreign lands, but now you could get one from your haberdasher down the street.

  For others, the emerging global mobility did not just redefine their idea of the world, but widened horizons and opened opportunities that would not have existed a few decades earlier. However much pleasure Song Yingxing gained from knowing that a new and wider world existed, he was fated to spend his life tucked away in the interior of China as an armchair surveyor of the world—so far from the ocean that he may never have even seen it, let alone sailed on it. Had the Chinese encyclopedist had the opportunities of a Dutchman of his generation, however, he might well have been someone like Willem Cornelisz Schouten. Schouten hailed from the Dutch port of Hoorn, home to many of the first generation of Dutch sea captains. He first circumnavigated the globe between 1615 and 1617, and then was back in Asian waters with the VOC in the 1620s. Schouten did not survive the long sea journey home across the Indian Ocean in 1625, however. He died of unrecorded causes just before his ship reached Antongil Bay on the east coast of Madagascar, and was buried there. An anonymous epitaph in verse epitomizes him as personifying the spirit of his age.

  In this our western world, where he was born and bred,

  Brave Schouten could not rest; his inmost soul afire

  Urged him to seek beyond, to voyage and strive ahead.

  The poet could have bemoaned brave Schouten’s death as a failure to return home to Hoorn, but he doesn’t. Instead, he celebrates this sailor’s death as a great success, the culmination of the global life he had chosen to live.

  ’Tis meet then that he lies i’ the world of his desire,

  Safe after all his travels. Oh great and eager mind,

  Repose in blessed peace!

  Dying abroad in the seventeenth century was not banishment from home for Schouten, but permanent residence in the world he desired. The only final end for Schouten, should he ever tire of Madagascar, was not Hoorn but heaven.

  . . . Yet if they soul refuse

  In narrow Antongil for e’er to stay confined,

  Then (as in earthly life so fearless thou didst choose

  The unknown channel ’twixt the seas of East and West,

  Outstripping the sun’s course by a whole day and night),

  Ascend thou up, this time surpassing the sun’s height,

  And find in heaven with God hope and eternal rest.

  The commanding passion of the seventeenth century, on both sides of the globe, was to navigate “the unknown channel ’twixt the seas of East and West”; to reduce that once unbridgeable distance through travel, contact, and new knowledge; to pawn one’s place of birth for the world of one’s desire. This was the fire within seventeenth-century souls. Not everyone was thrilled with the
disorder and dislocation that the passions of great and eager minds produced. One Chinese official complained in 1609 that the end result of this whirlwind of change was simply that “the rich become richer and the poor, poorer.” Even Willem Schouten may have had his doubts about the whole business as he lay in his hammock and drifted into death. But enough people were drawn into the vortex of movement to believe that they too could outstrip the sun’s course. Their world—and it was fast becoming our world—would never be the same. No surprise, then, that artists as homebound as Johannes Vermeer were catching glimpses of the change.