Vermeer's Hat

by Timothy Brook

  Does this anecdote demonstrate that the Chinese were not curious about foreign objects? Not at all. We have to realize what Li was doing when he collected. For him, the point of collecting was to discover objects that confirmed the cultural authority of the ancients; this was why authenticity was so important to him. He wanted things that connected him to better times, which were always in the past. What the anecdote does show is that foreign articles circulated in China in the seventeenth century. If they were reaching Nanjing and then circulating out in the hands of traveling dealers to the surrounding cities, there must have been some sort of market for them. They did not circulate on the scale that foreign manufactures did in Europe, but then they reached China in much smaller volume. Also, unlike in Europe, where roughly a century of plunder and trade around the world had trained Europeans into becoming connoisseurs of foreign curiosities, demand for such objects in China was not well developed. Foreign things were not out of bounds for Chinese collectors. Wen Zhenheng encourages the readers of Superfluous Things to acquire certain foreign objects. He recommends brushes and writing paper from Korea, and he advocates owning a wide range of Japanese objects from folding fans, bronze rulers, and steel scissors to lacquered boxes and fine furniture. Foreign origin was not a barrier to appreciation.

  If foreign objects were a “problem” in China, it was not due to some deeply embedded Chinese disdain for foreign things. It had to do with the pliable nature of things themselves. Objects of beauty were valued to the extent that they could carry cultural meanings; in the case of antiques, meanings having to do with balance and decorum and a veneration of the past. Antiques were valued because they brought their owners into physical contact with a golden past from which the present had fallen away. Given the burden of meaning that objects had to carry, it was difficult to discern what value to attribute to objects coming from abroad. Rarity was a quality to be prized, and curiosity about things marvelous or strange was a laudable impulse for the collector, but the essential impulse for collecting was to bring oneself into contact with the core values of civilization. This is why Wen could recommend Korean and Japanese objects to his readers. China had a long history of cultural interaction with Korea and Japan, so Korean and Japanese things could be seen as sharing in the same civilizational ethos as Chinese things. They were different, but the difference was tame. It did not slide from the odd to the bizarre.

  The same could not be said for European things. Li Rihua was not indifferent to knowing about what lay beyond China’s shores; indeed, his diary includes numerous remarks about what he heard concerning foreign ships and sailors who wandered into Chinese coastal waters. But the objects coming from foreign lands had no place in his symbolic system. They embodied no values. They were merely curious. In Europe, by contrast, Chinese things had a greater impact. There, difference became an invitation to acquire. Europeans felt inclined to incorporate them into their living spaces, and even beyond that, to revise their aesthetic standards. The dish that Vermeer set in the foreground of Young Woman Reading a Letter at an Open Window is a foreign thing, nestled in turn within the Turkish carpet, another foreign thing. These objects stirred no contempt or anxiety. They were beautiful, and they came from places where beautiful things were made and could be bought. That was all, and enough to make them worth buying.

  If there was a place for such foreign objects in European rooms, there wasn’t in Chinese rooms. This issue was not ultimately one of aesthetics or culture. It was the relationship with the wider world that each could afford to have. Dutch merchants with the full backing of the Dutch state were traveling the globe and bringing back to the wharves of the Kolk marvelous evidence of what the other side of the world might be like. The people of Delft looked on Chinese dishes as totems of their good fortune and happily displayed them in their homes. Of course they were beautiful, and taking pleasure in that beauty was what Dutch householders liked to do. But the dishes were also symbolic of a positive relationship to the world.

  What did Li Rihua see, as he looked beyond the wharves of his native Jiaxing, other than a coast beset by pirates? From where he stood, that wider world was a source of threat, not of promise or wealth, and still less of delight or inspiration. He had no reason to own symbols of that threat and place them around his studio. For Europeans, on the other hand, it was worth no little danger and expense to get their hands on Chinese goods. Which is why, four years after the sinking of the White Lion, Admiral Lam was back in the South China Sea looting Iberian ships and seizing Chinese vessels in the hope of acquiring more.

  4

  GEOGRAPHY LESSONS

  THERE IS ONE painting by Vermeer, The Geographer (see plate 4), that requires little effort to locate signs of the wider world that was enveloping and invading Delft. The painting opens conventionally on the artist’s studio, the same closed space we expect to find in a Vermeer painting where bright windows again have been painted at an angle so oblique that their panes transmit no image of what lies in the street outside. This time, however, the room is cluttered with objects that gesture exuberantly to a broader world. The drama that Vermeer sets on his stage is not about the engagements of love, the theme in the two preceding paintings, or about the drive for moral perfection, which will animate another painting that we will soon examine. It is about a different drive altogether, the desire to understand the world: not the world of domestic interiors, or even of Delft, but the expansive lands into which traders and travelers were going and from which they were bringing back wondrous things and amazing new information. The things engaged the eye, but the information engaged the mind, and the great minds of Vermeer’s generation were absorbing it all and learning to see the world in fresh ways. They were making new measurements, proposing new theories, and building new models on scales that stretched macroscopically as far as the entire globe and microscopically into the mysterious depths that were beginning to be revealed in a drop of rain or a mite of dust.

  This is what The Geographer is about. It is no surprise, then, that it evokes in the viewer a mood different from those of Vermeer’s other paintings. He has characteristically constructed the canvas around a figure who is absorbed in his own doings and is not posing for the viewer. Still, the sense of intimacy of the other paintings isn’t there. We are drawn to the geographer as he pauses to cogitate, just as we are drawn to the young woman who reads her letter, but we don’t really enter onto a deeper plane of reflection. Perhaps with The Geographer (and its companion painting, The Astronomer) Vermeer intended to move into new subject matter but hadn’t quite figured out how to make the intellectual drama an emotional experience for the viewer. The passion to know the world by mapping it was not quite as compelling for viewers, or the artist, as the passion to know another person through love. Perhaps the paintings were commissioned by a buyer who fancied owning images of the new thirst for scientific knowledge, which left Vermeer feeling undermotiviated. Indeed, perhaps they were commissioned by the man who posed for them, by best guess the Delft draper, surveyor, and polymath, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek.

  Leeuwenhoek’s surname was his address: “at the corner by Lion’s Gate,” which was the next gate to the right of the pair of gates shown in View of Delft. He is best known for the experiments he conducted with lenses, for which he is credited today as the father of microbiology. No documentary evidence directly links Vermeer and Leeuwenhoek, yet the circumstantial evidence that they were friends is strong. The fact that the two men were born in the same month, lived in the same part of town, and had friends in common might not be enough to convince the skeptical. But Leeuwenhoek played a key role after Vermeer’s death. Vermeer died when his business as a painter and art dealer was at a low ebb. His widow, Catharina, had to file for bankruptcy two months later, and when she did, the town aldermen appointed Leeuwenhoek to administer the estate. Judging from a later portrait, the man who has pushed back the Turkish carpet on the table and bends over a map with a set of surveyor’s dividers in his hand is Leeuwenho
ek. Even if he weren’t, Leeuwenhoek was just the sort of person the painting lionizes.

  The signs of the wider world are everywhere. The document that the geographer has spread out before him is indecipherable, but it is clearly a map. A sea chart on vellum is loosely rolled to his right under the window. Two rolled-up charts lie on the floor behind him. A sea chart of the coasts of Europe—the subject becomes apparent when you realize that the top of the map points west, not north—hangs on the back wall. The original of this sea chart has not been found, but it is similar to one produced by Willem Blaeu, the commercial map publisher in Amsterdam who printed the map on the back wall of Officer and Laughing Girl, among many others. A terrestrial globe literally caps the entire painting. This is Hendrik Hondius’ 1618 edition of a globe his father Jodocus first published in 1600.

  Vermeer includes just enough detail on the Hondius globe to show that it is turned to expose what Hondius calls the Orientalus Oceanus, the Eastern Ocean, which we know today as the Indian Ocean. Navigating this ocean was a great challenge for Dutch navigators in the opening years of the seventeenth century. The Portuguese route to Southeast Asia ran around the Cape of Good Hope and up past Madagascar, following the arc of the coastline. This route had the advantage of many landfalls, but it was hampered by unfavorable currents and winds and was under Portuguese control, however unevenly defended. In 1610, a Dutch mariner discovered another route. This involved dropping down from the cape to 40 degrees southern latitude and picking up the prevailing westerlies, which, combined with the West Wind Current, could speed a ship across the bottom of the Indian Ocean, then veering north to Java on the southeast trades, by-passing India entirely. The route to the Spice Islands was thereby shortened by several months.

  The cartouche (the ornamental scroll with an inscription that many a cartographer of the time used to fill in the empty areas of a map) on the lower part of the globe is illegible in the painting, but can be read on a surviving copy of this globe. In it Hondius has printed in his defense a brief explanation as to why this globe differs from the version he published in 1600. “Since very frequent expeditions are started every day to all parts of the world, by which their positions are clearly seen and reported, I trust that it will not appear strange to anyone if this description differs very much from others previously published by us.” Hondius then appeals to the enthusiastic amateurs who played a significant role in compiling this knowledge. “We ask the benevolent reader that, if he should have a more complete knowledge of some place, he willingly communicate the same to us for the sake of increasing the public good.” An increase in the public good was also an increase in sales, of course, but no one at the time minded the one overlapping the other if that made the product more reliable. There was a new world out there, and knowledge of it was worth paying for, especially as one of the tangible costs of ignorance was shipwreck.

  THE SPANISH JESUIT Adriano de las Cortes experienced the consequence of having less than “complete knowledge” of the South China Sea on the morning of 16 February 1625, when Nossa Senhora da Guía was driven onto the rocks of the Chinese coast. The Guía was a Portuguese vessel on its way from the Spanish colony of Manila in the Philippines to the Portuguese colony of Macao at the mouth of the Pearl River. The ship had departed from Manila three weeks earlier, tacking up the west side of the island of Luzon and then heading west across the South China Sea to China. On the third day crossing the open water, a cold fog becalmed the ship. The navigator should have carried the charts he needed to make the well-traveled crossing from Manila to Macao, but charts were only as good as the bearings he could take from the sun and stars. The combination of fog, slowdown, and drift defeated him. Approximating his distance from the equator was not too difficult, but estimating where the ship was between east and west was impossible. (The instrumentation needed to determine longitude at sea was not developed for another century and a half.) The wind came back up two days later, but then it whipped into a gale so fierce that it blew the ship even farther off its course. The Guía’s pilot had no way to reckon their position and could do nothing but wait until land came into sight and try to figure out their location from the profile of the shoreline.

  GLOBAL TRADE ROUTES IN

  THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

  Two hours before dawn on 16 February, the gale unexpectedly drove the ship onto the China coast. The place was uncharted and unknown to those on board. Only later would the survivors learn that they had run aground three hundred and fifty kilometers northeast of their destination, Macao. The water where the ship broke up was shallow enough that most of the over two hundred people taking passage on the Guía were able to get to shore. Only fifteen failed to make it: several sailors, several slaves (one of whom was female), a few Tagals from Manila, two Spaniards, and a young Japanese boy.

  The inhabitants of a nearby fishing village came down to the shore to stare at the host of foreign people coming ashore, giving them a wide berth as they scrambled out of the waves. Most may never have seen foreigners at close range before, as this spot on this coast was off the two main sea-lanes handling foreign trade, one from Macao to Japan, and the other to the Philippines from Moon Harbor (now Amoy), which lay two hundred kilometers in the opposite direction from Macao. The fishing people living along this coast were aware that foreigners were sailing in these waters. They would have heard about the Portuguese in Macao (official Chinese discourse called them the Aoyi, the Macanese Foreigners) and known that they were unlikely to be attacked by these people. Those they feared were the Wokou, or Dwarf Pirates (the colloquial term for Japanese), and the terrible Hongmao, or Red Hairs (a recently coined name for the Dutch). Dwarf Pirates had been raiding the coast for a century in reaction to the Chinese government’s 1525 ban on maritime trade with Japan. They were feared for their skill as swordsmen. Local people still told the story of a dozen sword-wielding Japanese who managed to kill three hundred Chinese militiamen sent against them. The Red Hairs excited an even greater fear. The Dutch had been preying along this coast only in the last two or three years but they had quickly established a reputation for being violent and dangerous. The Chinese name for these people tells us what most struck Chinese when they saw Dutchmen. Among Chinese, black is the normal color for hair. As Portuguese tended also to be dark haired, they were considered simply ugly rather than bizarre. The same could not be said for the Dutch, whose blond and reddish hair was a shock to Chinese eyes. Anyone with hair this color was a Red Hair, and therefore Dutch, and therefore dangerous.

  Red Hairs, Dwarf Pirates, and Macanese Foreigners were not all that came ashore. Scattered among them were another category altogether: Heigui, or Black Ghosts. These were the African slaves who worked as servants of the Portuguese and who were ubiquitous in the European colonies in East Asia. Truly unlike any person the Chinese had ever seen, they were feared above the rest.

  The sight of these foreigners stalled the villagers only briefly. Their eyes quickly turned to the chests and barrels floating ashore with the survivors. They began hauling the flotsam up the beach and scavenging through the cargo. Soon enough the local militia arrived carrying swords and arquebuses. Their duty was to keep the survivors at the site where they came ashore until a military commander showed up to take charge. They too were interested in picking up whatever might have washed ashore from the shipwreck. As the scavengers had beaten them to the cargo, the militiamen turned on the sodden survivors, frisking some and strip-searching others for the silver and jewels they suspected must be hidden on them. The survivors were at first too exhausted and frightened to do anything but comply, though a few quietly resisted. Before the militiamen had a chance to find much, the survivors gathered together and began to walk inland.

  Fearing they would be punished for failing to control the crowd, the militiamen began to throw stones and jab their spears to make them understand that they should remain on the beach. Still the crowd of two hundred foreigners pressed forward. The Chinese arquebusiers opened fire. One
hit his target, a Dwarf Pirate, though the gunpowder charge was so weak that the ball simply buried itself in the man’s clothing without doing any damage. The militia’s swords were more effective. A Portuguese sailor named Francesco was stabbed and then beheaded. He was the first of the survivors to die at the hands of their captors. Then a Macanese by the name of Miguel Xuarez was speared. A priest took Xuarez in his arms, but militiamen hauled him away and decapitated him.

  A military officer finally arrived on horseback with a small retinue. Benito Barbosa, captain of the Guía, hurried toward the officer to appeal for mercy for his passengers and crew, but the officer brandished his sword in a show of intimidation and ordered his attendants to slice a piece off Barbosa’s ear, marking him as a prisoner. There would be no negotiation; only surrender.

  Then the shakedown began in earnest. Militiamen freely moved among the shipwrecked survivors, searching them and grabbing whatever they could find. Some had managed to come ashore with a little of their wealth, and most surrendered it when accosted—but not everyone. Ismaël, an Indian Muslim merchant from Goa, had already removed an outer garment and folded it into a parcel. The parcel attracted the suspicious notice of a militiaman. Ismaël refused to hand it over, and in the tug of war that ensued, the bundle slipped from his grip. Out fell six or seven silver pesos. Furious at being resisted, the militiaman ended the tussle by cutting off Ismaël’s head. Budo, another Indian merchant from Goa, got caught in a similar struggle. One of the militiamen guessed correctly that Budo had hidden something in his mouth. When the militiamen tried to force his mouth open, Budo spat two rings on the ground and then kicked them into the sand to make them disappear. The disappointed militiaman feigned indifference, but ten minutes later, slipped up behind Budo and lopped off his head, carrying it aloft as a trophy.