Vermeer's Hat

by Timothy Brook

  SILVER DID NOT CAUSE THE massacre of thousands of Chinese in the Philippines. Yet these events would not have occurred had the bridge of precious metal flowing across the Pacific not collapsed. The rupture inflamed anxieties on both sides, allowing one small incident to snowball into a massive conflict. The violence that wealth is capable of provoking is invisible in Woman Holding a Balance. Preparing to weigh her coins, Catharina Bolnes is untroubled by the frenzy of acquisition and conflict that silver was fueling in the wider world.

  Not everyone who weighed silver in the seventeenth century could be so dispassionate. Fulgencio Orozco was already fifty years old when he arrived in Potosí in 1610 looking to make money. Although a nobleman, he was too poor to repay a debt of 800 pesos and unable to assemble a dowry for his daughter, for which he needed another 2,000 pesos. Orozco’s social status gave him an entrée with the elite families of the town, one of whom was able to recommend him for a position as a foreman in an ore refinery. It was the sort of job that an American-born Creole rather than a Spanish-born gentleman would take, but Orozco was desperate and willing to work any job that would earn him silver. Despite his best efforts, the job paid him barely enough to cover his own costs. His impatience to earn more drove him to leave the refinery in search of quicker methods. After struggling for twenty months in Potosí and finding himself still no closer to earning his daughter’s dowry, Orozco became deranged and suicidal. He ended up in the royal hospital, damning Christ for abandoning him in his time of need and ranting at the devil for not keeping up his end of a bargain that Orozco had thought he had struck to get rich.

  Orozco’s rants drew a crowd of spectators, who decided he was possessed and sent for an Augustinian priest, Antonio de la Calancha, to exorcise the devil inside him. Orozco refused his help, and became so angry at some of the zealous bystanders imploring the devil to leave his body that he grabbed the priest’s crucifix and smacked one of them on the forehead. The police arrived to disperse the crowd, which only added to the mayhem. Brother Antonio performed an exorcism without any apparent effect, and then performed a second. This only drove Orozco to greater frenzy. He kept trying to get the priest to realize that the devil was not inside him, but standing by the head of his bed. There was nothing in him to exorcise.

  Brother Antonio had reached his wits’ end. He turned on his patient and demanded, “Why is someone like you, a nobleman, raving like a heretic or a Jew?”

  “You wish to know why I abhor Christ?” Orozco shot back. “It is because He gives riches to worthless men and common folk, while He afflicts me, a gentleman whose obligations are heavy, with poverty. Since I came to this Peru to earn money for my daughter’s dowry, He has repeatedly taken away everything I have earned, forcing me to witness with my own eyes others earning money where I have lost it. Is there anyone in this city who has worked as hard as I and yet acquired nothing, and when I am witness to the fact that with less effort than my own, in less time and more easily, many have succeeded in laying hands on thousands?”

  Orozco’s despair was not just in finding himself poor, but in discovering that effort, honest intentions, and gentlemanly status had nothing to do with success in a commercial economy. Money did not end up in the hands of those who deserved it, and class was no protection. For Orozco, Potosí had become what it had been for the Andean Natives: puna, uninhabitable. Calancha tried to shift the argument by observing sympathetically that, whereas good people might become rich because God wanted them to, most people in Potosí got rich through theft, usury, and fraud. God might reward the virtuous with riches, but riches did not necessarily go only to those blessed by God. Potosinos in particular, being “zealous in the pursuit of riches, and somewhat given to venery,” rarely were among the blessed. This might seem like an impolitic admission from a priest who preached a doctrine of divine reward for the good and punishment for the evil, but that theology was always hedged by the conviction that God worked in mysterious ways, that it was not for humans to judge such matters, and that all such credits and debits would be weighed and sorted at the Last Judgment.

  At this point, Calancha abandoned theological reasoning and offered Orozco a deal. Suppose the people assembled around his hospital bed—and this group now included eight to ten priests of the Inquisition, who were keenly interested in the rumor that Orozco was spouting heresy—raised the 2,800 pesos to cover his needs? Would he agree to spurn the devil and seek God’s forgiveness? Orozco fell quiet but stayed noncommittal. He needed to see the money. To demonstrate their good faith, four or five priests went off to draw the silver from funds controlled by the Inquisition and have it weighed at the assaying office in the exact amount Orozco required. They even checked how much it would cost to have the silver delivered back to Spain before they returned to Orozco’s bedside.

  The offer worked. When the sacks of silver were delivered to his bedside that evening, the madman repented, praising God and confessing his sins to the priest. Exhausted, he lost the power of speech later in the evening and died in the small hours of the morning. At a cost of 2,800 pesos plus courier charges, it was an expensive conversion, but the Church (which, like every other institution in Potosí, accumulated a substantial share of silver) expressed itself satisfied with the transaction. Charity had worked its magic. A debt had been paid, a dowry secured, and a soul saved. And the agent through which all this was achieved—the agent as well of the man’s despair and death—was the silver dug out of Potosí, the very same substance waiting for Catharina to calmly assess its value.

  7

  JOURNEYS

  THE CARD PLAYERS (see plate 7) is easily recognized as a midcentury Dutch painting, but one is unlikely to mistake it for a Vermeer. The familiar elements are present: windows on the left, diagonally laid marble squares, a line of Delft tiles where the wall meets the floor, a Turkish carpet pushed aside on a table where two people converse, a delftware jug imitating Chinese blue-and-white, a wineglass held up, a map of the province of Holland on the wall. Add the officer in red military coat and beaver hat flirting with the young woman, and it seems like Vermeer’s Officer and Laughing Girl all over again. But it isn’t. The painting has all the elements of a Vermeer, yet it lacks the precision of draftsmanship and the care in composition that can turn a generic scene into a dynamic painting.

  The artist is Hendrik van der Burch, a painter of good reputation who worked in the same circles as Johannes Vermeer and possibly to much the same level of commercial success. The two men were rough contemporaries on the Delft art scene. Born near Delft five years before Vermeer, he moved to the city when he was fifteen. He studied painting there and joined the guild of St. Luke when he was twenty-one—exactly the same age at which Vermeer joined five years later. No documents prove the two artists knew each other, but it is impossible that they did not, since Van der Burch’s sister or stepsister married the prominent Pieter de Hooch, whose paintings Vermeer certainly knew. It is harder to prove a link between The Card Players and Officer and Laughing Girl. The courting officer was a common subject. Vermeer likely executed his painting first by a year or two, though by then Van der Burch was living in Leiden or Amsterdam, so he may never have seen Officer and Laughing Girl.

  Despite similarities of subject matter and style, no Vermeer interior prepares us for the figure who stands dead center in Van der Burch’s picture. Vermeer painted no children, he painted no servant boys, and he painted no Africans. Van der Burch gives us all three in a ten-year-old African boy in fancy doublet and earrings, doing his mistress’s bidding. Not only that, but he is looking straight at the artist—and at us. The man and woman are busily engaged in their game with each other, just as the little girl to one side is engaged in hers with the lapdog. The African boy alone is unengaged in these games, and looks at us almost knowingly. It is an odd pose for someone pouring a glass of wine. He should be looking at the wineglass. Even more odd is the position of the glass. Close inspection shows that he is holding the glass with his left hand. But fro
m a superficial glance at the painting, the viewer could think that the woman is holding it between her thumb and forefinger—which was the polite way to hold stemware in the seventeenth century. The only indication that she isn’t holding the glass is the card in her hand, though you have to look closely to see it.

  To me, the placement of the wineglass directly over her hand suggests that Van der Burch originally intended that she should hold it for her page boy to fill. That would make the principal act of exchange in the painting between the white mistress and her black servant, a favorite pairing in seventeenth-century paintings of upper-class women. But Van der Burch changed his mind, deciding that the principal act of exchange should be between the woman and her suitor. The wineglass she receives from the boy is no longer the center of the painting; the playing card she gives to her suitor takes its place. At that point, it was too late for him to remove the boy. So there the young African stands pouring wine from a jug, but with the glass full and no wine actually flowing from the tipping jug. No wonder the boy is able to take his eyes from the task and look at us.

  As we look at him. We would never know from Vermeer’s oeuvre that there were Africans in Delft. Van der Burch shows that there were. Africans had been coming in small numbers to Europe since the fifteenth century, but their numbers were increasing noticeably in the Low Countries in the seventeenth century. Africans arrived as sailors, laborers, and servants in the port cities of Antwerp and Amsterdam, but most of all as slaves. The laws of those cities permitted slaves to petition the city authorities for manumission from slavery once they had entered their jurisdictions. Few, it seems, did. The legal distinction may not anyway have made much difference to the real life of Africans in Flanders or the Netherlands, who had little alternative to employment outside domestic service and were as good as bound to the master or mistress who acquired them, even if the law judged them to be legally free.

  Van der Burch was not the exception among Dutch painters in including a black servant in his painting. Many Dutch artists painted Africans, usually within domestic settings, indicating that these slaves were not kept apart from the white families that owned them. In fact, those who owned black child servants (and they are usually boys) wanted to show off what they possessed. It was not unlike having an artist put a favorite Chinese vase into the painting you commissioned. It signaled your wealth, your good bourgeois taste, and your knowledge that these were meaningful signs in the social world in which you thrived. If you were a woman and your black slave was a boy, his copresence in a painting also highlighted your color, your complexion, your gender, and your superiority.

  The boy in The Card Players is the door within this painting that opens onto a wider world of travel, movement, servitude, and dislocation. This wider world was seeping into everyday life in the Low Countries, bringing real people from real places far away. As for this particular boy, we know nothing beyond the fact of his presence in this picture. If he wasn’t born in Delft, he was probably one of the unlucky ones who found himself caught in the net of trade and capture that moved people as readily as it moved things. Still, to be alive was to be one of the lucky ones. So many drawn into the whirlpool of global movement never made it out alive. Even those who went by choice rather than by force often were not spared. The toll of the seventeenth century fell on both.

  To reckon the human costs of the restless movement that scattered people across the seventeenth-century globe, we will follow five journeys that dumped people in places and situations far from where they were born: three men in Natal on the southeast coast of Africa, seventy-two men and boys on an island off the coast of Java, a Dutchman on the Korean island of Cheju, an Italian on the coast of Fujian, and two homeward-bound Dutch sailors on the island of Madagascar. Over their journeys hangs the figure of Van der Burch’s black boy, the one who made it safely to Delft but never made it home. We shall end with a journey story dear to seventeenth-century Christians, the journey of the magi, to think about why Vermeer hung a painting of this subject in his house.

  THE LAST TIME ANYONE SAW them, the three men watched their shipmates cross the broad river before them and recede into the African distance heading, they hoped, in the direction of Mozambique. The huge fat man on the litter, which his bearers had set under a makeshift canopy, was a Portuguese. Attending him were a Chinese and an African. The names of the African and the Chinese are forgotten. Slaves of empires rarely get their names entered in the public record unless they commit crimes that the annals of colonial justice consider worth preserving. But we do know the name of the Portuguese reclining on the litter, for he was their owner: Sebastian Lobo da Silveira.

  Lobo—his name means “wolf”—had the reputation of being the most obese man in Macao in the 1640s. In February 1647, he was sent back to Portugal to face trial. He had arrived in Macao nine years earlier to take up the lucrative position of captain general, a post that gave him command of all maritime trade between Macao and Japan. Lobo paid handsomely back in Lisbon for a monopoly that he expected in turn to pay him handsomely in Macao. Portugal had a monopoly on the trade between China and Japan, since the governments of both countries were generally hostile to direct trade but permitted the Portuguese to act as middlemen. A single return run between the Portuguese colony of Macao and the Japanese port of Nagasaki, carrying Chinese silks in one direction and Japanese silver in the other, could double your capital, so long as the Dutch did not capture your ship. But Lobo’s timing was bad. He had the misfortune to buy his post in 1638, just before Japan banished Portuguese traders from Japan for failing to observe the ban against missionaries entering the country. A Portuguese captain who tested the ban in 1639 was expelled. Another who tried in 1640 was executed along with most of his crew. Thenceforth only the Dutch, who happily agreed not to smuggle Catholic proselytizers into Japan, were permitted to trade in Nagasaki. There were no more runs from Macao, and no more easy profits for the Wolf.

  Blocked from trading with Japan, Lobo turned to other schemes, such as obliging wealthy Macanese merchants who needed his good opinion to loan him large sums he had no intention of paying back. Adding insult to injury, he enjoyed flaunting his wealth and snubbing public convention. He went about Macao in a ridiculous “Moorish costume of rich gold and sky blue silk, with a red cap on his head.” His rapacity put him in conflict with the Senate, a body consisting of the leading merchants of the town. That conflict eventually led to street battles in which the antagonists actually brought artillery into play against each other. When the crown administrator tried to get the situation in hand at the end of the summer of 1642, Lobo had him kidnapped, locked in a private dungeon for eight months, and finally beaten to death.

  The disorder that erupted in the streets of Macao here at the far southern edge of China was nothing compared to the chaos engulfing the cities of north China at that moment, where rebel bands were fighting government armies and, at least as often, each other, in the struggle to win supremacy over the faltering Ming regime. In 1644, one of these rebel leaders, a postal guard made redundant by the collapse of central funding, mounted a daring raid on Beijing and took the capital. Finding himself abandoned by those who had sworn to uphold his reign, Emperor Chongzhen, the one who tried to get Portuguese gunners to Beijing despite the objections of some of his courtiers, hanged himself from a tree at the north end of the Forbidden City. China was not to be taken so easily by one of its own, however. Within six weeks, a joint Sino-Manchu army swooped down on Beijing from the Great Wall and drove the rebel leader from his tenuously held prize. The Manchus then staged a coup by putting a young prince of their own on the throne and declaring him to be the first emperor of the Qing dynasty. The Ming dynasty was now officially over.

  That same year, a new governor arrived in Macao from the Portuguese colony of Goa. Charges had been filed against Lobo in Lisbon, and the new governor’s job was to indict him. It would take two and half years before the governor was at last able to bundle the Wolf onto a carrack bound for
Europe. The ship left Macao in February 1647. With Lobo went his devoted brother, his Chinese bond servant, and an African slave loaned to him for the duration of the voyage. Their ship never made it around the Cape of Good Hope. It went aground somewhere short of the cape, in the region now known as Natal. Those who made it ashore reckoned that their best chance of survival lay in trekking north toward Mozambique, but it was not a solution that suited Lobo’s constitution. The merchant was so grossly overweight and physically ruined by his extravagant lifestyle that he could walk only a few steps at a time. His brother had a hammock made from fishing lines and convinced the cabin boys to carry him in this device for a handsome daily wage.

  Within a day, the porters tired of their employment and decided to leave the Wolf in the company of several nuns who could go no farther. Lobo’s brother stepped in and promised rich rewards to sixteen sailors to take over the work, along with the threat that they might be held responsible for failing to fulfill the king’s command to return Lobo to Lisbon. So off they went, leaving the nuns behind. After a week of heavy carrying and dwindling food supplies, no price could buy cooperation. On the south bank of a wide river they could not possibly lug him across, the sailors put up a small cloth awning and left Lobo there. His Chinese bond servant and African slave had no choice but to remain with him, their prospects no better than his. Lobo’s brother tarried with them for a few hours, then set off after the others. He made it back to Portugal. The three men he abandoned were never heard of again.