Vermeer's Hat

by Timothy Brook

  The key actors in this drama of escape were not the European men, even though Bontekoe assigned them the leading role in his memoir. They were the Malagasy women. Had the women been unwilling to help the Dutchmen, Jopkins and Harmensz could not have dreamed of surviving at Sancta Lucia. They could have survived without sex, of course, but not without the resources and know-how the women provided, and the position within kinship networks that relations with them provided.

  The same calculations were going on all over the world. Champlain actually encouraged his men to find Huron wives, including those who had legal wives back in France. There was no better way to ensure their survival than by embedding them among those best able to support them and facilitate trade. On one side, missionaries in New France denounced these cross-racial unions as immoral. On the other, Huron men wondered how their women could tolerate such ugly mates. As one Huron said after meeting his first Frenchman, “Is it possible that any woman would look favourably on such a man?” But they had no other reason to object, for traders on both sides benefited from the practice: these unions gave them preferential access to trade goods. Canadian historian Sylvia van Kirk has called these Natives “women in between.” Interposed between two distinctly different cultural formations, they were able to relate to both, bridging from one to the other and enjoying influence and prestige as a result. Once the balance between French and Native tilted in French favor, however, the channel they had opened was shut. By then, European women were arriving in New France in sufficient numbers to drive Native women from the marriage market and reimpose racism as a social principle of Canadian society.

  These relationships existed on what American historian Richard White calls a “middle ground,” the space in which two cultures meet and must learn to interact. This space of intersection survives so long as neither culture has the power to overwhelm the other. As long as it does survive, both cultures are in a position to adjust their differences and negotiate a reasonable coexistence. Through war, trade, and marriage, the French and the Hurons sustained this sort of middle ground through the first half of the seventeenth century. The Malagasies and the Dutch were engaged in the same strategy at Sancta Lucia. There, too, neither side was in a position to force its will on the other, except at the cost of breaking the profitable bond between them. In this linking of cultures, castaways and captives had many roles to play. They taught and learned languages, gave and took knowledge, made whatever sense they could of the new customs and ideas they encountered and then interpreted them to the other side.

  This middle ground depended on each side seeing the necessity of compromise. Shakespeare in 1611 intuited the fragility of this relationship when he wrote The Tempest. All too soon, as Caliban rages to Prospero, his shipwrecked European master, what began as kindness—“Thou strokedst me, and made much of me”—turned to enslavement and deculturation. “You taught me language,” the fictional Caliban bitterly reminds Prospero, “and my profit on’t is, I know how to curse.” Shakespeare’s imaginary character expresses the despair that real Natives came to feel over their loss of language and culture. As one Algonquin complained to a French missionary who was converting his fellow tribesmen, “It is you who overturn their brains and make them die.” The consequences of exposure were unstoppably swift. “It is all done so quickly,” the contemporary Montagnais poet, Armand Collard, has written. “You have no time to react and so you submit.” The middle ground closes and with it the choice to meet strangers as equals.

  To be in Holland was similarly not a choice Van der Burch’s boy got to make. All he could do was submit and figure out how to improvise in his new surroundings. Looking at how he carries himself in the manner of a Dutch servant, he seems to have managed all right. And yet there is the hint of something in the frank look he casts our way, a hint perhaps of his mindfulness that this is not his place.

  VERMEER DIDN’T PAINT ANYONE WHO wasn’t born within twenty-five kilometers of Delft. The only time he considered painting people who weren’t purely Dutch was in his early twenties, when he took on the classical and biblical subjects that a student painter of that time was expected to paint. In the previous generation, Rembrandt van Rijn in Amsterdam and Leonaert Bramer in Delft had transformed biblical scenes into visually dramatic subjects establishing a style within which the young Vermeer had no choice but to start working. The challenge for seventeenth-century painters of scenes from the distant past was how to compose them in such a way that closed the natural gap between the world the viewers saw around them and the world as it might have looked in another time and place. The painter wanted his viewers to feel that they were there, actually seeing what was going on. Was that best achieved by making the biblical past look just like the Dutch present, or by making them different? Was the demand of realism better served by avoiding such playacting and dressing your figures in contemporary Dutch garb and remaining faithful to the architectural details of Dutch buildings? If not, then should a painter fill his canvas with Oriental details picked up from contemporary Near Eastern culture? Was this a more powerful device to get viewers to suspend their disbelief?

  Painters of the generation of Bramer and Rembrandt were brilliant in developing a hybrid look that Orientalized some features while retaining a strong touch of the familiar. Vermeer’s instinct went in the opposite direction: not to try for a faux-historical realism, but to translate historical moments into the present. When he paints the figure of Jesus in his early Christ in the House of Mary and Martha, he depicts him in the conventionally indeterminate drapery that artists of the time tended to put on Jesus. Mary and Martha, though, he dressed more or less as though they were Dutch women. So too, the sparsely indicated room where they are sitting looks suspiciously like a Dutch home. Already at the age of twenty-two, Vermeer was shying away from the Near Eastern touches in which his elders indulged. Within two years, he gave up this sort of fake historicizing entirely and painted nothing but the real world of everyday Delft.

  If Vermeer gave up painting biblical scenes, he was not averse to hanging them on his wall, as Catholic households in Protestant Holland did to remind themselves of their more literal interpretation of Christian belief. Among the artwork listed in the inventory of his possessions drawn up after he died was a “painting of the Three Kings” depicting the journey of the three magi to Bethlehem to worship the newborn Jesus. The painting was in his bequest to his mother-in-law, Maria Thins, who remained firm in her Catholic faith. It hung in the main hall of the house. This position gave it a prominence that suggests it was a painting intended to be seen, perhaps because of its devotional significance (attacks on the cult of the magi by Luther and Calvin may have inspired particular loyalty from Catholics keen to honor the role of adoration in worship) or because it was an object of some monetary value. As there is nothing more we can learn about this painting, let us suppose it is the one three kings painting by a Delft artist of this period that still exists, and that Vermeer could plausibly have seen: Leonaert Bramer’s The Journey of the Three Magi to Bethlehem (see plate 8).

  Bramer was the senior painter in Delft throughout Vermeer’s life. Born there in 1595, Bramer spent a decade learning his craft in France and Italy before returning home in 1628 and establishing his practice as a fine painter. He was also an excellent sketch artist: porcelain painters in town transferred his drawings to delftware. Bramer was a friend of the Vermeer family, perhaps through Vermeer’s father, who dealt in art and may have sold some of his work. Some have suggested that Bramer could have been Vermeer’s first painting teacher. Born there in 1595, Bramer spent a decade learning his craft in France and Italy before returning home in 1628 and establishing his practice as a fine painter. He was also an excellent sketch artist: porcelain painters in town transferred his drawings to delftware. Bramer was a friend of the Vermeer family, perhaps through Vermeer’s father, who dealt in art and may have sold some of his work. Some have suggested that Bramer could have been Vermeer’s first painting teacher. Vermeer�
��s craftsmanship points to a strong technical education, making Bramer, thirty-seven years his senior, a reasonable candidate. At the very least, the elder painter was the young man’s mentor if not his actual teacher, for he was one of the delegation of two who called on Maria Thins on Vermeer’s behalf to ask her to give up her objection to a marriage between her daughter Catharina and the twenty-three-year-old painter.

  Bramer painted The Journey of the Three Magi to Bethlehem in the late 1630s, when Vermeer was still a child. The central figures are the three kings, or the three wise men, as we know them now—Caspar and Melchior on foot and well lit, Balthasar on camelback and in shadow—following three angels toward Bethlehem. It is dusk and the angels carry torches to light the way. Accompanying the three magi is a retinue of attendants trailing off into the gloom behind them. The magi are dressed in lavish fur-lined robes and carrying gold vessels containing the incense and myrrh that Matthew mentions in his Gospel. The only element missing is the baby Jesus. The three wise men have not yet reached Bethlehem, but they approach.

  When a writer or painter tells a story, especially a religious story, he selects from a large treasury of such stories. In the case of a painting, he must also choose one part of the story to tell. One scene must convey the whole story. So when Bramer decided to represent the birth of Jesus, he had many decisions to make. He could have painted the story in the Gospel of Luke about the angel Gabriel appearing to the shepherds rather than the story in Matthew about the three magi, for example; or he could have painted the magi in the more conventional posture of presenting their gifts to Jesus in the manger, rather than carrying them en route to Bethlehem. Given the choices Bramer had to make, we have to ask the question that Renaissance historian Richard Trexler asks again and again in his history of the cult of the three magi. What was emerging or evolving at the time the story of the three wise men was being told “for which the magi story provides a discourse”? To focus on Bramer, what was he trying to talk about by choosing to depict the journey of the magi in this way? Or, to return to the device I have used throughout the book, where are the doors in this painting, and down what corridors do they lead?

  For me, the doors in this painting are the people. When he did a biblical scene in a faux-Orientalist realist style, a Dutch painter found himself obliged to depict people who were not, in fact, Dutch. Since Bramer was not interested in achieving realism by transposing Bible stories into Delft, he had to decorate his characters with Near Eastern details. These would lure his viewers back to biblical times. The most consistent touch in his Journey of the Three Magi is the turban, a standard cliché for setting a biblical scene. All three magi have turbans, though Melchior has taken his off and carries it loosely in his right hand. In addition, Balthasar’s black servant and at least one of the attendants are in turbans. Evoking simultaneously the contemporary Near East and the distant past, the turban blends the Oriental present with biblical time into a pastiche that doesn’t need to worry about historical realism. Bramer has used clothing to achieve the same effect: an eclectic mix of nonstandard ecclesiastical vestments; fur-lined Oriental robes; and indeterminate drapery that appears real, while evoking the distance of time and place that puts the scene back in the biblical era.2

  Underneath the robes and turbans, however, are the people wearing them. This is where we might begin to detect what Bramer was trying to express when he produced this picture: people of many origins thrown together on a journey and heading toward an outcome that is not yet in view. The ethnic variety of the convoy is signaled most vividly by Balthasar, the black African. Theological reasoning had long accepted that Balthasar might have been black, but the iconography of the three kings only caught up to the theology in the 1440s, when the first African slaves were arriving in Lisbon. In no time, European artists were painting Balthasar black (some were even painting over the white Balthasars in older paintings). In Bramer’s painting, the black king is difficult to see. He is turned away from us. A black servant is next to his camel, but he too is indistinct—which may reflect a lack of Africans in Delft that Bramer could use as models. Perhaps he had to make these figures up from his memory of the Africans he saw in Italy. As for the other two magi, Bramer makes the ruddy-faced Caspar look completely and hopelessly Dutch (was he working within the tradition that allowed an artist to paint in his patron as one of the magi?), but he has exoticized the bald and bearded Melchior, giving him what could be read as Jewish or Armenian features. Two attendants reacting to a rearing horse look so Dutch as to be straight out of Rembrandt, but the white-skinned angels are of indeterminate ethnicity.

  Are we as viewers supposed to notice these details? If the whole point of the painter’s artifice is to make us think that what is happening in the picture is actually happening, we are not. The last thing a realist painter wants to do is to leave any of his tools lying about the scene, a badly drawn figure, say, or an anachronistic detail that couldn’t belong to that place and time. Such details disrupt the viewing experience and remind us that what we are looking at is just a picture. But every picture, not just a poorly executed one, is attached to the place and time of its making. No picture can escape the tension between what is going on inside the frame and what is happening out in the world—which is, after all, where the artist and his viewers live—and what was happening in Bramer’s time was an unprecedented mixing of people, hence the multicultural odyssey in his painting. The scene may be biblical, but the artist was not abandoning his social experience and common knowledge when he assembled these figures. Nor need we abandon ours, which is why it is worth paying attention to the ethnic signs of the characters in the painting and suspecting that the variety of people we are seeing is a variety that Bramer experienced in his own time.

  The ostensible purpose of a three kings painting is to celebrate the recognition of Christ’s birth and reinforce the viewer’s pious adherence to the truth of that recognition. That is the first meaning of the painting. But the second, lived meaning of a three kings painting belongs to the place and time the painter made it, and that second meaning keeps shifting as we, the viewers, move through place and time and look for doors that we can open. This is especially so with a painting from four centuries ago. An artist of our own time wouldn’t paint the story in this style, so the details catch our eye, hinting at secrets now lost to us.

  What we see in the painting—people of different cultural origins who have banded together to journey through a dim landscape toward the promise of a future that remains unrevealed—is I think not a bad description of the world in the seventeenth century. It may not have been what Bramer intended, yet he too lived in a real world, and in that real world the defining boundaries of cultures were perforating under the pressure of constant movement. People were journeying around the globe, from the wealthy few merchants handling high-value commodities over long distances, to the impoverished multitude of transport workers and service personnel who followed in their wake.

  This is the knowledge that retrospection gives us as we think about the three kings painting that hung in the main hall of Vermeer’s home. Our urge to place it within a wider historical context sends us well beyond Vermeer’s intentions. Perhaps he hung the painting for an entirely devotional purpose: to make a Catholic version of Christian faith daily visible, at least to his mother-in-law. If the painting really were by Bramer, he might have hung it in honor of the mentor who convinced Maria Thins to let him marry her daughter. But why stop at the first door, when we have the knowledge to step right through the painting and come out the other side into the town of Delft, where well-dressed men who traded in precious metals, exotic manufactures, and spices worth their weight in silver brought with them a ragged multitude of Europeans, Moors, Africans, Malays, possibly even the odd Malagasy picked up in Sancta Lucia—all of whom improvised their way as best they could into survival.

  Here is one of them now, attending his mistress as she entertains her gentleman caller in an upstairs room in Delft: a b
lack boy, who never meant to be where he was, who will never find a way back to his place of beginning, and whose descendants most likely will end up blending into Dutch society as though he had never been black.

  8

  ENDINGS: NO MAN IS AN ISLAND

  NO MAN IS an Island, entire of itselfe.” The line comes from Devotions upon Emergent Occasions by the English poet and theologian John Donne. Donne wrote these meditations on the burdens of Christian faith in 1623 while deathly ill, at a time when he faced one of the many “occasions of emergency” in his life. His seventeenth meditation (“Perchance hee for whom this Bell tolls”) contains the fragments of Donne’s writings best remembered today, including “No man is an Island.” Donne does not end the image of the island there, but takes the metaphor and inserts it into a wider vision. “Every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine; if a Clod be washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were.” Donne then turns to the moral purpose to which the image is building and declares: “Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde.” At the close of this meditation, he returns to the tolling bell with which he began.

  When Donne wrote this passage, he was meditating on the state of his soul, not on the state of the world. He feared his own death, but with that fear found himself struggling with the spiritual responsibility for the welfare of every lost soul, not just his own. To a historian looking back on 1623, the metaphor of island and continent—an intentionally resonant choice for English islanders who, among other threats, feared attacks from the continent—stands out more powerfully than the theology on which it rests. The language Donne has chosen to use is the language of geography, one of the rapidly changing new fields of seventeenth-century research. The trend within that academic discipline at the time he was writing—which was to assemble a global system of knowledge of the oceans and continents coming to European attention, and to compile an ever-more complete map of the world—gives him a model to think about the spiritual links that every member of the human community has with every other, extending outward in a universal web. As his spiritual world was filling, so too more and more of the mundane world was coming onto the map. The metaphor of island and continent would have occurred naturally to Donne at this moment, when Europeans were moving across the face of the globe in ever-greater numbers and bringing their new knowledge back to Europe—or to Asia, for that matter, where seventeenth-century cartographers in China and Japan also began drawing surprising new images of the world.