Of the fifty-nine charges laid against Corcuera, one was that he had purloined objects of precious metal belonging to the king and shipped them back to Spain to build his personal fortune. Included in the list was a solid gold plate and ewer set, intended as a gift from the king of Spain to the emperor of Japan in the hope of opening trade relations. The gold plate and ewer somehow disappeared, and Cor-cuera was charged with having sent the set back as his personal property on the Concepción, the outbound ship that sank in the Marianas in 1638. He vigorously denied the charge, and nothing came to light, as he had prevented a thorough manifest from being compiled. Eventually, the authorities in Madrid threw up their hands and declined to find for or against Corcuera. All charges were dismissed, and Corcuera resumed his service to the Spanish empire. He was appointed magistrate of Córdoba, and ended his career and his life in the prestigious post of governor of the Canary Islands.
No gold plate and ewer ever surfaced at the time to stand as evidence against Corcuera. But 350 years later, it did. When marine archaeologists in the 1980s surveyed the coral bed where the Concepción went down, they found on the ocean floor the rim of a gold plate—the best evidence yet that Corcuera was guilty as charged.
WEN ZHENHENG, THE CONNOISSEUR OF superfluous things, might have risen to high office like Corcuera, had he been able to pass the state examinations. He succeeded in passing the qualifying county exams in 1621, but couldn’t seem to discipline his writing into the formulas that examiners liked and that he needed to imitate if he were to proceed toward an official appointment. The 1620s was not a propitious decade to seek official advancement anyway. Notoriously corrupt eunuchs around the throne effectively throttled and bled the administration, and anyone who sought a post in government had to go along with this state of affairs or face impeachment, or worse. After failing the prefectural exams again in 1624, Wen stepped out of the examination rat race and turned his attention to the things he loved: playing music, staging operas, and building gardens in Suzhou, the center of high culture and consumption in the late Ming. The family’s immense wealth allowed him to live the life of the aesthete that he had championed in his Treatise on Superfluous Things.
Wen had a talented brother, Zhenmeng who passed the highest exams in 1622 and pursued a bureaucratic career that brought renewed honor to the Wens, but political calamity to himself, when he opposed the eunuch faction. He died in 1636, leaving the responsibility of leading the family to Zhenheng. After the obligatory year of mourning, Wen Zhenheng felt he had to follow his brother’s example. He secured a minor post in Beijing, where he soon got on the wrong side of court politics and ended up briefly in prison. Two years later, he was appointed to serve with one of the armies defending the northern frontier of the Ming against the Manchus. This was 1642, the worst year of the dynasty, with Manchu forces massing on the border and making lightning raids into Chinese territory, and plague crossing from Mongolia and devastating much of north China. It was a disease episode of extraordinary virulence; in some places struck by the plague, entire villages died.
Wen managed to evade the appointment and found an excuse to retire home to Suzhou in the south. He was engaged in building a new garden for himself when the Manchu conquerors reached Suzhou in 1645. He died during the takeover of the city. What place would a sixty-year-old man of his temperament have had in the new order?
Wen Zhenheng’s biography is but one of any number that could be told for Chinese scholars who got caught in the collapse of the Chinese world in the mid-seventeenth century. Yang Shicong, the vice-minister who noted the appearance of tobacconists on every street corner of Beijing, lived a similar fate. Yang did not quit the capital when Wen did in 1642. He remained right up to the time a rebel army captured the city in the spring of 1644, when the last emperor tried to kill his daughters rather than allow them to fall into the rebels’ hands and was later found hanging from a tree behind the palace. Yang’s daughter and two concubines followed the imperial example and committed suicide, but Yang’s servants prevented him from taking his own life and smuggled him out of the fallen capital so that he could join the resistance. He returned home, but had to flee farther south when the Manchus invaded. The armies did not catch up with him as they did with Wen, but agents of the Manchus eventually did, approaching him to abandon his loyalty to the Ming and serve the new regime. He rejected their offer and died shortly thereafter in self-imposed exile in the south.
For people such as Yang Shicong and Wen Zhenheng, the seventeenth century may have been bringing the world together, but its effects on their place and time were more than they could bear.
JOHANNES VERMEER, TOO, FACED HARDSHIPS in the last years of his life. The family had never been prosperous, but they had managed to survive on Vermeer’s painting and his art dealing, along with Maria Thins’s properties and investments. When France invaded the Netherlands in 1672, the art market on which Vermeer relied for his financial solvency collapsed. Dealing in art was a line of business that did well when the economy flourished. The abundance of cash in the Dutch economy favored the production of these wonderfully superfluous things. Householders were mad about hanging paintings on their walls and through the mid-seventeenth century bought art as never before—which is one of the reasons art museums all over the world have so many seventeenth-century Dutch paintings. The disappearance of surplus cash from the Delft economy in the 1670s was catastrophic for artists such as Vermeer, whose survival depended on sales. When purchases and commissions dried up, the only way for him to support his family was to take loans. The last loan on record, contracted from a merchant in Amsterdam (who may have been buying painting futures by offering it), was for a thousand silver guilders, an enormous and unrepayable sum. The pressure of these hardships muted his muse. Of the three paintings that survive from these later years, all of which show women self-consciously playing musical instruments, only one begins to match the brilliance of the earlier work.
Suddenly on 15 December 1675, at the age of forty-three, Vermeer died. In a petition to the Delft municipal authorities for support a year and a half later, Catharina testified that his death had been due to the financial collapse brought about by “the ruinous and protracted war.” Her husband had found himself “unable to sell any of his art and also, to his great detriment, was left sitting with the paintings of other masters that he was dealing in, as a result of which and owing to the very great burden of children, having nothing of his own, he had lapsed into such decay and decadence, which he had so taken to heart that, as if he had fallen into a frenzy, in a day and a half he had gone from being healthy to being dead.” The suddenness of his death suggests that a deadly infection laid him low. Despite her elaborate explanation, Catharina was probably right in believing that his depressed condition sapped his resistance. If so, then what killed Vermeer may well have been the same thing that gave him his career in the first place: Delft’s place in the economic networks that stretched around the world. When those networks flourished, Vermeer’s carefully crafted masterpieces earned him the means to support his family and the time to take as long as he liked to finish a painting. When it collapsed and the only way to get silver was to borrow it, desperation and death ended both his life and his work.
Vermeer was buried the following day in the Old Church, somewhere near the spot I visited. Fortunately for the family, Maria Thins had bought the grave fifteen years earlier when the family was flush. She had no intention to find herself at death’s door without a place to rest. What she had not expected was to find her son-in-law preceding her into it. Nor was Johannes the first. He and his wife had already buried three children there. When the gravediggers lifted the paving stone to bury the artist, they found the body of the child they had interred two years earlier still intact. They carefully removed the little body, lowered Vermeer’s coffin into the grave, then laid the child to rest on top of its father. This time the bell tolled for Vermeer. The great era of Delft painting had come to an end, yet the doors that tr
ade and travel and war had opened not just in that town, but all over the globe, remain so still.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This was not an obvious book for a specialist in Chinese history to write, but world history has to be written from some promontory of expertise, and China is as good a place as any, perhaps better, to track the global changes of the seventeenth century. The idea for writing this history grew out of my experience teaching a world history course at Stanford University and the University of Toronto. As the ideas for the book developed, I was invited to present some of them at the Center for Chinese Studies at the University of California, Berkeley; the Center for Early Modern History at the University of Minnesota; the Department of History at the University of Manitoba (the Henry A. Jackson Memorial Lecture); the Center for Historical Studies at the University of Maryland; and at the China Studies Group at the University of British Columbia.
Partial funding for this project was generously provided by the project on Globalization and Autonomy under the direction of William Coleman at McMaster University, Ontario. The Globalization and Autonomy group also gave me an interdisciplinary context within which to develop my ideas. I have also been blessed with support received over many years from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. I completed the manuscript while enjoying a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
Among those who have helped me shape the ideas and logic of this book, often without knowing they were doing so, I would like to thank Gregory Blue, Jim Chaplin, Tim Cheek, Craig Clunas, Paul Eprile, Shin Imai, Ken Mills, Ken Pomeranz, Richard Unger, Danny Vickers, and Bin Wong. For answering queries from me on topics far from my own expertise, I am grateful to Greg Bankoff, Liam Brockey, Patricia Bruckmann, Jim Cahill, Timothy Francis, Geoffrey Parker, Jane Stevenson, Maggie Tchir, and Hsing-yuan Tsao. Susan Galassi hosted my visit to the Frick Collection in New York to view Officer and Laughing Girl at close quarters, and Ilse Boks of the Gemeente Musea Delft kindly supplied me with the photograph of the Van Meerten plate, the subject of chapter five. Eric Leinberger drew the maps.
Without the constant encouragement of my literary agent, Beverly Slopen, and my editors at Bloomsbury Press, Peter Ginna, Katherine Henderson, and Elizabeth Peters, I’m not sure this book ever would have appeared. My final thanks go to Fay Sims for constantly reminding me that I should be writing for readers like her.
APPENDIX: CHINESE AND
JAPANESE PUBLICATIONS
Advantages and Disadvantages of the Various Regions of the Realm (Tianxia junguo libing shu)
A Brief Account of Macao (Aomen jilüe)
Case Summaries from Mengshui Studio (Mengshui zhai cundu)
Collected Writings from Jade Hall (Yutang wenji)
Compendium of Archives and Documents on the Macao Question in the Ming-Qing Period (Ming-Qing shiqi Aomen wenti dang’an wen-xian huibian)
Compendium of Pictures and Writings (Tushu bian)
Comprehensive Gazetteer of Guangdong (Guangdong tongzhi)
Comprehensive Gazetteer of Guizhou (Guizhou tongzhi)
The Complete Works of Master Jingyue ( Jingyue quanshu)
The Condolence Collection (Zhuai ji)
Continuation of My Record of Extensive Travels (Guangzhi Yi) Dew Book (Lu shu)
Diary from the Water-Tasting Studio (Weishui xuan riji)
Further Deliberations on My Record of Extensive Travels (Guangzhi yi)
Gazetteer of Jining Subprefecture ( Jining zhouzhi)
Gazetteer of Songjiang Prefecture (Songjiang fuzhi)
Illustrated Account of the Eastern Foreigners (Dongyi tushuo)
Investigations of the Eastern and Western Oceans (Dongxi yangkao)
Jottings from the Hall of Benevolence (Renshu tang biji)
Miscellaneous Notes from Zai Garden (Zaiyuan zazhi)
Miscellaneous Records from the Wanping County Office (Wanshu zaji)
New Standard History of the Tang Dynasty (Xin Tang shu)
Notes on Rare Historical Sources from the Ming-Qing Period (Ming Qing xijian shiji xulu)
Pharmacopoeia of Edible Wild Plants (Shiwu bencao huizuan)
A Popular History of Smoking in China (Zhongguo xiyan shihua)
Provisional Gazetteer of Shouning County (Shouning daizhi)
Questions and Answers on First Meeting (Chuhui Wenda)
Sights of the Imperial Capital (Dijing jingwu lüe)
Smoking Manual (Yanpu)
Standard History of the Ming Dynasty (Ming shi)
Studies in the Early History of the Opening of the Port of Macao (Aomen kaipu chuqi shi yanjiu)
Supplement to the Agricultural Treatise, annotated edition (Bu nong-shu jiaozhu)
A Survey of the Age (Yueshi bian)
The Swords of Canton (Yuejian pian)
Tobacco Manual (Yancao pu)
Toward a History of the National Language: A Festschrift in Honour of Professor Doi Tadao (Kokugoshie no michi: Doi sensei shōju kinen ronbunshū)
Treatise on Superfluous Things, annotated (Zhangwu lun jiaozhu)
Twilight Tales of Nagasaki (Nagasaki yawagusa)
Unedited Records of the Chongzhen Reign (Chongzhen changbian)
Veritable Records of the Tianqi Reign of the Ming Dynasty (Ming Xizong shilu)
The Woof of the Earth (Di wei)
RECOMMENDED READING AND SOURCES
This bibliography provides a record of the sources on which I have drawn to write Vermeer’s Hat, both original sources from the seventeenth century and later studies by twentieth-century scholars. Sources in Asian languages are cited first by an English translation of the title, followed parenthetically by the original title in Chinese or Japanese. For those who wish to read further in some of the subjects on which this book touches without having to burrow into the detailed references that follow, I recommend these eight books:
Anthony Bailey’s Vermeer: A View of Delft (New York: Henry Holt, 2001) is a thoughtful and thoroughly engaging biography of Johannes Vermeer. John Michael Montias’s more scholarly Vermeer and His Milieu: A Web of Social History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989) exhaustively examines every piece of evidence the author, an economic historian, could discover relating to Vermeer in the Delft archives. This book is a historian’s dream.
For delightful short essays on the histories of major commodities and global markets over the past half millennium, see Kenneth Pomeranz and Steven Topik, The World That Trade Created: Society, Culture, and the World Economy, 1400 to the Present (Armonk, NY: M. E.
On Ming China, the author’s The Confusions of Pleasure: Commerce and Culture in Ming Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998) provides a broad social and cultural history. Craig Clunas relies on Wen Zhenheng’s guide for connoisseurs, The Treatise on Superfluous Things, to analyze Ming culture in his Superfluous Things: Material Culture and Social Status in Early Modern China (Cambridge, MA: Polity, 1991). Still the most engaging account of a Jesuit missionary in Ming China is Jonathan Spence, The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985).
Marc and Muriel Vigié’s L'Herbe à Nicot: amateurs de tabac, fermiers généraux et contrebandiers sous l’Ancien Régime (Paris: Fayard, 1989) is a delightful cultural history of smoking in the seventeenth century. For a survey of the topic in English, I recommend V. G. Kiernan, Tobacco: A History (London: Hutchinson Radius, 1991).
THE EPIGRAPH IS FROM GARY Tomlinson, Music in Renaissance Magic: Toward a Historiography of Others (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), p. 20.
CHAPTER 1. THE VIEW FROM DELFT
I began my acquaintance with Vermeer through Ludwig Goldscheider, Vermeer (London: Phaidon, 1958,1967). On Vermeer’s life and work, in addition to John Montias’s Vermeer and His Milieu and Anthony Bailey’s Vermeer, I have benefited from reading Gille Aillaud, Albert Blankert, and John Montias, eds., Vermeer (Paris: Hazan, 1986);Arthur Wheelock, Vermeer and the Art of Painting (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), and
his edited volume, Johannes Vermeer (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1995); Ivan Gaskell, Vermeer’s Wager: Speculations on Art History, Theory and Art Museums (London: Reaktion Books, 2000); Wayne Franits, The Cambridge Companion to Vermeer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); and Bryan Jay Wolf, Vermeer and the Invention of Seeing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001); also the Web site http://www.essentialvermeer.com.
On the Netherlands during Vermeer’s lifetime, see Jonathan Israel, The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness, and Fall, 1477–1806 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995); see p. 621 for population figures. On the history of seventeenth-century Dutch art and culture, see E. de Jongh, Questions of Meaning: Theme and Motif in Dutch Seventeenth-Century Painting, trans. Michael Hoyle (Leiden: Primavera, 2000); and David Kunzle, From Criminal to Courtier: The Soldier in Netherlandish Art 1550–1672 (Leiden: Brill, 2002). On Delft’s history, see Ellinor Bergrelt, Michiel Jonker, and Agnes Wiechmann, eds., Schatten in Delft: burgers verzamelen 1600–1750 [Appraising in Delft: Burghers’ Collections, 1600–1750] (Zwolle: Waanders, 2002); and John Montias, Artists and Artisans in Delft: A Socio-Economic Study of the Seventeenth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982).
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