Eye of the Beholder: Johannes Vermeer, Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, and the Reinvention of Seeing

by Laura J. Snyder

  Cornelis de Bie’s admiration of the still-life painter Daniel Seghers was typical of the age: he reported that Seghers’s flowers were so realistic that live bees tried to settle on them. “Life seems to dwell in his art,” De Bie enthused. Similarly, of the drops of dew depicted in a flower painting by the Dutch painter Simon Pietersz. Verelst*4 (who was living in England), the London diarist Samuel Pepys wrote it was “the finest thing that ever, I think, I saw in my life,” and that he was “forced, again and again, to put my finger to it, to feel whether my eyes deceived me or no.” Indeed, it was said approvingly of Gerrit Dou—Rembrandt’s first pupil—that “his creations can hardly be distinguished from life itself.”

  More than ever, Leonardo da Vinci’s dictum that painters should study “the science of art and the art of science” was true. Because of the perceived similarity between the science of painting and natural science, there were many intersections between these fields, which were not seen as vastly different by their practitioners. Indeed, many of the natural philosophers of the day had trained as artists and used this training in their scientific work. For example, when Galileo turned his perspicillum (as it was still called) to the heavens to view the moon, he was able to see what others who had previously viewed the moon with the instrument had not seen: that the blotches on the moon’s face were shadows cast by mountains on its surface. Because of the way these dark patches shifted as the moon moved through its phases, Galileo realized that the surface of the moon was irregular, not perfectly smooth as most astronomers—still following Aristotle’s view—believed. Galileo’s conclusion was based on his understanding of the behavior of shadows at different angles of illumination both on planar and on curved surfaces, an understanding he had gained through his study of perspective theory while training to be an artist in his younger days. In short, Galileo recognized the dark patches on the moon as shadows of mountains by knowing how the painter would depict mountains and their shadows on a curved surface. In England, William Lower admitted to his friend Thomas Harriot (both men had seen the moon’s spots through the telescope before Galileo), “In the moone I had formerlie observed a strange spottedness al over, but had not conceite that anie parte thereof might be shadows.” Instead, Lower had compared the moon’s blotchiness to his cook’s treacle tart.

  Leeuwenhoek’s and Vermeer’s acquaintance Constantijn Huygens was not only fascinated by science—he read the new scientific journals, corresponded with most of the natural philosophers of the day, and carried around his own microscope for impromptu observations—but also studied art with a cousin, the esteemed painter of miniatures Jacob Hoefnagel. Hoefnagel, like many of the other painters of the time known for their delicately precise depictions of insects and flowers, used a convex lens, or magnifying glass, to examine his subjects. This dual interest and training allowed Huygens to recognize the power of the camera obscura for both scientific discovery and artistic creation. Huygens’s son Christiaan, who became an important astronomer and physicist, also studied art. He later used his knowledge of perspective theory to look at the flat, two-dimensional field of his telescope and mentally transform the images into a three-dimensional model. This ability helped Christiaan recognize, as no one else had done, that the rings of Saturn were rings, and not nearby stars. Leeuwenhoek, too, was steeped in both science and art; his letters betray an in-depth knowledge of certain artistic processes, such as those involved in the engraving of prints and in the decorating and firing of the famous pottery produced in his hometown.

  Across the North Sea in England, the fellows of the fledgling Royal Society of London held discussions on the science of painting and asked their “curator of experiments,” the brilliant and irascible Hooke, to demonstrate a portable, box-like camera obscura that he had designed himself; the minutes of the meeting describe this demonstration as an “optical experiment” which succeeded in showing how “it was now proper for the hand to draw a picture conveniently.” As a boy, Hooke had apprenticed with the Dutch-born painter Peter Lely, and was expected to become a portraitist like his master—until the fumes from the paint exacerbated Hooke’s migraines and forced him to find another vocation.

  At the same time, many artists were students of natural philosophy, such as those miniaturists, who often worked hand in hand with the philosophers studying the insects and flowers they depicted so precisely. Their still lifes were meant to be studied up close, rewarding the viewer with the velvety skin of plums, the extravagantly striated petals of the prized Semper Augustus tulip, the greenish sheen of the wings of the dragonfly. Almost by necessity, the artist became a natural historian. Jacob Hoefnagel’s engravings of his father Joris’s studies of insects, flowers, and other specimens—studies his father had made with a magnifying glass—are so accurate that they are considered the first published biological and botanical investigations using lenses. Another miniaturist-turned-naturalist was Johannes Goedaert of Middelburg, who published a three-volume study of insect development with more than two hundred hand-colored engravings of insects and their larvae from watercolors done from life. Constantijn Huygens bemoaned the fact that a neighbor and friend, the painter Jacob de Gheyn II, was no longer alive to produce an atlas of a “new world” of tiny creatures now seen through the microscope. Rachel Ruysch became famous for her flower still lifes, based on botanical knowledge she had gained from her father, Frederik Ruysch, the head of Amsterdam’s hortus botanicus—and by her own careful examination of specimens from the gardens. Leeuwenhoek himself worked closely with artists who served as his “draftsmen,” capturing on the page the wondrous sights he saw through his lenses; in some cases, he admitted, they were able to see more than he did himself through his microscopes, perhaps because they were more accustomed to looking through lenses. These draftsmen were, like Leeuwenhoek, and like the painters of the time, investigators of the newly enlarged visible world.

  -5-

  The fascination with lenses pervaded both the artistic and the scientific communities, so much so that these communities can be seen as one, united by the shared goal of investigating nature and the collective employment of optical devices. The cohesiveness of art and science in this place and time is best exemplified by the fact that Delft’s greatest artist and its greatest natural philosopher were both using lenses to see the world in a new way.

  It is tempting to speculate that Vermeer and Leeuwenhoek must have known each other, that they must have been friends who talked together about lenses and optical experiments. There is an intricate web of threads that draws them together—they were born the same week in 1632, they lived and worked their entire adult lives within the area of an American football field,*5 they had friends in common, and, most telling of all perhaps, when Vermeer died, Leeuwenhoek was the executor of his estate. But there is no “smoking gun” proving conclusively that they were friends or even acquaintances. What we do know of the two men is intriguing enough without engaging in conjecture, no matter how agreeable it is to imagine them discussing optics and optical instruments over a beer in Vermeer’s family’s tavern. The true allure of the story of their lives and works is the way both men played key roles in the sea change in the notion of seeing that occurred in this time and place. Leeuwenhoek, with his superbly skillful methods of making microscopes and observing a newly visible microscopic world through them, was one of the foremost figures in bringing about the seismic shift in the way of seeing the world that occurred in the seventeenth century. Vermeer, one of the greatest painters of the age, indeed of all time, explored this new way of seeing in his paintings and helped bring it to the Delft public—to those who saw his works displayed at his house, at that of his local patron, and even, perhaps, on the wall of the town bakery when the painter was unable to pay his bread bill. The sublime work that defines Vermeer’s mature style was the result of his optical investigations, which he conducted with an optical device and in accordance with the new optical theories. As the artist John Constable would later say, painters are natur
al philosophers, inquiring into the laws of nature by using their pictures as experiments. While Constable’s landscapes were experiments in natural history, Vermeer’s paintings were in no small measure experiments in optics—as were the exploits in microscopy of his neighbor Leeuwenhoek.

  *1 Leeuwenhoek did not add the “van” to his signature until 1685. I will follow his usage, referring to him as “Leeuwenhoek” until the narrative reaches the mid-1680s.

  *2 In the first few years of letters to the Royal Society of London, Leeuwenhoek addressed the members as “curious gentlemen dabblers” (“Heeren curiuse Lieffhebbers”).

  *3 This painting is Young Woman Seated at a Virginal. Although it was not dated by Vermeer, art historians believe it was painted sometime between 1670 and 1675.

  *4 In the Dutch Republic at this time, patronymics were often used as middle names. These were composed of the father’s name plus the ending -zoon for sons and -dochter for daughters, which were abbreviated as sz. and dr. Thus Simon Pietersz. Verelst was Simon, the son of Pieter.

  *5 The Delft Market Square measures 360 feet by 130 feet, which is smaller than an American football field (including the end zones). Both men lived on streets across from the square (either right across it, as Vermeer did, or just behind it, as Leeuwenhoek did) and worked in buildings on the square.

  PART 1

  Counterfeiter of Nature

  * * *

  ON OCTOBER 31, 1632, an infant boy was brought to the Protestant Nieuwe Kerk (New Church) in Delft to be baptized. In this age before last names become standard, his parents were recorded in the registry as Reynier Jansz. (Reynier, son of Jan) and Dingnum Balthasars. (Dingnum, daughter of Balthasar). They were accompanied by Pieter Brammer, a sea captain who would later skipper a ship called the White Unicorn and travel with the East India Company to Batavia; Jan Heijndricxsz., an ebony worker and frame maker; and the boy’s paternal aunt, Maertje Jans. At the church the boy was given the name Joannis. Not Jan, the name common among Dutch Protestants (and the name of his paternal grandfather), but the more elegant, Latinate version, generally bestowed upon boys of higher social status or Catholics. This boy will, much later, be known as Johannes Vermeer.

  -1-

  Johannes was born during what is now known as the Golden Age of the Dutch Republic—a period spanning roughly the years from 1568, when seven mainly Protestant provinces of the Catholic Spanish Netherlands declared themselves an independent republic and initiated a rebellion against Philip II of Spain, until the end of the seventeenth century. (Some scholars more simply define the Golden Age as encompassing the seventeenth century.) Though war raged between the “United Provinces” of the Netherlands and Spain for eighty years of this Golden Age—excepting the official Twelve-Year Truce, between 1609 and 1621—until the Treaty of Münster finally ended the struggle in 1648, the Dutch managed to become one of the most advanced nations in the world in trade, military might, science, technology, and art.

  Indeed, for a brief span of time, this small, soggy patch of land sixteen thousand square miles, with its one and a half million inhabitants, was a major world power. Up until the 1640s the Dutch possessed a vast and profitable colonial empire, ranging from Brazil (New Holland), the Amazon estuary to the mouth of the São Francisco River; to Africa, where the Dutch Republic was the strongest European power; to the Guyanas and nearby islands of Antilles; to New Netherland, on the east coast of North America with its capital New Amsterdam (today’s Manhattan). Its ships roamed the world’s seas, bringing back sugar from Brazil, furs from New Amsterdam and Fort Orange in North America, and, from Africa, men, women, and children bound for the slave market. Later, the Dutch acquired colonies in Indonesia, South and North India, Ceylon, Siam, and Japan; in 1657 the Dutch East India Company, the VOC, had 160 ships in Asian waters. The VOC would become the largest employer in the Dutch Republic. From South India the ships would pick up cotton textiles to take to Indonesia to trade for spices, which were shipped to India and Persia in exchange for Indian textiles and Persian raw silk, meant for the European market; Chinese raw silk traveled from Taiwan to Japan, in exchange for Japanese silver destined to be sold in Europe. Along the way ship captains would pick up exotic “rarities”—flora, fauna, fossils, shells, and minerals—for the delight of naturalists and collectors, specimens to be classified, studied, and added to their “cabinets of curiosity.” Some of these collectors would one day proudly bring prized specimens to Leeuwenhoek for him to study with his microscope, such as the merchant who bestowed upon him the rare “cockchafer” (more prosaically known as the West Indies cockroach).

  Industry, especially in areas related to the global trade, thrived as well; in order to send goods around the globe, ships were needed, so the Dutch became master shipbuilders; dry goods were transported in baskets, so basket weaving advanced; wet goods required pots, so pottery kilns proliferated; the growing tapestry and cloth industry required—and stimulated—new thread-spinning and weaving technologies. This global trade created a wealthy class of merchants with disposable income to spend on decorating their homes, so painting, glassblowing, faience making, and other artistic crafts thrived in the Dutch Republic. Dealers and artisans offered wealthy buyers silver vessels, jewelry, cameos, medals, finely decorated majolica, Chinese porcelain, and sculptures in alabaster, wood, and bronze. Even workers spent money on the decorative arts. Throughout the Dutch Republic people craved items considered luxuries in other countries: pottery, pictures, furniture, bedding, fine clothing. Refugees from the south brought with them a legacy of refined artistic skill; Antwerp, Bruges, and Ghent had been the foremost artistic centers of the whole of Europe. Painting became a considerable industry, with many pictures produced for export, especially to places such as Germany that had a Protestant civic culture sharing the same tastes as Dutch society. Between five and ten million paintings were produced in the Dutch Republic in the seventeenth century. Of course, these were of varying quality and cost—only a small proportion were the masterworks we know today.

  The seemingly endless decades of war with Spain, and skirmishes with England, France, and other powers, honed the Dutch Republic’s skill at building and maintaining garrisons; rallying, training, and deploying troops; and developing ever more powerful weapons. The Netherlands was considered the “principal school of warfare” in Europe at the time. Even apart from the increasingly technological nature of warfare, gaining technological expertise was literally a life-or-death necessity for the Dutch: because much of the country is at or below sea level, keeping flood waters at bay required engineering and scientific skill, and so these were nourished among its young people, who had to invent or improve, and then build and maintain, a series of dikes, locks, sluices, and other devices, such as “mud mills” to dredge the mud and silt from harbor floors; these mud mills were sought out by the Venetians, who were having their own trouble with the silting up of their canals and harbors.

  The topography required innovations in agricultural techniques as well, such as better drainage, soil replenishment methods, and the use of fodder crops; these innovations were later borrowed by the English, who used them to revolutionize their own agricultural system in the eighteenth century. Dutch drainage experts were commissioned for projects in Bordeaux, Tuscany, and the Papal States. The Dutch also improved harbor cranes, timber saws, tactile looms, windmills, and clocks. Amsterdam would soon be the first city in Europe to have an efficient system of street lighting, designed and implemented by the artist-inventor Jan van der Heyden.

  The Dutch were known throughout the world for their work ethic. Labor was highly respected, even among the very wealthy. As the painter Karel van Mander put it in his Schilderboek (Book on Painting) in 1604, “In my opinion a better custom prevails among us Netherlanders than any other people, namely that parents, however rich they may be, have their children taught some craft, art, or trade while they are still young.” Workers in the Dutch Republic enjoyed a better life than workers elsewhere; the republic h
as justly been called “an island of plenty in an ocean of want” during this period. Throughout the Golden Age, Dutch workers had higher real incomes, better diets, and safer livelihoods than did workers elsewhere in Europe. Even in the eighteenth century, the French philosopher Denis Diderot was shocked enough to comment on the fact that workers in the towns and cities ate fresh and cured meat and fish, fresh vegetables and fruits, butter, eggs, and cheeses. Employers in the Dutch Republic complained that they had to pay their workers more than twice what their counterparts in England, in Germany, or in the Southern Netherlands had to pay, and they were correct. Workers in glass manufactures in Holland earned eighteen to twenty-four stuivers a day (about fifteen dollars a day in today’s money),*1 while their counterparts in Liège received less than half that amount. The British writer and fellow of the Royal Society of London William Aglionby surely exaggerated when he supposed that it was “not very rare to meet with peasants here worth ten thousand pounds,” but his comment highlights the impression made by the Dutch working classes upon members of higher classes from elsewhere. Certainly, in the Dutch Republic, most citizens were not in want, and those who were benefited from numerous civic organizations set up by the state to provide what they needed.