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Vermeer's View of Delft and his Vision of Reality. |
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Dr. Arthur K. Wheelock Jr.,C.J.Kaldenbach
Paintd city views occur only sporadically throughout the first half of the seventeenth cebtury. Although a certain number of topographical views were painted early in the century, among which are two scenes of Delft by Hendrick Vroom, specific town portraits are found only frequently by midcentury. In the early 1650ﾕs, however, artists in Delft began to focus on the major architectural monuments of the city, in particular the Oude Kerk and the Nieuwe Kerk. A dynamic school of architectural painting emerged as Gerard Houckgeest, Emanuel de Witte, and Hendrick van Vliet depicted a wide range of interior views of these vast spaces. Also during the 1650ﾕs the city itself became an important backdrop for portraits (Jan Steen, The Burgher of Delft and His Daughter, p.c. Great Britain) and genre scenes (Carel Fabritius, View of Delft with a Musical Instrument Sellerﾕs Stall, National Gallery, London; Pieter de Hooch, A Dutch Courtyard, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.). Vermeerﾕs A Little Street is an important work in this tradition, even though no recognizable monuments are depicted, because for the first time figures are totally subordinate to the quiet beauty of the architectural forms and their textures.
On October 12, 1654, a disaster occurred in Delft that had important consequences for the evolution of Delft architectural painting. On that date the gunpowder warehouse in Delft exploded, devastating a large, northeastern section of the town and killing many citizens, including the painter Carel Fabritius. The explosion and its aftermath became the subject of many city views by Delft artists, particularly Daniel Vosmaer and Egbert van der Poel. Although these pictures have an anecdotal character, the paintings generally included a panoramic view of the city. including the two vast towers of the Nieuwe Kerk and Oude Kerk.
Rather than a description of the aftermath of a disaster, Vermeerﾕs View of Delft has a totally different character. Almost as a reaction to the depictions of the effects of the explosion on Delft, he chose a site where evidence of the destruction could be seen. As with the architectural paintings of the early 1600ﾕs, his is the celebration of a cityﾕs existence; a reminder, through its careful recording of massive gates, walls and church spires, of Delftﾕs old and distinguished history. The Rotterdam and Schiedam gates, which date to the fourteenth century, had served to control the traffic over land and water, and to defend the city against enemy attack. After the assassination of Willem the Silent in 1584 in Delft and the departure of the Court and the seat of government to The Hague, the threat of military attack lessened. The Schiedam Gate, which once had twin towers like those in the Rotterdam Gate, was altered in 1590-91 and the harbor dug in 1614. The Rotterdam Gate remained intact (with the exception of some aesthetic modifications on the city side) until its twin towers were demolished sometime after 1695 (See the appendix).
Beyond these shadowed walls and gates, light floods the city. It strikes in particular the Nieuwe Kerk, the massive fifteenthﾐcentury gothic structure that stands at one end of the cityﾕs market square. The church was, in fact, the central focus of civic life and held additional importance as it housed one of the most famous monuments in the Netherlands, the Tomb of Willem the Silent. Whether or not Vermeerﾕs topographical adjustments were symbolically as well as compositionally motivated are difficult to determined. Nevertheless, Vermeerﾕs image of the city is almost reverential in character. From this viewpoint Delft remains distant and remote, the water obstructing our direct approach to the far shore. The strong horizontal and vertical emphasis and somber lightening of the foreground elements creates a church and inner city lends a radiance that draws one to it.
The likelihood that Vermeer consciously sought to give a special aura to his view of Delft is reinforced when one notes the contemporary interest in Delft for glorifying the city, its sovereignty and its arts. In 1661, the newly refurbished St. Lukeﾕs Guild commissioned various artists, including Cornelis de Man and Leonaert Bramer to execute allegorical works on the art of painting, architecture and sculpture. Bramer also painted a series of the Liberal Arts with Painting explicitly added to the original seven. In 1667 upon the publication of Dirk van Bleyswijckﾕs Beschryvinge der Stadt Delft, a description and history of the city he chose for his title page design an allegorical figure of Fame blowing upon her gilded trumpets. A few years later the town government commissioned the large Figurative Map of Delft. In this detailed view of the town, Delft was shown in its full glory, commanding the surrounding region. The symbolism of Delftﾕs importance, however, lay not totally in the impressive scale of the map that hung in the Burgomasterﾕs room in the city hall. When Bleyswijck expanded upon his book and described the large Figurative Map of Delft, he focused not on the map but on the emblematic symbols contained in the frame that surrounded it.
Such literary associations are certainly different in kind from the more subjective devices used by Vermeer to glorify Delft and its heritage, but they have at their roots a common basis. This foundation, that art is more than descriptive, that it contains references to essential truths fundamental to human experiences, is one that is found manifested in most of Vermeerﾕs paintings. In this, the most moving of all his masterpieces, references to emblematic meanings, have been eliminated in favor of a far more profound expression of human endeavor that he has achieved through a selected transformation of naturals forms.
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