A Bourgeois Paradise
Although the word “civilization” is out of fashion and the idea it represents has become politically incorrect, each time fate has brought me to the Netherlands in recent years, that has been the notion that immediately springs to mind: a civilized country. Or, more accurately perhaps, a country committed to civilizing itself, to expanding its citizens’ spaces for freedom, culture, choice, and human rights.
Except in the civic promotion of women, in which Norway has left it behind, the Netherlands is facing the great challenges of our times with more audacity than any other society in the world. Whether the issue is drugs, abortion, euthanasia, sexual minorities, the social and political integration of immigrants, religion and churches, or aid to the Third World, the Netherlands has gone further than any other country in enacting permissive and tolerant policies intended to guarantee, in the whirlwind of contemporary Europe, the democratic ideals par excellence of individual sovereignty and coexistence in diversity. That some initiatives undertaken in these matters haven’t produced the expected results (as seems to be the case with the legalization of so-called soft drugs) or are still the object of ferocious controversy (like homosexual marriage or the decriminalization of assisted suicide) doesn’t tarnish but rather underscores the bravery of the institutions and people who, instead of burying their heads in the sand, honestly and valiantly confront a complex set of problems that, for the first time in history, are emerging from underground to occupy center stage in current affairs.
All this is done without fanfare or intellectual grandstanding, without lectures to the rest of the world, and even with an attempt to avoid provoking antagonism and controversy among those governments, churches, and media outlets that criticize the reforms from outside and occasionally present them as portents of the apocalypse. This discretion is an aspect of the Netherlands’ cultural heritage, which, despite being incredibly rich, is one of the least heralded that I know. Almost all its great figures—from Rembrandt to van Gogh—have been recognized only posthumously by the rest of Europe after having lived and worked, diligently and without fuss, in the diffident half-light of bourgeois anonymity that seems to have been the preferred circumstance of its thinkers and creators and something like a national tendency (although I know very well that there is no such thing).
It was, in any case, the condition of the mysterious gentleman who is the reason for my being here on this cheerful, sunny weekend, with spring exploding at last and the gardens of The Hague and Delft greeting the dawn bright with tulips. There was never a more inconspicuous, routine, or provincial life than that lived by Johannes Vermeer (1632–1675), teacher and art dealer, who was born and died in Delft and whose biography can be summed up in five words: he painted and he procreated. These are the only facts about which his biographers may be utterly certain: in his forty-three years of life, he worked a lot but painted very little—only forty-four paintings are documented as his, of which thirty-six have survived—and he was a very attentive husband, as proved by the fifteen children he had with his wife, Catharina Bolnes, four of whom died soon after birth.
It is almost certain that he was ushered into the world and spent his early years at The Flying Fox, an inn run by his father. Innkeeper was a very respectable profession in seventeenth-century Delft, where beer, along with pottery and woolen cloth, was a principal source of wealth. At the age of twenty, despite the opposition of both families, he married a girl from Delft’s Catholic minority (he had been raised Protestant and converted to the “papist faith,” as it was called then). That same year he was admitted to the Guild of Saint Luke, which gave him the right to sell his own paintings and to deal in other painters’ work. He never attained the prosperity of the affluent families of the city of twenty-five thousand inhabitants, but neither did he know poverty. He lived more or less well, although with occasional lean periods, assisted by his mother-in-law and from time to time selling Italian fabrics to make ends meet, until the terrible recession of 1675, which ruined him (it is suspected that the shock killed him). He was so meticulous and exacting in his work that the birth of each of his oils was like a geologic event: his average production was a couple of paintings a year at most. Although he was respected as an artist in his small city, he was not known in his lifetime outside it, even in Holland. Glory was a few centuries in coming.
Now it has reached its pinnacle, with an exhibition in the Mauritshuis of The Hague that brings together twenty-three of his paintings and the complementary (and magnificent) show in the Prinsenhof of his native city, called Delft Masters: Vermeer’s Contemporaries. At both, cosmopolitan and devoted crowds squeeze in—I’ve overheard every language imaginable—who have come from many miles away. They pack the galleries, and the visitor must crane his neck to see over the heads and shoulders of so many museum-goers. No matter. To inhabit for a few hours the world invented by Vermeer is one of those experiences that momentarily fill us to overflowing with joy and a zest for life, because it gives us the illusion of having touched the crucial center of existence, of understanding what we are here for and why.
The associations that this world immediately elicits are: placidity, calm, order, domestic life, bourgeois families and habits, the prosperity of hardworking shopkeepers. Urban and secular, it is a world of routine and efficiency, without heroism or mysticism, in which there is no place for eros and its excesses; a world distrustful of strong emotions and lacking in imagination, although well educated, well groomed, and immaculate. Faith seems assimilated into material life, and the spirit endowed with powerful earthly roots, not vying with the body but in friendly harmony with it. Of the two paintings on religious subjects, one, Christ in the House of Martha and Mary, has been rendered bourgeois and secularized to the extent that, without the timid halo over the head of the male figure, one could take it for an amiable gathering of three friends about to have a bite to eat. The other, Allegory of Faith, contrary to what it intends to portray—the apotheosis of true religion, incarnated in a beautiful matron who straddles the globe and at whose feet a serpent bleeds from the mouth—is glacially precious, the fanatic precision and polish of each object keeping all sentiment at arm’s length and precluding emotion.
This world is extremely simple and predictable, immersed in the everyday and enemy of the exceptional. Its motifs are few and recurrent: women and girls in elegant middle-class interiors, spotless black-and-white checkerboard floors, landscapes and still lifes on the walls, and big windows of translucent glass that flawlessly let in the light. Music is performed, and reading a common pastime, since books appear among the brocades and on the sturdy pieces of furniture, and musical instruments abound—clavichords, virginals, mandolins, and flutes—with which the ladies while away their leisure time. Women’s love of fabrics and jewelry is exhibited without the least shame, with the clear conscience that success in business gave the industrious merchants of Delft (the Dutch East India Company’s ships left each week for the Orient loaded with cloth and pottery and full of barrels of foamy beer for the long crossing). But even more than the sumptuous dresses of silk, satin, or velvet and the fine lace, pearls are the delight of these well-to-do bourgeois ladies. They are everywhere, sparkling in the pale little ears of girls of marriageable age, wound around the necks of married women, and in every adornment ever designed by clever jewelers to flatter feminine vanity: in brooches, tiaras, rings, and pins and on strings that spill out of dressing tables.
This prosperity, however, is never excessive, is somehow contained at the exact limit where elegance becomes affectation and luxury becomes exhibitionism and frivolity. Everything seems so moderate, and people and their possessions seem so well suited to each other that it is impossible not to accept one and the other as linked by a secret and intimate bond, by a kind of necessity. It is a world that one could call educated, respectful of science, curious about what lies on the other side of the sea (among Vermeer’s subjects is a geographer surrounded by maps and armed with a compass), and convinced that the arts—painting and music, above all—enrich life.
And yet to describe the world of Vermeer as I have just described it is an exercise in futility. It was conceived and realized in forms and colors, not in words, and upon being translated into conceptual discourse, it loses what makes it inimitable and unique: its perfection. It isn’t easy to define perfection, since definitions are by nature imperfect. Most of the paintings by the master of Delft deserve this high and mysterious classification, because nothing is superfluous and nothing lacking in them; no element is out of place, and all the elements together complete the whole. The inhabitants of these canvases—the soldiers with broadswords and plumed hats, the alabaster damsels, the bits of stale bread, or the minute flaws in a wall—are united by something that seems to underlie their strictly plastic qualities. The beauty they exude is more than artistic. Besides dazzling us, it unsettles us, because it seems to give meaning and reality to the lovely and incomprehensible vocabulary of religion: grace, spirit, miracle, transcendence, soul.
When a creator reaches the heights of a Vermeer, we discover how insufficient the explications that critics, philosophers, and psychologists give us of artistic genius still are, despite everything we know. The brushes of this ordinary and methodical bourgeois transformed the small world in which he lived and was inspired—a world of mediocre appetites and boring habits, devoid of flights of fancy, impetuous sentiments, or desires—into a sovereign reality, without defects or mistakes or unnecessary or harmful ingredients, a country of inherent grandeur and aesthetic self-sufficiency brimming with coherence and pleased with itself, where everything celebrates and justifies what is. I don’t know whether heaven exists, but if it does it may well resemble the bourgeois paradise of Johannes Vermeer.