Leonardo Digital Reviews
 LDR Home  Index/Search  Leonardo On-Line  About Leonardo  Whats New








Reviewer biography

Current Reviews

Review Articles

Book Reviews Archive

Giants of Delft: Johannes Vermeer and the Natural Philosophers: The Parallel Search for Knowledge during the Age of Discovery

by Robert D. Huerta
Bucknell University Press, New Jersey, USA, 2003
156 pp., illus. b/w, col.
ISBN: 0-8387-5538-0

Reviewed by David Topper
University of Winnipeg

David.Topper@ds1.uwinnipeg.ca

Once while browsing through a video store I came across a film titled, All the Vermeers in New York. After reading the box I took the film home. It was not very memorable: as I recall it was a prosaic girl meets boy movie, which I never would have noticed without the title catching my eye. I’ve spoken with others who rented the movie for the same reason; the name "Vermeer" can do that. But this was not always so. It is hard to believe that there was a time
starting not long after his early death when Vermeer’s paintings were seen as run-of-the-mill Dutch art; not until the mid-19th century, with the trend toward pictures that capture light and color, was there a Vermeer revival. Stylistic trends are fickle: the same happened to Bach and Shakespeare. So today Vermeer’s quiet pictures of humans and their artifacts in comfortable rooms are recognized as some of the most serene and breathtaking works in European art. Thus the attraction to anything including a movie title bearing his name.

Despite this reverence for seemingly anything related to Vermeer, little is know of his short life (1632-75). To surmount this problem, historians have looked to the artist’s environment, his intellectual and social circle, for clues to penetrating the enigma of those "still life" portraits. Holland of the 17th century was a center of commerce and publishing as well as art and science. Dutchmen invented the telescope and microscope. Much has been written about Vermeer’s use of a camera obscura, mirrors, and other possible optical and perspective devices. Huerta covers this too, but draws his circle much wider by encompassing the scientists of the time, primarily Galileo and Kepler (both used the telescope and camera obscura), Hooke and Leeuwenhoek (masters of the microscope), and Huygens (master-builder of telescopes and clocks, and discoverer of the rings of Saturn). Using indirect evidence, Huerta makes a convincing case that Vermeer knew both Huygens and Leeuwenhoek. Vermeer and Leeuwenhoek were born within a few days of each other in Delft; Leeuwenhoek was the executor of Vermeer’s estate.

The past several decades have seen an abundance of publications on the interrelationship of science and art around the Scientific Revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries. Huerta draws heavily upon this work: indeed, the book is very much an ingenious synthesis it. Those familiar with this scholarship will recognize the authors: a partial list includes Samuel Edgerton, Martin Kemp, Phillip Steadman, Arthur Wheelock, Scott Montgomery, Albert Van Helden, Stephen Straker, Svetlana Alpers, and James Welu. I found no "gaps" in Huerta’s research.

The resulting range of topics not only entails the camera obscura (incidentally, the first illustration of this device shows it being used to view safely a solar eclipse), but also the telescope, microscope, as well as various lenses and mirrors. Hence scientists enter the story, who were both superior observers and masters of their instruments. Not surprisingly, as a master observer, Vermeer is linked with Van Eyck and the Northern tradition of painting minute details and the possible use of mirrors. Such instrument-mediated perception leads Huerta to the topic of perception and art; and here again there is a wealth of material to rely on: that the names of E. H. Gombrich and Richard Gregory arise is not unexpected, since both emphasized the role of mental hypotheses in visual perception and in the act of depiction.

On page 55, Huerta discusses the example of the depiction of a Rhinoceros by Dürer as discussed in Gombrich’s classic, Art and illusion. Since Gombrich juxtaposes the drawing with a photograph of a Rhino (the African species), this example
often quoted over the years by writers on matters pertaining to art and perception is viewed as showing how Dürer departed from a realistic transcription, relying more on his mental schemata for depicting a unfamiliar object. Gombrich goes on to show how Dürer’s Rhino became the model for such depictions through the 18th century, even for those looking at real animals. But the original comparison is erroneous. The Rhinoceros that Dürer drew was the Indian species, which has an armored-looking body, very similar to Dürer’s drawing. I once corresponded with Gombrich on this matter and he replied: "In the early years of the book I was bombarded by letters of protest" on the photo of the African rhino. He went on to inform me that he intended finally to correct this if another edition of the book appeared. Alas, this is not to be since Gombrich recently died. Hence I am pleased to make this correction here.

Nonetheless knowledge-mediated perceptions need not entail erroneous observations. Galileo’s familiarity with artistic techniques for depicting three-dimensional objects facilitated his perception and subsequent depiction of the craters of the moon. A similar mental imagery facilitated Huygens in "seeing" the arcs on the sides of Saturn as three-dimensional ellipses (the planet’s rings) around it. Some of Huerta’s connections between art and science, however, are forced, others just plain silly. For example: of the 35 remaining works attributed to Vermeer 32 are domestic interiors (three early paintings are mythological themes); Huygens visualized the changing images of Saturn circling the Sun and revealing the planet’s rings with a famous illustration containing 32 images of different viewpoints. Of this, Huerta writes (p.66): "As in Huygens’s drawing, Vermeer’s oeuvre provides us with thirty-two images, thirty-two variations on Vermeer’s optical themes."

The range of issues, beyond perception and optics, include the word-image interplay and the role of maps (the wall-covers in so many of Vermeer’s paintings) in both science and art. As such, the book is an informed and inventive synthesis of a vast amount of scholarship. But for a work on such a wide range of topics, its about 105 pages (which includes pictures and illustrations) is relatively short, and surprisingly repetitive. Nonetheless, and perhaps because of its synthetic brevity, it is a superb summary and introduction to this borderline area of art and science during the Scientific Revolution.

top







Updated 1st October 2003


Contact LDR: ldr@leonardo.org

Contact Leonardo: isast@leonardo.info


copyright © 2003 ISAST