EthnologyPerspective as Process in VermeerAuthor(s): Christopher HeuerReviewed work(s):Source: RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, No. 38 (Autumn, 2000), pp. 82-99
Perspective as process in Vermeer
CHRISTOPHERH EUER
Vermeer is a cup of honey full to the brim, the inside of an egg, a drop of molten lead. When one has looked at Vermeer's paintings, everything that the great painters insist upon letting us see of their technique, their know-how, their procedure, seems to be vanity, feebleness, or vulgarity, a kind of bluff. Vermeer. . . hides all that he knows, all that he does.1
These words appeared in the Paris weekly L'Opinion during May of 1921. Written by
the critic Jean-Louis Vaudoyer, they spoke to a view of Johannes Vermeer's art that?
not only through its evocations of eggs, drops of lead, and cups of honey?assumed
that a virtually alchemical process was at work in his canvases. The placid, mirrorlike
surfaces, the apparent erasure of painterly texture, and above all, the cool,
seemingly unobtrusive perspective of works like The Art of Painting (fig. 1) led
Vaudoyer to assume that Vermeer's art-making was, if not magical, then virtually
photographic in nature. Traces of traditional technique, such as brushstrokes, were
nowhere to be found. The quiet, introspective Delft pieces were then, as now,
contrasted with the theatrical, expressive, and tactical works of painters like Titian
and Rembrandt.2 For Vaudoyer, the
thick impasto of these latter artists (which was so frank about its status as paint)
remained a rather distracting effect. Today, however, such dynamic traces resonate
with discourses of gesture and the bodily in art history, and thus the apparent
absence of visible marks in Vermeer often make him an exemplar of purely "optical"
strategies of representation.3 In these accounts, it is Rembrandt (fig. 2) who
generally trumps Vermeer as the true progressive artist of the seventeenth century,
his violent handling of the brush and his bold treatment of the quotidian providing
an easy connection to modernist conceptions of the creative process as a subject of
art. In his use of perspective, however, Vermeer may also have something to offer.
Linear perspective inW estern art is a compositional element that provides a
systematic fiction of depth, variously defined as a visual cone (Euclid), a window
(Alberti), or a "seeing through"
(D?rer).4 The perspective in Vermeer's paintings, although a longstanding subject of
hard-science technical inquiry in this century, has remained largely unexamined as to
its role in narrative and meaning. In most accounts, perspective is left strangely
under-emphasized as a component of painting-beholding dialectics. Much of this has
to do with the assumption that perspective, as a kind of invisible scaffolding beneath
pictures, must always act as a closed, irretrievable, and above all, past ingredient of
seventeenth-century art. The findings of technical examinations conducted for
Vermeer exhibitions in Washington and The Hague in 1996, however, suggested
alternatives. Here, physical evidence of carefully placed pinholes was discovered
with X-radiography (fig. 3), causing quite a stir. Yet most of these traces had long
been visible to the naked eye. The very tangible presence of these and other "by-
products" of perspective techniques?chalk lines, canvas punctures, nail marks?
unsettled not only the idea of Vermeer's process as "hidden," but also of perspective
as a hermetic, abstract, and purely uncommunicative element of painting. In the
present essay, I am interested in how the study of perspective in paintings may be
used for purposes other than the reconstruction of past workshop practices. I
propose to consider how physical leftovers from an ostensibly preliminary episode in
a paintings' making (perspective construction) condition our understanding of
Vermeer's meaning in the present. The role that disconnected, often sloppier
residues of painting (for example, drips, splashes, traces of the brush or the palette
knife) play in the interpretation of a work tends to be viewed as an issue of facture,
o? making. Yet such residues are equally elements of texture, as contoured layers of
pigment that intercede between the viewer's eye and the image on canvas.5
Elements like underdrawing, submerged reworkings of a composition, and?
significantly?perspective construction, when brought to light through scientific
examination, can be meaningful to the observer as well, yet for more than
connoisseurship. Unearthing the physical stuff of a painting's making, of course,
brings to light material, as much an integral part of the artwork's subject as its
putative subject matter?the mimetic image. In certain works by Vermeer,
perspective traces not only abet this mimetic project but actually supersede it to
become the primary subject of representation. In this, perspective can function as
both texture and facture when elements like vanishing points can be actively beheld.
When they are, the overlapping processes of both making and beholding a painting
(fig. 1) come together.
Speculation about the actual techniques Vermeer and many of his contemporaries
used to create illusion has been widespread. His supposed experimentation with the
camera obscura during the 1660s has generated debate over the applicability of
proto-photographic devices to early modern painting in general.6 Although much
investigation of Vermeer's work in this vein has attempted simply to recreate the
conditions under which the canvases were made, recently it has been suggested the
camera obscura may not have been used alone (if at all). Rather, such devices may
have been used in tandem with perspective construction.7 The scientific
investigations of Vermeer and his fellow Delft painter Peter de Hooch at exhibitions
in The Hague and London that attempted to unearth material evidence of
perspective processes used infrared photography, stereo microscopy, and
radiography. In some de Hooch works, traces of chalk underdrawing were, in fact,
detected, but for the most part, such investigations proved fruitless, as most traces
of large-scale perspective construction appear either never to have been present, to
have simply disappeared, worked into layers of pigment in the painting process.8 Yet
one mark of perspective construction that was consistently detected had frequently
been visible with the naked eye. This was the vanishing point where orthogonals
converged. De Hooch's Woman and a Child from 1658 (Aurora Art Fund) contains a
small disruption in the paint surface where a pin was once inserted into the white
ground, while Vermeer's 1667 The Art of Painting in Vienna (fig. 1), displayed such a
point below the lower rod of the hanging map (fig. 3).9 These small cavities, which
have also been discovered in Dutch works by de Lorme, El inga, van Vucht, and
others, mark
the spot where the artist would have inserted a pin attached to a chalked string, held
this cord taut along the intended orthogonals, and then snapped it repeatedly
against white ground, moving it slightly, in order to leave straight lines behind.10
The chalk lines would have then been traced with graphite or paint on the white
ground of the canvas, but the nail would sometimes remain embedded in the surface
well into the painting process. Like the theory of linear perspective itself, the origin
of this nail practice lies most probably in Quattrocento Florence. Following
Brunelleschi's famous demonstration in front of the Baptistery in 1413, painters like
Veneziano, Piero della Francesca, and Uccello all are reputed to have experimented
with pin- or nail-hole techniques.11 Small pin-depressions have been found in
Masaccio's Trinity fresco in Santa Maria Novella, and in the so-called Citt? Ideale in
Urbino,12 and like those from the Netherlands, they appear to have been placed
according to one of three methods. Brunelleschi's single point method (often
erroneously credited to Alberti) rested upon the placement of a central "point of
flight" from which projected the organizing rays of the composition. Meanwhile the
bifocal method?also known by Brunelleschi but popularized by Vignola? eliminated
the need for this central punctum, positing two convergences outside of the picture
plane along a horizon; these foci were known as distance points. Of the methods,
Vignola claimed, the first technique is better known, easier to understand; but more
time-consuming and a nuisance to use; the second method is more difficult to
comprehend, but easier to execute.13 The tiers points technique, used by de Hooch
and Vermeer, in essence combined these previous two, negotiating something of a
middle path in terms of complexity. Outlined first in Jean Per?lin's De Artificiali
Perspectiva in 1505, and later taken up by Jean Cousin,
the procedure involved drawing three different sets of orthogonals, two of which
converged at points outside of the picture (again, distance) and one which remained
in the center. The so-called "vanishing point," thus paired with the exterior "distance
points," allowed for the construction of a believable-looking illusion without
recourse to mathematical formulas; indeed, the procedure remained, particularly
during the seventeenth century, a system more related to carpentry than geometry.
A writer like Abraham Bosse, unsurprisingly, thus depicts lines of sight as strings, that
is, as beatable physical entities in his 1664 Algemene manier tot de Praktyck der
Perspective. These spring and uncoil atop imaginary ladders or cluster tightly in the
hands of dandified geometers (fig. 4). Elsewhere the same author advises would-be
perspectives to avoid mathematicians and philosophers when looking for help with
constructions, urging them instead to seek out surveyors, bricklayers, and cabinet
makers, for "they are more versed in the tangible practice of Meet-konst
(measurement)" and thus grasp the key elements of the art.14 At least one Dutch
artist from the seventeenth century appears to have done just that: Pieter
Saenredam consulted the Haarlem surveyor Peter Wils for advice with his
architectural paintings throughout the 1630s.15 More than eight of Vermeer's works
exhibit physical traces of this method. And Pieter de Hooch, the son of a master
bricklayer, appears to have adopted the technique as well, for evidence has been
discovered in over a dozen of his interior scenes, including Couple with a Parrot iron)
1677 (Cologne, Wallraf-Richartz Museum) and Woman with a Child from 1661 (Los
Angeles, Getty Museum). Over time, Vermeer sunk the lines of his horizons and
reduced the span taken in by his distance points, essentially narrowing the viewing
angle of the beholder, reducing marginal distortions in elements like floor tiles. De
Hooch, meanwhile, was less rigid in his application of preexisting perspective
methods, occasionally introducing multiple horizon lines or other deviations from a
standard grid, which could account for different levels of depth in a scene. Thus in
some of his works, second or ?/7/rc/pinholes are actually visible. In the Courtyard in
Delft from 1658 (fig. 5), there are two depressions in the canvas along what appears
as the inside wall of the brick doorway, betraying evidence of a slightly altered
perspective
system. Here, the twin points have been charted using the three-point method along
slightly different horizons to provide a structure but, curiously, a mutable one. This
more "experiential" approach to the illusion of space was a practice initially
developed by architectural painters like Pieter Saenredam and adopted by fellow
Delft painters who specialized in church interiors. Emanuel de Witte and Hendrick
van Vliet, for example, frequently introduced multiple viewpoints and perspectival
"errors" in their paintings of the 1660s and 1670s to create a more complex sense of
space.16 Many of these works combined fragments of views taken from different
parts of a building's interior, resulting in a finished picture hardly "correct" by any
optical standard, but which indeed accounted for the activity of the roving human
eye. This "freer" method of space evocation did not discard perspective completely
(as is sometimes claimed), but rather allowed for multiple angles to co-inhabit the
canvas, assuming the presence of a mobile, projective viewer.17 Modern pictorial
reconstructions of early modern perspective do not account for these multiple
spatial constructions in a single picture, however. Such diagrams, common in
technical literature, exhibition catalogues, and thematic monographs (fig. 6)
oversimplify perspective somewhat by treating it as nothing but a preparatory
element made obsolete by the completion of the work. Demonstrative orthogonals
and horizon lines, mapped over paintings, can create an altogether different visual
artifact than the painting itself, one where (as in scientific examination) the
seemingly invisible is somehow brought to light. This schematizing makes the picture
appear as if it contains a code to be cracked, a puzzle to be solved, and has thus
wrongly influenced much thinking about perspective. The exaggeration of straight
lines gives the impression that
perspective is a dead element from the painting's past construction, something that
must be drawn out and recovered only hypothetically from deep in within the
canvas.18 Perspective itself becomes relegated to a mere preliminary role in the
story of a painting. With explanatory diagrams, a narrative of making often seems to
end abruptly once the finished painting is on the wall or reproduced in print. III. In
the seventeenth century, the idea of a single, formulaic grid, one step away from a
finished painting, was unknown. The perspective available to most early modern
artists was instead a diffuse, fragmented, and pluralized affair.19 Many textual
sources that individuals like Vermeer and de Hooch may have turned to for
instruction on the subject used vastly different means to teach their truly
heterogeneous topic; writers on the subject commonly acknowledge the complexity
of perspective to the reader, who was only in rare instances assumed to be an artist.
Alberti's 1435 Delia Pittura had established the metaphor of the "window" above all
as an imaginary aid in explaining perspective to students. Using purely textual
description, Alberti emphasized that measurement (and even the plotting of nail-
points) could be crucial in the production of a picture.20 In the sixteenth century,
meanwhile, authors began to add lengthy equations to their texts coupled with
elaborate instructions and diagrams (fig. 7). Barbara's Practica della perspettiva, first
published in 1568, is typical (fig. 8), promising to reveal the "obscure and difficult"
rules of linear perspective. However, only one of Barbara's diagrams is what today
might be considered explicitly pedagogical. Peppered with references to antiquity,
the book is aimed largely at proving why one perspective method is superior to that
of previous authorities, digressing at length into histories of Euclidean geometry
and scenography. Such rhetorical embellishment resulted from a humanist sense of
aedificatio rather than clarity? visual aids, generally woodcuts, only sporadically
appear. Predominantly, textual exegesis characterizes the treatises of Benedetti
(Rome, 1585), Commandino (Venice, 1588), and particularly Lomazzo (Milan, 1584)
as well. The latter, particularly, offers long and tedious explanations with few or no
clarifying diagrams.21 Hans Vredeman de Vries's hugely successful Perspective
(1604-1605) attempted a different tact. Geared not toward artists but to "all lovers
of perspective," the book consisted of two volumes of plates, which demonstrated
an idiosyncratic strain of Viator's technique. Windy textual addresses to the reader
accompanying these images said almost nothing about how the shapes should be
drawn; instead, they were concerned almost obsessively with Vredeman's own
achievement, presenting the "admirable" qualities of the plates. Begging the reader
to appreciate his inventive
ability and knowledge, Vredeman offers page upon page of eerie, geometric
landscapes as products of his method alone?unlike a writer such as Barbara, for
example, he makes no claims whatsoever as to the superiority of his work. In
rambling, complicated sentences Vredeman refers readers to earlier sections of the
book, then back to other figures, and then to publications from south of the Alps and
elsewhere. This brand of active perusal?itself a form of travel for the reader?is
intrinsic to the study of perspective, for it parallels the darting activity of the mobile
eye. In Vredeman's treatise, it is the viewer, the possessor of the eye, who is thus
upheld as a fundamental component of the perspective system. Vredeman's well-
known plate 30 makes plain the importance of the embodied beholder for his
schema (fig. 9). A centrally placed viewer, ensnared in a web of orthogonals, unifies
the scene with his eyesight as gesturing onlookers align themselves along diagonals.
None of the figures look out, but the complicity of the beholder/perspectivist in the
upholding of illusion is made quite clear. As in Vermeer's Art of Painting (fig. 1 ), the
turned back of the central figure invites us both to look over his shoulder and
simultaneously to identify with his working process. Perspective illustrations
throughout the second half of the sixteenth century increasingly included this kind of
human staging in their explanation, indebted largely to the final pages of D?rer's
Underweysung der Messung (fig. 10), which depict the concretization of Alberti's
window metaphor (and the use of strings as drawing aids). Illustrations showing
either viewers or students hard at work on perspective become common. Jean
Dubriel's 1642 Perspective Practique, which depicts an apprentice using a drawing
frame to render a landscape, is one example. As a teaching tool, these illustrations
often supplanted the line-and-letter diagrams of earlier works like Barbara's,
accounting for the participatory presence of a maker within the
perspective act.22 The sum expression was that perspective was a process made up of
manual, human application as well as simple results that today are too often presented
as the sole component of the craft. For the most part, however, perspective books
remained no less mysterious in their explanations; they simply shifted outward to
acknowledge explicitly the human viewer's involvement in the making of illusion.
One marvelous page designed by Hendrick Hondius for Samuel Marlois's 1629 work
on perspective, suggests this in an illustration of Alberti's visual pyramid (fig. 11).
Here, geometrical diagrams appear in sequentially numbered succession, gradually
describing the rendering of a cube in perspective. In figure 7, as if on cue, a calipers-
clutching human figure suddenly appears, his right eye forming the originating point
for the visual rays. By figure 8, he has disappeared, but thanks to his presence the
cube has, as it were, sprung to life in the scene. The standing geometer here
manifests the implicit role of the beholder in the process of perspective.23 Books on
perspective like Marlois's inevitably contributed to the cultural milieu of de Hooch
and Vermeer. Yet going through them?looking, reading, copying, thinking, correcting,
erasing?was never a simple or even a practical act, as modern perspective analyses
sometimes imply. In fact, after the late sixteenth century, few of the books
contained any real new ideas at all, and certainly none aimed explicitly at the
student of painting. Dutch treatises, in particular, suffered a reputation of being
particularly useless?in 1628 one reader of Vredeman's Perspective quipped ". . . it is
about as easy to learn something [from this book] as to grab a bird out of the sky. ... I
have never met anyone who has learned anything from [its] prints."24 But nowhere
in Vredeman's book does "learning" come to figure; had Vredeman actually been
alive to read such a comment, the idea that perspective was simply a means would
have seemed preposterous to him. For, like the layering of paint on a canvas, the
construction of a building, or the sculpting of a marble block, an artist's engagement
with a perspective treatise remained a process like any other endeavor, one of
laborious trial-and-error and potentially full of misinterpretation, confusion, false
starts, and repetition?in sum, not at all dissimilar to the looping vagaries of a bird in
flight. "Working through a perspective treatise is not only like making a picture,"
James Elkins has noted, "it is making a picture."25 That is, it is a task often less
explanatory than poetic, and thus potentially aberrant, elliptical, and abstruse,
similar to the reading of many modern writings on perspective, from Warburg to
Panofsky to Damisch.26 In all cases, the demands made on the reader highlight his or
her own complicity in the generation of meaning and undermine the assumption that
perspective and its application is always synonymous with some kind of cool
mathematical logic. The constructions found in Barbara, Hondius, and Vredeman
demonstrate the more inelegant and eccentric aspects of perspective as a manual
process of making, highlighting the fact that the reader exists as a
separate entity. These works are not dry Cartesian proofs or even meditative exercises,
but almost contemplations of a kind of homemade algebra, subjective to the extreme.
Is perspective really the issue in Vermeer, however? The fame of much seventeenth-
century Delft art rests largely upon its artists' supposed eschewing of linear methods
of composition in favor of light, color, and surface. Today commentaries often echo
Vaudoyer's suggestion that Vermeer's images must have sprung forth "by a kind of
magic."27 Perspective's origins as a drawing technique have traditionally located itw
ithin a graphic tradition of representation. Conversely, color and light have been
more closely linked to an optical one. This art
historical categorization is ultimately traceable to W?lfflin, Riegl, and Gombrich, but
their recent reformulation by Harry Berger, Jr., provides the more relevant grounds,
it seems, for considering Vermeer: In the graphic mode, things are painted as they
are known or thought to be, that is, as people imagine they really are and appear. ...
the images produced in the graphic mode are governed by prevailing conditions of
objective appearance. It is reflexive in that the graphic image is conspicuously
displayed a product of analytical observation and knowledge. . . . In the optical
mode, things are painted as they are seen, or, more pointedly, in such a manner that
the way they are shown modifies, obscures, or conflicts with their objective structure
and appearance. ... the optical mode enjoins the observer to peer into shadow,
distinguish figures from space where chiaroscuro overrides the individual forms, sort
out the motions of figures from those of light, shade, and paint.28 The rush to posit
graphic modes of representation as somehow contrary to, or of a different nature
than, optical ones in terms of illusion is understandable, but perhaps not entirely
applicable to the seventeenth century. First, the presence of the vanishing point on
the canvas in a sense sees a component of the graphic mode acting in an ostensibly
optical fashion. It is a tiny, physical disruption, a touchable "thing" and at the same
time one element of a spatial abstraction. The palpable nail hole remains part of the
overall representation, demanding that the viewer indeed "shuttles" back and forth
before the canvas to sort out what is what.29 Second, the idea that perspective is a
purely "objective" process is suspect, as even a handful of idiosyncratic perspective
treatises has demonstrated. Yet third, and most significantly, linear perspective in
the seventeenth century was often a complement of, and hardly an alternative to,
color in the construction of illusion. Rather, it was but one more component of the
Dutch notion of houding. Variously translated as "conception," "attitude," "aspect"
or even "union," houding was defined in a 1670 book by William Goeree as
that which binds everything together in a drawing or painting, which makes things
move to the front or back, and which causes everything from the foreground to the
middleground and thence to the background to stand in its proper place without
appearing further away or closer.30 The term is a compositional one. Goeree's
explanation is concerned with spatial effects in a painting, less with how they are to
be achieved than the results they will produce. The definition makes no prescriptions
as to what methods should or should not be used, suggesting again that the
boundaries between linear and coloristic strategies for art-making may have been
somewhat indistinct. Goeree is also rather vague in his terminology. His avoidance of
concrete examples here for the expression "everything" (alles) suggests that he may
be referring to elements other than simply the mimetically depicted human figures
or objects in the picture. Possibly the compositional lines and pigments?just as much
as the subjects?are to appear, as he claims "as if they were accessible with one's
feet" (als of sijn met de voeten toegangelijk ware)?as well.31 The "graphic"
perspectival skeleton beneath a composition would then be understood as a subject
just as worthy of the picture as the scene it helped to counterfeit. V. The correlation
between perspective as a model of drawing and of seeing the world remains a
contentious subject in the art, philosophy, and psychology of this century. Erwin
Panofsky's famous dismissal of Renaissance perspective as an accurate reproduction
of vision (1927) was among the first to suggest that cognitive processes may be
conditioned by specific cultures. Since then, perspective has often been viewed as a
rough abstraction, with no more claim to essentialism than any other stylistic
convention.32 As an oppressive and confining compositional relic in art, perspective
has become suspect, the optical burden photography and film are cursed to bear,
and which the avant-garde is bound to renounce.33 It remains emblematic of an
ideology that shackles representation to scientific exactitude and quantification, and
subjects human expression to the model of a capitalist account-book. And when
deployed in scenes like Vermeer's, which often depict burghers^at leisure,
perspective further perpetuates hazy associations with some kind of merchant
bourgeois ideology, which immobilizes and excludes viewers before an arbitrary
construct.34 As a paradigm of experience, meanwhile, Renaissance perspective is
seen?not incorrectly, in many ways?as incapable of accounting for the vagueness,
uncertainty, and volatility of individual lives and bodies in space.
Hubert Damisch, however, has suggested something of the opposite. In his ambitious
Origin of Perspective (1987) he synthesizes several older art-historical and
psychological analyses to offer the claim that perspective in fact makes subjectivity
possible. Rather than harnessing the viewer to a single, objective viewpoint, Damisch
claims that perspective allows the act of seeing to become visible, making the
beholder's visual options clear. By fixing the anterior viewer, and acknowledging his
presence, perspective in essence points like a twin index not simply back to the
process of a painting's creation, but also out to the subject beholding, addressing
him as through an utterance, which "assigns the subject a place that gives
meaning."35 In this process, perspective functions dietically?it expresses spatial and
temporal information about its place of origin, indicating the presence of the viewer
as if by a demonstrative pronoun. With this, perspective allows for the involvement,
not the exclusion, of the subject into a kind of discourse. The locus of perspective's
enunciation to the viewer here becomes the vanishing point, which, like the
perspective treatise explicitly oriented towards the viewer, reflexively posits the
existence of a separate entity through its own act of self-designation. The point thus
maintains a dual existence as both an internal and external component of a system:
within it as one element of illusion and outside of it as a kind of meta-linguistic
marker of that system as a construct?a reminder that we are specific and particularly
located, corporeal individuals looking at an image from a point of view.36 Now,
there seem to be a number of problems with Damisch's idea?most noticeably the
supposition that pictures work exactly like language and that beholding is something
like the act of listening.37 And the pictures he discusses (the two Ideal City panels in
Baltimore and Urbino) are from the fifteenth century, not the seventeenth, and put
basically, are simply more perspectival-/oo/c/V?g than many works by Vermeer. But
his theory is not completely inapplicable, for it actually suggests (if indirectly) an
alternative to perspective's "rational" side. If a perspective system is functioning to
reference the viewer, it is not, Christopher Wood has noted, doing so in grammatical
terms. Rather, the system "operates within the terms set by the fiction proposed by
the picture," and thus remains, indeed, something more haphazard, less
predictable.38 The beholder of the
painting is needed to complete the perspective system, as in the Renaissance
treatises' illustrations and directives, but he does so in an unchartable way. Consider
the case of Vermeer's famous Milkmaid in the Rijksmuseum (fig. 12). In this work,
there is a small, painted nail in the upper center of the canvas, which is made to cast
a shadow on the white pitted wall. X-ray reflectography of the canvas, which took
place for a 1995 exhibition, revealed that the nail falls not far from where there once
had been a large map, later painted over.39 This piece of information about the
work's construction, of course, speaks more to the^noment of the painting's
production than to our present-day moment of its interpretation. But in both
moments perspective works as a process. As they now appear, the represented nail
and holes tell the story of previous attempts to hang a painting or a basket like that
adorning the upper left.40 But the pock-marked wall also refers to the work's
construction?pointing to the one-time existence of a real nail in the center of the
canvas. Meanwhile, a small physical depression in the surface four centimeters
above the woman's right hand addresses viewers as a physical evidence of this
perspective (fig. 13). It serves to remind the viewer of his active complicity in the
creation of this linear system of illusion and, correspondingly, of the role that he, like
the mimetic subject on the canvas, plays in the production of meaning. The
generation, articulation, and reworking of potential meanings that is prompted by
the painting?but ultimately supplied by the viewer?remains in itself as active a
process as Vermeer's application of paint. And in the end, this introspective process
is paralleled almost uncannily by the workings of perspective. Partial and intrusive
(once discovered), the texture of the piece signifies "another state of painting"
within the picture? the state of craft, of materiality.41 For viewers today the pinhole
unsettles the conceptual primacy of the mimetic narrative, making the perspectival
grid or system itself something of the main subject of the painting instead of the
pouring of milk and its
connotations of domesticity, motherhood, and productivity. In 1669, an art collector
from The Hague named Peter Teding van Berckhout got at this after he visited
Vermeer's studio in Delft. Describing the works that he saw there to his diary, he
named not pictures of objects or people, but rather "extraordinary .. . and curious
perspectives."42 To Teding van Berckhout, perspective effects remained an artistic
endeavor and a subject unto themselves, as in the treatises. For rather than simply
providing the stage sets for an artistic production, perspective became the play,
unseating the depicted genre subject as the primary focus of interpretation. At the
closing of the exhibition that Jean-Louis Vaudoyer had so enthusiastically reviewed
in 1921, one of his readers was provided with a personal tour. Marcel Proust, an avid
(if cloistered) subscriber to L'Opinion, was escorted to the show by Vaudoyer in
October of that year, but apparently understood Vermeer somewhat differently than
his journalistic companion. For the novelist, the paintings remained objects more
expressive, processural, and introspective. Vermeer's work had first struck the
delicate Proust during a visit to the Mauritshuis in 1902, and in the intervening
period, he had, of course, produced a text in which The View of Delft figured
continuously, The Remembrance of Things ftsf.43 Itw as hardly the muted finish of
Vermeer's work that was so intriguing in the book, but rather its very active
harmonization of "patches" of color, light, and space. This harmonization, readable
in discrete visual passages, spurred the very subjective ordering of experience in
Proust's literary characters. As Bergotte gasps in The Captive: . . . these
resemblances, concealed, involuntary, which broke out in different times ... at
remote intervals I recaptured in my life as starting-points, foundation-stones for the
construction of a true life. .
Proust recognized the manner in which seemingly unconnected aspects of a painting
can cohere and evoke, and how the traces of things supposedly past can impart
meaning through their reception in the present. As I have suggested, it is possible
that in certain Vermeer paintings the remnants of perspective technique can work
this way as well. For, as the traces of making persist, so does their signification of
process, and such "remote intervals" of composition on the canvas?as points?most
certainly emerge as well as vanish.
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