By JAMES MONTI
In 1653, a young Dutchman of Delft named Johannes Vermeer (1632-1675), the son of Calvinist parents, married the daughter of a devout Catholic widow. It is clear from the circumstances of the marriage that Vermeer also made the life-changing decision of embracing the Catholic faith. His first two sons were given distinctly Catholic names, Ignatius and Franciscus, and one son for a time studied for the priesthood.
Vermeer’s earliest known painting is expressly Catholic in its subject matter, a depiction of a virgin saint of second-century Rome, Praxedis, in the act of collecting a martyr’s blood as a relic, doing so with a crucifix in her hand.
Over the years that followed, Vermeer was to develop a highly successful career as a painter of serene and introspective scenes of Dutch domestic life, a corpus of work for which he is widely acclaimed. But toward the end of his years, he produced an artwork so seemingly different from his core repertoire that many admirers of his other paintings have dismissed it as a failure, dismayed and even embarrassed by its mysterious, overtly Catholic symbolism.
In Vermeer’s Allegory of the Catholic Faith, an ornamental curtain is pulled aside to reveal the interior of a Dutch drawing room, at the center of which a woman in white and blue sits on a richly carpeted dais beside a veiled table, upon which rests a gilded chalice, an ebony crucifix and a large folio-sized book lying open to a page near its end, with a blue-tinged crown of thorns on it.
Against the wall behind her, in subdued light, is a large painting of the crucifixion, recognized as a work of another Flemish artist, Vermeer’s contemporary Jacob Jordaens (1593-1678), a work the Vermeer family is known to have owned. From the ceiling above, suspended upon a blue ribbon, hangs a clear glass globe, toward which the woman gazes, as her raised right foot rests upon a large and cartographically detailed globe of the world. On the checkered floor in the foreground lies a bleeding serpent crushed beneath a cornerstone, and to the right, a bitten apple.
By its very mystery this large canvas draws the viewer in, its eclectic array of imagery situated in such an ordinary domestic setting begging for an explanation. What unfolds before us is unmistakably a Catholic allegory, established beyond a doubt by the obvious evocation of the Mass expressed by the chalice and crucifix, with the veiled table, the open book, and the dais clearly intended to suggest an altar, a missal, and the altar step respectively, an evocation driven home further by the crucifixion scene in the background.
But who is the woman around whom this scene is wrapped? What is the meaning of the glass globe above her, and the cartographer’s globe below? Is the book really a missal, or is it something else? What is Vermeer saying to us?
Many decades ago, scholars were able to determine that the woman is a personification of the Christian virtue of faith drawn largely from the iconographic features for such a personification spelled out in a 1644 Dutch edition of the work Iconologia: authored by the Italian scholar Cesare Ripa (+c. 1622). The latter describes a seated woman clothed in blue with a crimson outer garment, the world beneath her feet, holding a chalice in her right hand, with her left upon a book, which rests on a cornerstone representing Christ, beneath which is a crushed serpent (clearly representing Satan), with an apple representing sin nearby. Behind the woman hangs a crown of thorns (“Fede; Geloof,” in Iconologia, Amsterdam, 1644, p. 147, right column).
Vermeer’s rendering loosely corresponds to this definition, but the artist departs in several ways from the above to add further layers of meaning. The chalice and book are transferred to a table to create a tableau of the Mass. Faith’s right hand rests upon her heart, and her clothing is changed, with her dress altered from blue to white and her outer garment changed from crimson to blue.
The latter changes suggest that Vermeer has incorporated into the woman another personification from Ripa’s Iconologia, “the Complaint to God,” a woman seated and gazing heavenward, in “white raiment,” with her hand resting upon her heart, the latter two details explained by Ripa as expressions of her innocence in the face of injustice done to her (ibid., “Querela a Deo; Klachte tot God,” p. 255). And it is this personification that serves to explain her emotional posture.
Vermeer’s personification of Faith has been characterized by some as theatrical in posture, melodramatic and awkward. Yet the woman’s posture does make sense if it is understood as an expression of intense inner suffering. In the unscripted reality of everyday life, when sorrow strikes, the person experiencing it will often seem “melodramatic” or “histrionic” to those who do not feel their sorrow. Vermeer’s Faith depicts the virtue as Holland’s seventeenth-century Catholics had experienced it, a virtue put to the test by suffering and persecution.
The model for Vermeer’s depiction of Faith personified is thought to have been his devout Catholic mother-in-law Maria Thins, a woman who knew all too well the price of being a Catholic in Calvinist-dominated Holland. Going to Mass meant going to a secret chapel concealed within a friend’s or neighbor’s home. The government made it clear in no uncertain terms that Catholics were not to practice or manifest their faith in any public way, and government laws proscribed private Catholic chapels as well.
While magistrates tended “to look the other way” regarding the actual enforcement of the private chapel ban, from time to time Calvinist zealots would instigate a raid upon these secret places of Catholic worship. Maria Thins would have witnessed just such a raid upon a Catholic home in Gouda where she was living in 1619. Clearly Vermeer’s Mass tableau in his painting is an evocation of the only way Holland’s Catholics could attend Mass — within the privacy of their homes.
But what is the meaning of the clear glass globe hanging from a blue ribbon above, and why is the woman gazing toward it? For decades, Vermeer scholars have cited an illustration in the 1636 book Emblemata sacra de fide, spe, charitate of the Jesuit William Hesius, in which a glass globe catching reflections of a cross and the sun hangs suspended from the hand of a winged youth symbolizing the soul. As a poem accompanying the illustration explains:
“In the smallest thing the vast universe can be shown; / a small globe encompasses within [itself] the vast heavens, / and contains what it cannot comprehend. The mind is large enough, / although it may be thought by us to be small, / if it have faith in God… the human mind is greater than the largest globe” (Emblemata sacra de fide, spe, charitate, Antwerp, 1536, pp. 88-89).
In Vermeer’s glass globe we see a reflection of sunlit windows from another part of the room. But what we can’t see from our viewing angle is what the woman is seeing. On a natural level, it would be simply a reflection of herself, as one would see when gazing directly at a mirror; yet her face indicates she is envisioning something more. The crucifix, the crown of thorns, and the Crucifixion painting all point to the conclusion that she is meditating upon the Passion, and her posture suggests that she is relating Christ’s sufferings to her own.
There is in fact a perceptible resemblance between her posture and that of Christ being crowned with thorns in Gerrit van Honthorst’s circa 1622 depiction of this Passion subject. Even the position of the chalice, standing between the woman and the open book, suggests her train of thought, as expressed in the question of our Lord, “Are you able to drink the cup that I am to drink?” (Matt. 20:22).
The Mirror Of A Soul
In the 1646 edition of the book Het masker van de wereldt afgetrocken (The Mask of the World Pulled Off) by the Jesuit Adriaen Poirters, there appears for the first time an engraving depicting two women gazing into mirrors. One stands in the foreground obviously admiring herself, her vanity accentuated by a second miniature mirror hanging by a ribbon from her waist (a common “fashion accessory” of women in that era). The other woman, however, seated in the background, sees in her mirror an image of Christ crowned with thorns, as she holds a crucifix, her right foot trampling a globe as in Vermeer’s painting.
The accompanying caption above this engraving makes its message clear, “The Passion of Christ is the best mirror of a God-loving soul,” and a further caption below adds, “Behold how he, not how thou” (Jan Baptist Bedaux, “The Reality of Symbols: The Question of Disguised Symbolism in Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait,” Simiolus, volume 16, n. 1, 1986, p. 16 — downloaded from jstor.org).
Several Vermeer scholars have seen this engraving as a further source for Vermeer’s Allegory. What has not been noticed is how the engraving serves to explain why the reflective globe is suspended from the ceiling by a blue ribbon, its color matching the woman’s clothing. It is as if the woman’s miniature vanity mirror has been transformed by her meditation into a mirror of Christ’s Passion.
This leads us to the identity of the open book on the table. Vermeer’s book does not correspond to the dimensions of a seventeenth-century missal, but it does match quite well the dimensions of one of the most widely read Catholic meditative works, the Vita Jesu Christi of the Carthusian author Ludolph of Saxony (+1377). Vermeer’s depiction of where the book is opened to corresponds quite well to where in Ludolph’s book the death of Christ is recounted, and the crown of thorns resting upon it seems to support this inference. Ludolph’s text links the Passion directly to the Holy Eucharist, as Vermeer does with his Mass tableau.
If Vermeer has jarred his audience out of the serene world of his other paintings in his Allegory of the Catholic Faith, he means to do so. That Faith is depicted not as some Greco-Roman paragon of beauty and elegance but rather as a fairly ordinary Dutch Catholic housewife goes to the point of Vermeer’s message. It is a tribute to the faith of Holland’s rank-and-file lay Catholics, tried by fire and found worthy in the eyes of God.
May their courageous faith inform and inspire us in facing similar trials in our own age.
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