Vermeer's Hat (12 page)

The circulation of decorative objects did not go only from China to Europe. European objects and pictures circulated in China
too. On 5 March 1610, while the
White Lion
was on its third voyage from Amsterdam to Asia, and a few years before Wen Zhenheng started writing his
Treatise on Superfluous Things
, an art dealer called Merchant Xia paid a call on a favored customer. Li Rihua was a renowned amateur painter and a wealthy
art collector living in Jiaxing, a small city on the Yangtze Delta southwest of Shanghai. Li moved in the same social circles
as the Wen family and probably knew the author of
Superfluous Things
. He was one of Merchant Xia’s regular customers, having bought paintings and antiquities from him over a long stretch of
years. Xia was just back from Nanjing, the center of the antiques and curiosities trade at the opposite end of the Yangtze
Delta. He brought a selection of rarities for Li to view: a porcelain wine cup from the 1470s; an old bronze water dripper
of the sort calligraphers used to thin their ink, which was fashioned in the shape of a crouching tiger; and two greenish
earrings the size of a thumb. Xia assured Li that the earrings were a rare type of crystal from a kiln that produced such
things only in the 950s, implying that he expected them to fetch a high price.

Does this anecdote demonstrate that the Chinese were not curious about foreign objects? Not at all. We have to realize what
Li was doing when he collected. For him, the point of collecting was to discover objects that confirmed the cultural authority
of the ancients; this was why authenticity was so important to him. He wanted things that connected him to better times, which
were always in the past. What the anecdote does show is that foreign articles circulated in China in the seventeenth century.
If they were reaching Nanjing and then circulating out in the hands of traveling dealers to the surrounding cities, there
must have been some sort of market for them. They did not circulate on the scale that foreign manufactures did in Europe,
but then they reached China in much smaller volume. Also, unlike in Europe, where roughly a century of plunder and trade around
the world had trained Europeans into becoming connoisseurs of foreign curiosities, demand for such objects in China was not
well developed. Foreign things were not out of bounds for Chinese collectors. Wen Zhenheng encourages the readers of
Superfluous Things
to acquire certain foreign objects. He recommends brushes and writing paper from Korea, and he advocates owning a wide range
of Japanese objects from folding fans, bronze rulers, and steel scissors to lacquered boxes and fine furniture. Foreign origin
was not a barrier to appreciation.

The same could not be said for European things. Li Rihua was not indifferent to knowing about what lay beyond China’s shores;
indeed, his diary includes numerous remarks about what he heard concerning foreign ships and sailors who wandered into Chinese
coastal waters. But the objects coming from foreign lands had no place in his symbolic system. They embodied no values. They
were merely curious. In Europe, by contrast, Chinese things had a greater impact. There, difference became an invitation to
acquire. Europeans felt inclined to incorporate them into their living spaces, and even beyond that, to revise their aesthetic
standards. The dish that Vermeer set in the foreground of
Young Woman Reading a Letter at an Open Window
is a foreign thing, nestled in turn within the Turkish carpet, another foreign thing. These objects stirred no contempt or
anxiety. They were beautiful, and they came from places where beautiful things were made and could be bought. That was all,
and enough to make them worth buying.

What did Li Rihua see, as he looked beyond the wharves of his native Jiaxing, other than a coast beset by pirates? From where
he stood, that wider world was a source of threat, not of promise or wealth, and still less of delight or inspiration. He
had no reason to own symbols of that threat and place them around his studio. For Europeans, on the other hand, it was worth
no little danger and expense to get their hands on Chinese goods. Which is why, four years after the sinking of the
White Lion
, Admiral Lam was back in the South China Sea looting Iberian ships and seizing Chinese vessels in the hope of acquiring more.

4

GEOGRAPHY LESSONS

T
HERE IS ONE painting by Vermeer,
The Geographer
(see plate 4), that requires little effort to locate signs of the wider world that was enveloping and invading Delft. The
painting opens conventionally on the artist’s studio, the same closed space we expect to find in a Vermeer painting where
bright windows again have been painted at an angle so oblique that their panes transmit no image of what lies in the street
outside. This time, however, the room is cluttered with objects that gesture exuberantly to a broader world. The drama that
Vermeer sets on his stage is not about the engagements of love, the theme in the two preceding paintings, or about the drive
for moral perfection, which will animate another painting that we will soon examine. It is about a different drive altogether,
the desire to understand the world: not the world of domestic interiors, or even of Delft, but the expansive lands into which
traders and travelers were going and from which they were bringing back wondrous things and amazing new information. The things
engaged the eye, but the information engaged the mind, and the great minds of Vermeer’s generation were absorbing it all and
learning to see the world in fresh ways. They were making new measurements, proposing new theories, and building new models
on scales that stretched macroscopically as far as the entire globe and microscopically into the mysterious depths that were
beginning to be revealed in a drop of rain or a mite of dust.

This is what
The Geographer
is about. It is no surprise, then, that it evokes in the viewer a mood different from those of Vermeer’s other paintings.
He has characteristically constructed the canvas around a figure who is absorbed in his own doings and is not posing for the
viewer. Still, the sense of intimacy of the other paintings isn’t there. We are drawn to the geographer as he pauses to cogitate,
just as we are drawn to the young woman who reads her letter, but we don’t really enter onto a deeper plane of reflection.
Perhaps with
The Geographer
(and its companion painting,
The Astronomer
) Vermeer intended to move into new subject matter but hadn’t quite figured out how to make the intellectual drama an emotional
experience for the viewer. The passion to know the world by mapping it was not quite as compelling for viewers, or the artist,
as the passion to know another person through love. Perhaps the paintings were commissioned by a buyer who fancied owning
images of the new thirst for scientific knowledge, which left Vermeer feeling undermotiviated. Indeed, perhaps they were commissioned
by the man who posed for them, by best guess the Delft draper, surveyor, and polymath, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek.

Leeuwenhoek’s surname was his address: “at the corner by Lion’s Gate,” which was the next gate to the right of the pair of
gates shown in
View of Delft
. He is best known for the experiments he conducted with lenses, for which he is credited today as the father of microbiology.
No documentary evidence directly links Vermeer and Leeuwenhoek, yet the circumstantial evidence that they were friends is
strong. The fact that the two men were born in the same month, lived in the same part of town, and had friends in common might
not be enough to convince the skeptical. But Leeuwenhoek played a key role after Vermeer’s death. Vermeer died when his business
as a painter and art dealer was at a low ebb. His widow, Catharina, had to file for bankruptcy two months later, and when
she did, the town aldermen appointed Leeuwenhoek to administer the estate. Judging from a later portrait, the man who has
pushed back the Turkish carpet on the table and bends over a map with a set of surveyor’s dividers in his hand is Leeuwenhoek.
Even if he weren’t, Leeuwenhoek was just the sort of person the painting lionizes.

The signs of the wider world are everywhere. The document that the geographer has spread out before him is indecipherable,
but it is clearly a map. A sea chart on vellum is loosely rolled to his right under the window. Two rolled-up charts lie on
the floor behind him. A sea chart of the coasts of Europe—the subject becomes apparent when you realize that the top of the
map points west, not north—hangs on the back wall. The original of this sea chart has not been found, but it is similar to
one produced by Willem Blaeu, the commercial map publisher in Amsterdam who printed the map on the back wall of
Officer and Laughing Girl
, among many others. A terrestrial globe literally caps the entire painting. This is Hendrik Hondius’ 1618 edition of a globe
his father Jodocus first published in 1600.

THE SPANISH JESUIT Adriano de las Cortes experienced the consequence of having less than “complete knowledge” of the South
China Sea on the morning of 16 February 1625, when
Nossa Senhora da Guía
was driven onto the rocks of the Chinese coast. The
Guía
was a Portuguese vessel on its way from the Spanish colony of Manila in the Philippines to the Portuguese colony of Macao
at the mouth of the Pearl River. The ship had departed from Manila three weeks earlier, tacking up the west side of the island
of Luzon and then heading west across the South China Sea to China. On the third day crossing the open water, a cold fog becalmed
the ship. The navigator should have carried the charts he needed to make the well-traveled crossing from Manila to Macao,
but charts were only as good as the bearings he could take from the sun and stars. The combination of fog, slowdown, and drift
defeated him. Approximating his distance from the equator was not too difficult, but estimating where the ship was between
east and west was impossible. (The instrumentation needed to determine longitude at sea was not developed for another century
and a half.) The wind came back up two days later, but then it whipped into a gale so fierce that it blew the ship even farther
off its course. The
Guía
’s pilot had no way to reckon their position and could do nothing but wait until land came into sight and try to figure out
their location from the profile of the shoreline.

GLOBAL TRADE ROUTES IN

THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

Two hours before dawn on 16 February, the gale unexpectedly drove the ship onto the China coast. The place was uncharted and
unknown to those on board. Only later would the survivors learn that they had run aground three hundred and fifty kilometers
northeast of their destination, Macao. The water where the ship broke up was shallow enough that most of the over two hundred
people taking passage on the
Guía
were able to get to shore. Only fifteen failed to make it: several sailors, several slaves (one of whom was female), a few
Tagals from Manila, two Spaniards, and a young Japanese boy.