Vermeer's Hat Read Free

that things were ending up in places other than where they were made, and were being seen in these new locations for the first
     time. Soon enough, though, commerce took over. Moving things were no longer accidental travelers but commodities produced
     for circulation and sale, and Holland was one such place where these new commodities converged. In Amsterdam, the focal point
     of their convergence, they caught the attention of the French philosopher René Descartes. In 1631, Descartes was in the midst
     of a long exile in the Netherlands, his controversial ideas having driven him from Catholic France. He described Amsterdam
     that year as “an inventory of the possible.” “What place on earth,” he asked, “could one choose where all the commodities
     and all the curiosities one could wish for were as easy to find as in this city?” Amsterdam was a particularly good place
     to find “all the commodities and all the curiosities one could wish for,” for reasons that will become clear as we proceed.
     Such objects came to Delft in lesser numbers, but still they came. A few even ended up in the household that Vermeer shared
     with his mother-in-law, Maria Thins, to judge from the inventory of possessions that his wife, Catharina Bolnes, drew up in
     the course of filing for bankruptcy after he died. Vermeer was not wealthy enough to own many nice things, but those he did
     acquire reveal something about his place in the world. And where we will see them in action is in his paintings.
    To bring to life the stories I want to tell in this book, I will ask that we examine paintings; or more exactly, objects in
     paintings. This method requires suspending some of the habits we have acquired when it comes to looking at pictures. Chief
     among these habits is a tendency to regard paintings as windows opening directly onto another time and place. It is a beguiling
     illusion to think that Vermeer’s paintings are images directly taken from life in seventeenth-century Delft. Paintings are
     not “taken,” like photographs; they are “made,” carefully and deliberately, and not to show an objective reality so much
     as to present a particular scenario. This attitude affects how we look at things in paintings. When we think of paintings
     as windows, we treat the objects in them as two-dimensional details showing either that the past was different from what we
     know today, or that it is the same, again as though a photograph had been taken. We see a seventeenth-century goblet and think:
     That is what a seventeenth-century goblet looks like, and isn’t it remarkably like/unlike (choose one) goblets today? We tend
     not to think: What is a goblet doing there? Who made it? Where did it come from? Why did the artist choose to include it instead
     of something else, a teacup, say, or a glass jar?
    As we gaze at each of the eight paintings on which this book has been draped, I want us to ask just these sorts of questions.
     We can still enjoy the pleasures of the surface, but I also want us to duck past the surface and look hard at the objects
     as signs of the time and place in which the painting was made. Such signs slipped into the picture as it was being painted
     largely unawares. Our task is to coax them out, so that we can in effect use the painting to tell not just its own story,
     but our own. Art critic James Elkins has argued that paintings are puzzles that we feel compelled to solve in order to ease
     our perplexities about the world in which we find ourselves, as well as our uncertainties as to just how it is that we found
     ourselves here. I have recruited these eight Dutch paintings for such service.
    If we think of the objects in them not as props behind windows but as doors to open, then we will find ourselves in passageways
     leading to discoveries about the seventeenth-century world that the paintings on their own don’t acknowledge, and of which
     the artist himself was probably unaware. Behind these doors