run unexpected corridors and sly byways linking our confusing
present—to a degree we could not have guessed, and in ways that will surprise us—to a past that was far from simple. And if
there is one theme curving through seventeenth-century Delft’s complex past that every object we examine in these paintings
will show, it is that Delft was not alone. It existed within a world that extended outward to the entire globe.
LET US BEGIN WITH View of Delft (see plate 1). This painting is unusual in the Vermeer oeuvre. Most Vermeers are staged in interior rooms engagingly decorated
with discrete objects from the artist’s family life. View of Delft is quite different. One of just two surviving outdoor scenes, it is his only attempt to represent a large space. Objects,
even people, dwindle in scale and significance when set against the wide panorama of buildings and the vast sky above. The
painting is anything but a generic landscape, however. It is a specific view of Delft as it appears from a vantage point just
outside the south side of the town looking north across the Kolk, Delft’s river harbor. Across the triangular surface of the
water in the foreground stand the Schiedam and Rotterdam gates, which flank the mouth of the Oude Delft where it opens into
the Kolk. Beyond the gates is the town itself. Our attention is drawn to the sunlit steeple of the New Church. The steeple
is visibly empty of bells, and as it is known that the bells started to be mounted in May 1660, we can date the painting to
just before that moment. There are other towers on the skyline. Moving leftward, we see the cupola atop the Schiedam Gate,
then the smaller conical tower of the Parrot Brewery (Delft had been a center of beer making in the sixteenth century). And
poking just into view beside that we see the top of the steeple of the Old Church. This is Delft in the spring of 1660.
I encountered the painting for the first time on a visit to the Mauritshuis thirty-five years after I landed in Delft. I went
expecting to see Girl with a Pearl Earring and I did. I knew that there were other Vermeers on display as well, though I did not know which ones until I turned into
the corner room on the top floor and found myself facing his View of Delft . The painting was larger than I expected, busier and far more complex in its modulation of light and shade than reproductions
revealed. As I was trying to decipher the buildings in the painting based on what I knew from seventeenth-century maps, it
dawned on me that Delft was ten minutes away by train. Why not compare Vermeer’s rendition with real life, especially if the
seventeenth century were still as present as I suspected? I rushed downstairs to the gift shop, bought a postcard of the painting,
and hurried to the station. The train pulled out four minutes later, and in no time I was back in Delft.
I was able to walk right to the spot where Vermeer composed the picture, though the knoll of the small park that now stands
in the foreground wasn’t quite high enough for me to set the scene exactly according to his perspective. He must have painted
it from a second-story window. Still, only a small adjustment was needed to transcribe the painting onto Delft as it looks
today. The vicissitudes of time and city planning have decayed much of the original scene. The Schiedam and Rotterdam gates
are gone, as is the Parrot Brewery. The city wall has been replaced by a busy road. But the spires of both the New Church
and the Old Church continue to stand in the very places where Vermeer put them. It wasn’t Delft in 1660, but it was close
enough for the picturesque scene in View of Delft to tell me where I was. Looking at the painting now, the first door opens easily. This is Delft as it looked from the south.
Is there a second door? Yes; in fact there are several.
The first place we will look for a second door is in the harbor. The Kolk handled boats traveling
Larry Bird, Jackie Macmullan