The greatest art exhibition of the 21st century has just closed. Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum stayed open until 2 a.m. on its final nights, June 2 and 3, to admit 2,600 additional lucky ticket winners. And “lucky” really is the word. The original half-million tickets had sold by the second day.
What made people fight their way from five continents to the city of gables and bicycles? The display was as pared-back as its title: “Vermeer.” It contained 28 of the master’s 37 known works, some minimal explanatory text, and nothing else. The canvasses were shown off to perfection, each given the space it deserved, with heavy curtains to ensure that we might hear that still, small voice of calm.
DO MATH AND LITERATURE HAVE ANYTHING IN COMMON?
You could see the bliss on the visitors’ faces. Somehow, in a few brushstrokes, a 17th-century art dealer managed to take the most prosaic scene — a girl at a piano, a woman reading a letter — and make it lovelier and more mesmerizing than the flesh-and-blood original could ever be. In every canvass, movement — a head turning, milk pouring — becomes not so much frozen in time as tranquil. Intimacy is made dramatic, domesticity dazzling. Light has a truer-than-life vividness. How Vermeer worked this magic, sometimes with a single white dab, is utterly beyond me. But, if you know his oeuvre, you’ll know what I mean.
Not far away, in the artist’s home town of Delft, all 37 of his paintings are gathered in replica — indistinguishable, to the naked eye, from the originals. A few years ago, I spent a rainy morning in the rebuilt Guild of Saint Luke staring intently at those canvasses, held conveniently at eye level on transparent poles. So why did I feel impelled to see the originals?
The answer, I think, lies in a single word. “What is civilization?” asked the art historian Kenneth Clark in a landmark 1969 BBC series. “I don’t know. I can’t define it in abstract terms, yet. But I think I can recognize it when I see it.” Glancing over his shoulder at Paris’s Notre-Dame cathedral, he added, “And I’m looking at it now.”
I might try to explain Vermeer’s appeal in functional ways. I might argue that the rarity of his works lends him mystique. I might talk of how he was made famous by the Impressionists, who delighted in the way he used form to illustrate light rather than the reverse. I could write about the way his popularity was boosted, first in the early 20th century by Marcel Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu and then, in our own time, by the novel Girl with a Pearl Earring, made into a film in 2003. I might speculate that Vermeer seemed more interested in light and surfaces than in people, giving his human subjects an almost fathomless ambiguity onto which the rest of us can project ourselves.
In the end, though, we are drawn to Vermeer’s corpus because it speaks to us of the longing for home, which is at the heart of human experience. As so often, Roger Scruton put it best:
“In an interior by Vermeer we see people set among objects that shine with the light of ownership. They have been brought into the house, so to speak, polished like mirrors, so as to reflect the lives and loves surrounding them. A kind of tenderness radiates from the objects in such paintings, to embrace the viewers and to tell them that they, too, are at home, among these things rubbed smooth by human affection.”
Civility lies at the heart of civilization. To see it up close is to be exalted and ennobled. I could expatiate at length about Vermeer’s place in the Western canon, about his Catholicism, overt in two of the paintings but implicit, perhaps, in the orderly way in which others recall earlier Annunciations. I could argue that the Dutch Golden Age was in fact the beginning of capitalism and that the fact of being able to paint for the general market rather than for princely or episcopal patrons is what raised art in the Netherlands to such a sublime level.
But let me instead close with this observation. I have noticed that the term “Western civilization” is often wielded as a political bludgeon these days. To some of its critics, it is a shorthand for ultraconservatism, narrow-mindedness, and white supremacy. For some of its supporters, conversely, it means opposition to wokeism, to Islamism, and to immigration. Both sides should put their screens aside and look — really look — at the patrimony that defines our culture. It will, I promise, make them feel better.