Here, Vermeer presents us with a carefully composed allegorical image of scientific progress. Infrared images show that he tried out different versions, one with the head in a higher position and a taller hat, another with the head slightly tilted down, turned more to the left, perhaps looking on the map.
The more horizontal position and loose grasp communicate more convincingly that he is actually pausing his work with this tool which was used for measuring, calculating and transferring the distance between two geographical points. Brass square and piece of paper On the stool we see another tool, a brass square. Originally, a piece of paper laid next to it, but it was later overpainted. You can make out its contours. Additionally, it would simply have been too near to the light-coloured roles of maps lying carelessly on the floor.
It is one of the Pascaarten , printed by Willem Jansz. That shows the style at those times. In addition, when we look at this figure, we can guess he is thinking of something or someone. In the story written for Claire, I have supposed that he was imaging new lands he could discover in his next travels. Apart form the geographer, the globe and the signature of Vermeer are also important elements in the painting.
More important elements that can be seen in this painting are maps which show the art of the person who paint them and also his scientific skills. These maps signify that there is something outside. There is a world to visit. In addition, the compass is a symbol that shows how women are the fixed side and men are the ones who travel around the world to discover it. Both paintings contain books, a globe, the same cloth in the same position, a chair, the window in the same side and the cupboard.
They are not the focus of Vermeer's compositions. The viewer is invited to appreciate the thought process, invited to look ahead to new things that will result because of what The Geographer has just discovered. The impact of the sciences expanded significantly in the seventeenth century, especially in Holland.
This situation is reflected in the way that researchers were much sought after as pictorial themes. The Geographer is a case of that. Johannes Vermeer was well known for his smaller paintings, some of which focused on the sciences.
Originally from Delft , Vermeer is now known around the world. He painted a geographer in his own space, giving us an intimate view of the scientist's thought process.
He is twisted around his working table and encompassed by the utensils of his education. He is distant from everyone else in reasoning and does not give off an impression of expecting guests.
His work takes priority for him and there are papers lying on the floor. In this respect, the Holland circle circumferentor , invented around by the Leiden surveyor Jan Dou, was a great improvement.
Kees Zandvliet has pointed out that given that the instruments depicted in The Geographer —such as the Jacob's staff and compasses—were indeed practical instruments, it would seem that Vermeer did not intend to paint an armchair scientist.
In fact, it has been suggested that the scientist portrayed here is none other than Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, who was not only the inventor of the microscope and father of microbiology but a qualified surveyor as well.
Owing to its relatively tolerant political and religious attitude, the United Provinces had become a magnet for some of the great thinkers of the century, such as John Locke and Baruch Spinoza. Theirs was an age of observation and scientific discovery in which religious faith was no longer sufficient guidance for all men.
Optical instruments, such as the telescope, microscope and camera obscura Vermeer certainly knew the latter had become means to scrutinize the "anatomy of the universe" and sight itself had become an issue of intense philosophical speculation. In recent years, various writers have endeavored to link Vermeer's measured art and his concerns with optics with these revolutionary intellectual currents.
Accordingly, the artist would have employed the camera obscura not merely as a mechanical means for studying and transcribing outward appearances but for its philosophical implications. The historian Robert Huerta promoted the Delft artist to the role of the natural philosopher.
Vermeer and Spinoza had some things in common. Spinoza was born in the same year as the artist, , and died in , two years after Vermeer. Spinoza's Tydeman home, just an hour twenty-minute walk to Vermeer's house in Delft, was seven miles away. There is no proof that Vermeer knew Spinoza or even if Spinoza's ideas were discussed in Delft but in the age when books were still expensive commodities, five folios and twenty-five assorted books reported in the inventory of the artist's estate testify that he was not unlearned.
Whether or not Vermeer occupied himself with the scientific and philosophical debates of the time remains uncertain but he left two powerful images which al least show his admiration for the scientists of his time, The Astronomer and The Geographer painted between and Spinoza had a solid grasp of optical theory and of the then-current physics of light, and he was competent enough to engage in sophisticated discussion with correspondents over fine points in the mathematics of refraction.
We know that Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, the distinguished scientist and lens-grinder, almost certainly knew Vermeer since both lived in Delft. We would expect Van Leeuwenhoek was aware of Spinoza's reputation for either his work with lenses or free-thinking heresies, which came under fire in the late s. Some writers have associated Spinoza's praise of the contemplative and intellectual life as the highest of man's achievements with the people that appear in Vermeer's paintings, many of whom are pictures absorbed in rapt contemplation or engaged in intellectual pursuits.
From a formal point of view, Vermeer compositions have an uncommon air of equilibrium as if every element had been examined and exactly ordered within the perimeters of his composition according to some unknown plan.
As one author wrote, Vermeer's thoughtful compositions stand for the independent mental activity of his figures. His penchant for geometrical forms have been indirectly linked to the subtitle of Spinoza's Ethics , ordine geometrico demonstrate arrange according to geometric principles. Like the figure's face, the white surface of the paper has been overcleaned, so its purpose can no longer be identified.
The Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit. Of all Dutch painters, only Vermeer and the obscure Jacob Vrel fl. Vermeer exploited the walls to establish the intensity and direction of the incoming light, as well as create a specific atmosphere adapted to the painting's particular meaning. He especially relished in depiction the shadows that are cast upon them by paintings-within-painting and nearby pieces of furniture.
In The Geographer , the shadows cast by the globe and cupboard play crucial roles in unifying the compositonal elements to form a single indissoluble unity. The strong diagonal of the cupboard's shadow overlaps the lower corner of the ebony-framed nautical map bonding it to the rest of the composition despite the empty gulf that separates it from the rest of the composition and the fact that most of the map disappears off the painting's right-hand edge.
The vertical edge of the same shadow terminates near the profile of the background chair allowing raking light to brighten the decorative pattern of the chair's upholstery and a slim rectangle of wall to its left.
The hazy shadow cast by the globe is particularly suggestive. Many middle eastern and southern countries used tiles on floors or the exteriors of buildings for decorative or protective purposes. This was not possible in the Netherlands because winters were much colder so the tiles would only last for a few years: used for flooring they eventually lost their glazed images.
Initially, the Dutch used tiles to cover the inside the eternally sooty fireplaces since they were unaffected by the high temperatures and were easy to clean. Soon after they noticed that the same wall tiles could be used to protect them from humidity and stains as it was difficult to heat houses of the time.
Demand increased with the growing prosperity. Tradesmen and farmers wanted decorated tiles too. The original Delft tile designs came about when Chinese porcelain stopped being imported in the mid-seventeenth century and Dutch potters began to produce ceramic ware of high quality in blue and white, decorated initially with faux Chinese designs.
Since this type of pottery was produced mainly around the city of Delft, it was eventually referred to as Delftware, or Delft Blauw.
Even though tiles were not a major product, they were nonetheless produced and exported in vast numbers estimated at eight hundred million to France, Germany, Russia, Spain and the Ottoman Empire over two hundred years: many Dutch houses still have tiles that were fixed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Ships, windmills, child play and animals were just a few of the most popular themes. As can be seen in many Dutch paintings of the time were set in a single row at the base of walls to protect them from the daily assault of brooms and mops.
Floor tiles appear in five paintings by Vermeer. The decorative motifs on the row of tiles in The Geographer are so sparingly painted that they cannot be made out.
The tiles of The Milkmaid lack the flourishes in the corners present in The Geographer. Unlike most of Vermeer's late works, The Geographer features a mundane nondescript floor. The sketchy of this and other passages of the paintings suggests that it may have not been completely finished.
There are two signatures on The Geographer. A recent restoration has demonstrated that both are original. Click here to access a complete study of Vermeer's signatures. Wheelock Jr. Click here to access a complete study of the dates of Vermeer's paintings.
The canvas was lined, resulting in weave emphasis. A gray ground containing chalk, umber, and lead white extends to the tacking edges.
The paint was applied wet-in-wet in places. Many different textural effects have been created with the use of glazing, scumbling, impasto, and dry brushstrokes.
The vanishing point of the composition is visible in the paint layer on the wall between the chair and the cupboard. Some abrasion, particularly in the shadows in the map, has resulted from past cleaning. Click here to access all of Vermeer's paintings in their frames. Click here to access a complete, sortable list of the exhibitions of Vermeer's paintings. Click here to access all of Vermeer's paintings in scale. Philips Wouwerman , Dutch painter, dies. He was the most celebrated member of a family of Dutch painters from Haarlem, where he worked virtually all his life.
He became a member of the painters' guild in and is said by a contemporary source to have been a pupil of Frans Hals. The only thing he has in common with Hals, however, is his nimble brushwork, for he specialized in landscapes of hilly country with horses—cavalry skirmishes, camps, hunts, travelers halting outside an inn, and so on.
In this genre he was immensely prolific and also immensely successful. Bernini sculpts a terra cotta study for one of the angels of Rome's Port Santa Angelo. His sacred Abendmusiken concerts will be presented each year during Advent on the five Sundays before Christmas. Buxtehude's cantatas and instrumental organ work will have a strong influence on other composers. Newton invents the reflecting telescope, building the first telescope based on a mirror reflector instead of a lens refractor.
First accurate description of red corpuscles by Antonie van Leeuwenhoek. Leeuwenhoek was born in the same year as Vermeer and is often associated to the artist for their interest in optics. Tavernier is also given a title of nobility.
Vermeer's mother, Digna Baltens , leases the inn Mechelen to a shoemaker for three years. She and her husband had worked in the place for 28 years. Afterward, she goes to live with her daughter Gertruy on the Vlamingstraat, in Delft.
Pieter Teding van Berckhout , from an important family in The Hague, visits Vermeer twice and enters in his diaries his impressions. In May 14, , Van Berckhout writes: "Having arrived in Delft, I saw an excellent painter named Vermeer," stating also that he had seen several "curiosities" of the artist.
He had arrived in Delft accompanied by Constantijn Huygens and his friends—member of parliament Ewout van der Horst and ambassador Willem Nieupoort. Huygens was an artistic authority in his own day, maintaining contacts with the famous Flemish painters Peter Paul Rubens and Anthony van Dyck and recording in his own diary some remarkably insightful comments about the art of, among others, Rembrandt van Rijn.
Van Berckhout must have been deeply impressed by the work he saw in Vermeer 's studio, since he returned for another visit less than a month later. On June 11, Van Berckhout notes: "I went to see a celebrated painter named Vermeer" who "showed me some examples of his art, the most extraordinary and most curious aspect of which consists in the perspective. This testifies Vermeer had achieved a rather considerable reputation.
What is most interesting about this visit is that Vermeer's studio like Dou and van Mieris had evidently evidentbecome a major cultural destination. The first Stradivarius violin is created by Italian violinmaker Antonio Stradivari, 25, who has served an apprenticeship in his home town of Cremona in Lombardy to Nicola Amati, now 73, whose grandfather Andrea Amati designed the modern violin.
The younger Amati has improved on his grandfather's design and taught not only Stradivari but also Andrea Guarnieri, 43, who also makes violins at Cremona.
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