Yonder: Essays

Vermeer’s Annunciation

Every painting is always two paintings: the one you see and the one you remember, which is also to say that every painting worth talking about reveals itself over time and takes on its own story inside the viewer. With Vermeer’s work, that story probably lasts as long as the person who sees it. This is my own unfinished story of looking at one of his paintings. Before I walked through the doors of the National Gallery of Art in Washington to look at its historic gathering of twenty-one of Vermeer’s works, I hadn’t decided which painting I would write about. My job was to discuss only one, and while I was paging through the catalog and listening to the museum officials and curators talk about the show, I turned to Woman with a Pearl Necklace. I had never seen the original, although I had admired it in reproduction many times, but suddenly, for reasons I didn’t fully understand, this painting of a woman holding up a necklace in the light of a window jumped out at me. Although I didn’t have the slightest notion of what I would say about it, the choice had been made, and I walked up the stairs already in its grip.

I spent four hours in the gallery, two of which were spent solely in front of Woman with a Pearl Necklace. I looked at it from close up. I looked at it from several feet away. I looked at it from either side. I counted drops of light and scribbled down the numbers. I recorded the painting’s elements, working to decipher the murky folds of the large cloth in the foreground. I noted the woman’s hands, her orange ribbon, her earring, the yellow of her ermine-trimmed jacket, the mirror frame, the light. I never touched the painting, of course, but once I was reprimanded by a guard. Perhaps my nose came too close to the paint or perhaps my obsessive focus on one painting struck him as slightly deranged. He waved me off, and I made an attempt to look less awed and more professional. There was a bench in that room, and after my dance of distances, I sat down on it and looked at the canvas for a long time. The more I looked at it, the more it overwhelmed me with a feeling of fullness and mystery. I knew what I was looking at, and yet I didn’t know. I had to ask myself what I was seeing and why it had become an experience so powerful, I felt I couldn’t have lasted another hour without crying. It seemed to me that both because of and despite its particularity, Woman with a Pearl Necklace was something other than what it appeared to be. This is an odd statement to make about a painting, which is literally “appearance,” and yet I couldn’t help feeling that the mystery of the painting was pulling me beyond that room and its solitary woman.

Every viewing of a painting is private, an experience between the spectator and the image, and yet I would wager that the feelings evoked by this painting are remarkably similar, particularly for those who aren’t burdened with historical interpretations and the problem of puzzling out Vermeer’s intentions. Even the most cursory glance at Vermeer scholarship suggests that there is much disagreement. But I am not an art historian, and those disputes won’t come into the story until later. My intention that day was simply to look at this painting, to study it with fresh eyes, and to let the painting and only the painting direct my thoughts. In that gallery in the museum, I looked at the profile of a young woman who is apparently looking at herself in a small mirror. The mirror is only slightly larger than her own face and is represented by its frame only. In fact, the viewer assumes there is glass in the frame only because of the way the woman stands and gazes toward it. But what we imagine she is seeing — her own face — is not part of the painting. The window is so close to the mirror, and its light so clear and dominant on the canvas, that whether she is transfixed by the mirror or by the window isn’t entirely clear. My first impression of the painting was that she was looking at the window, although the longer I looked at it, the less sure I became. The woman’s gaze is not dreamy but active, the focus of her eyes direct; and although her feet cannot be seen under the shadowed folds of her skirt, they seem to be firmly planted on the floor. Her soft lips aren’t smiling, but there is the barest upward tilt at the visible corner of her mouth. And yet there is no feeling that she is about to smile or that her expression will change anytime soon. Her hands aren’t moving either. She isn’t tying the necklace. She has stopped in mid-gesture and is standing motionless. One look at The Lacemaker (also in the show), a painting in which a girl’s fingers are caught in action, confirmed for me that the hands of the woman with the pearls are frozen. In fact, the painting is stillness itself — a woman alone and motionless in a room. I am looking in at her solitude, and she cannot see me.

In a number of Vermeer’s paintings, the spectator is seen. Girl with a Red Hat and Girl with a Pearl Earring (both in the Washington show) are paintings in which the spectator and the subject exchange looks, and although neither of these paintings is large, each depicts a partial rather than a whole body. We see only the upper body of the girl with the hat, and only the head and shoulder of the girl with the earring. This focus on faces creates intimate access into the painting for the viewer — two faces meet for what becomes an eternal moment. On the other hand, the woman with the necklace doesn’t acknowledge the presence of any onlookers, and the viewer is barred from entrance to the room on two counts. First, the small size of the painting, which holds her entire body, places her in another perspective from that of the onlooker: my dimensions are radically different from hers. And second, the entire foreground of the painting — a large chair and a table draped with dark cloth and topped with a gleaming black covered jar — would have to be shoved aside before anyone from the viewer’s position could even imagine stepping into the luminous space she occupies.

So what’s happening in this room? The woman trying on her necklace is young, pretty, and beautifully dressed, but she is not preening in front of her reflection. Nothing about her expression or posture suggests vanity. On the table, it is possible to see part of a bowl and a powder brush, but these objects, even if she has recently used them, are forgotten things. They are pulled into the shadow of the dark foreground, which forbids entrance and makes the empty space of light between the woman and mirror more dramatic. While I was looking at the painting, I realized that I had picked it because of its empty center, a quality that distinguished it from other, related works. The painting was hanging in a room with three other great Vermeer paintings of women alone: Woman in Blue Reading a Letter, Young Woman with a Water Pitcher, and Woman Holding a Balance. In all of these paintings, women occupy a space that is illuminated by a far window on the left as you face the canvas (although the window in Woman in Blue is implied, rather than depicted, by the source of light that illuminates her page). In the three other paintings there is a map or painting somewhere on the wall in the room. In Woman with a Pearl Necklace there is nothing but light.

It turns out that Vermeer changed his mind. Arthur Wheelock, in his short essay on the painting in the catalog, which I read fitfully while I was in the museum, writes that neutron autoradiography of the canvas shows that there was once a map on that shining wall and, moreover, a musical instrument, probably a lute, sitting on the chair. The great folds of cloth in the foreground also covered considerably less of the tile floor. By simplifying the painting, by allowing fewer elements to remain, Vermeer altered the work’s effect and meaning forever. The map, which can be seen in the neutron autoradiograph reproduced in the catalog, was located behind the woman’s upper body, and even in the small and foggy picture in the catalog, the map draws the viewer back to the wall and gives that surface greater dimension and flatness. By eliminating the map, Vermeer got rid of an object that would have made a geometric cut between the woman’s eyes and the window. The map would have interrupted the line of her gaze and disturbed its directness. And had it remained, it would inevitably have called to mind a geography beyond that room, the possibility of travel — of the outside. In the painting’s final form, the outside is represented only by light. The instrument would have evoked music, and even the suggestion of sound would have changed the painting, distracting the viewer from its profound hush. By increasing the size of the cloth in the foreground, Vermeer further protected the woman from intrusion. This technology of looking through a painting and exposing it like a palimpsest gives a rare glimpse into art as a movement toward something that is not always known at the outset. As he worked, Vermeer’s idea about what he was doing was transformed by what he himself saw, and what he saw during the process and came to paint was something simpler and more sacred than what he had imagined to begin with.

But the question remains: Why is this woman so endlessly fascinating, and how does the painting work its magic on the viewer? Many people feel this is clear, but they explain it differently. In his book Éloge du Quotidien (Paris, 1993), Tzvetan Todorov both includes and exempts Vermeer from his subject: daily life in Dutch painting of the period. He argues that by being the highest example of this genre, Vermeer’s work transcends it; that because the everyday is taken to another level, it ceases to be everyday. Notably, he tells his reader to look “again and again” at Woman with a Pearl Necklace. The ordinary act of trying on a necklace in front of a mirror doesn’t look ordinary at all. Vermeer, he says, uses genre themes but doesn’t submit to them. I would take this further and say that while Woman with a Pearl Necklace uses the Vanitas theme as a point of departure, linking it to other paintings of the period showing women at their toilet, Vermeer subverts the theme. This subversion creates ambiguity, and ambiguity creates fascination. Ambiguity in Vermeer, however, is strangely untroubling. This isn’t the uneasy ambiguity of Henry James, for example, where conflicting desires hang in precarious balance or secret motives are buried in appearances. And it isn’t the moral ambiguity that Todorov writes about in paintings of the same period in which moments of ethical indecision are depicted. Vermeer presents the viewer with a painting that resembles other paintings about vanity, and since he lived inside the world of painting and painters, this is clearly intentional; but to assume that the painting must be about vanity because it evokes that tradition is to miss the point. In fact, the longer I looked at the painting, the less its trappings mattered and the more I felt that I was looking at the enigmatic but unalterable fact of another person’s life in a moment of sublime quiet and satisfaction. The mirror suggests Narcissus only to make it clear that he has no place here. The woman’s gaze doesn’t convey desire, but the end of desire: fulfillment.

Edward Snow, in A Study of Vermeer (University of California Press, 1979), reiterates throughout his essay that Vermeer’s great paintings aren’t moral but ontological. When I read his treatment of The Procuress, I was struck by how his reading corresponded to what I’ve always felt about that painting but had found hard to reconcile with its title. Snow argues that despite its vulgar subject, the painting, which has a woman as its radiant focus, conveys the peace of an erotic relationship so natural, so happy, that it defies moral analysis. In short, the woman of The Procuress isn’t bad. All anyone has to do is look at her for a while to know that badness and goodness are not at issue here.

If every painting, particularly those of private life, makes the onlooker a voyeur, most of Vermeer’s women undercut erotic voyeurism with their autonomy — very much in the way that the woman in The Procuress defies the leering onlooker in the painting itself, not by recognizing his leer but simply through the power of her being. It isn’t that Vermeer’s women are without eroticism — their physicality is undeniable — but rather that they resist definition as erotic objects. This fact is all the more marvelous in a painting in which the man has got his hand on the woman’s breast. Even when Vermeer’s women glance back at the viewer or look directly out of the painting, even when his subject is breathtakingly young and beautiful — as is the case in Girl with a Pearl Earring—she appears to be in full command of a separate and whole desire that is hers, not the spectator’s. And although the subject of Woman with a Pearl Necklace invites voyeurism, it deflects it completely. Because she appears to be the object of her own gaze, what she is seeing repeats what the viewer of the painting sees, although from another angle. The mirror then would seem to be the narcissistic end of all this looking: “I love what I see.” This is exactly what happens in the Frans van Mieris painting Young Woman Before a Mirror, where the dark frame of the mirror becomes the imaginary focus (because the woman’s reflection isn’t seen) of sensual desire for the self. But it doesn’t happen in Vermeer’s painting. And it doesn’t happen because we know from the woman’s face that what is being reflected there isn’t self-love and, more important, because the entire far side of the canvas is opened up by the astonishing light that comes through the window.

While I was sitting on the bench in front of the painting, a word popped into my head. I didn’t search for it. It just came. Annunciation. That bench was about six feet away from the painting, and from that distance the light of the pearls disappeared. They are softly illuminated with the most delicate dabs of paint, and I could see them very well when I was standing close to the picture; but from my bench I didn’t see their light anymore, only the woman’s hands raised in that quiet, mysterious gesture and the radiance of the window light, a light that no reproduction can adequately show. When I turned my head, almost as if to shake out the thought, I saw one of the exhibition’s two curators, Arthur Wheelock, standing right beside me and remembered that “the press” had been told that either of them would be happy to answer any questions, and there he was, so I stood up and boldly asked: “Has anyone ever thought of this painting in terms of an Annunciation?” He looked a little funny at first. Then he shook his head and said, “No, but that’s very interesting. I had thought of it as a Eucharistic gesture.” And then, at the same time, we both lifted our hands as if to imitate the gesture of the woman with the pearls, which is itself an echo of the gesture from early Renaissance paintings in which Mary raises her hands toward the angel who comes to tell her that she is pregnant with God’s son. Mr. Wheelock then thanked me a couple of times, which was very nice of him, and the simple fact that he didn’t consider this idea an outrage gave me the confidence I needed to think it through. This thought, or maybe little epiphany, didn’t leave me. I knew there were “Annunciations” buried in my brain that had been triggered by this Vermeer painting. Later, when I was reading through the catalog more carefully, I discovered that among the few things known about Vermeer’s life is that he was summoned to the Hague in 1672 as an “expert in Italian paintings” (Wheelock, Johannes Vermeer, catalog, p. 16).

It is impossible to know what art Vermeer saw or what places he visited in Italy — if indeed he went to Italy at all. He converted to Catholicism before his marriage, and the painting of Saint Praxedis shows that, at least once, he painted a specifically Catholic subject, but no one knows whether it was a commissioned painting or not.¹ Nevertheless, Catholicism, with its many female saints and the central position of the Madonna, emphasizes women far more than Protestantism, and Vermeer’s art suggests that, at the very least, this feminine side of his new faith must have appealed to him. Wheelock mentions the Eucharist in his catalog essay. Snow writes, “The woman appears not to be so much admiring the pearls in the mirror as selflessly, even reverently, offering them up to the light: it is as if we were present at a marriage.” Two sacraments. Both thoughts are similar ways of explaining an experience of looking at something that feels holy. For Todorov, Vermeer’s ascension is into art. The artist leaps beyond realism into the enchanted space of art itself, a leap that anticipates a much later aesthetic. All these readings are ways of explaining the magic — the secret that announces itself in the painting and doesn’t go away. It may be that Vermeer’s ambiguity allows all these readings, that this is what the painting means, and that, like all great art, it opens a space of possibility larger than what is circumscribed in lesser works.

Nevertheless, I am going to push my intuition further and suggest that the painting is also rife with an allusion to the Annunciation. After I had left Washington and returned to New York, I began mulling over the Annunciation problem and understood that the resemblance I had seen was not only gestural but spatial. On a hunch I turned first to Fra Angelico, who painted several Annunciations, and in his work from the San Marco frescoes in Florence I found an image as motionless as Vermeer’s Woman with a Pearl Necklace. Intended for monastic meditation, the picture is stripped of all ornament and architectural detail. The event takes place in a bare gray cell. As was conventional, the Virgin is on the right as you face the painting, the angel on the left; but in this work there is nothing between them. The space is filled by a soft light that comes from the left, illuminating the back of the angel and the front of the Virgin. But the space is also filled by Mary’s gaze. Her eyes, turned toward Gabriel, are the hypnotic focus of the work; and although her posture doesn’t resemble Vermeer’s woman, it must have been her eyes that my ruminations on Woman with a Pearl Necklace had called forth.

Nevertheless, there was a particular painting I had in mind, although its details had been lost to me, and in it was a Virgin with uplifted hands. I became convinced that I had seen the work in Sienna almost seventeen years ago and knew that I would recognize it if I came across it — and I did. It was a work by Duccio in the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo in Sienna. That it was by Duccio isn’t strange. His Madonnas in the same museum are among my favorite paintings in the world; and when I was there, I spent a long time with them. Because Duccio inhabits that borderland between the icon and the human face of the Renaissance, I have always found his figures achingly beautiful. In Vermeer, I have seen something similar. The threshold is a later one, but in Vermeer the sacred and the human are also joined, and the memory of the icon lives in allegory — the form of allusion in Dutch painting of the time.² But the Annunciation I remembered by Duccio when I saw it reproduced was The Annunciation of the Death of the Virgin. So, surely, if Vermeer knew his Italian art, he would be making no specific reference to this work. After digging about, however, I discovered that the Virgin is shown with uplifted hands in a number of Annunciation paintings, that this posture does belong to the iconography of gesture in both Italian and Flemish paintings of the period. Two examples to turn to are one by Giusto de’ Menabuoi (1367) and one by Dieric Bouts, painted a hundred years later.³

At the recommendation of a friend, I turned to a book by Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy (Oxford University Press, 1972). Among other things, the author discusses physical gesture in painting of the period, noting that “the painter was a professional visualizer of holy stories” for a public that through spiritual exercises was well versed in a similar task — seeing in their minds events from the lives of Christ and Mary. He cites a sermon by Fra Roberto Caracciolo da Lecce on the Annunciation as an example of popular preaching on the Immaculate Conception. In the sermon, Fra Roberto first discusses the “angelic mission.” One of its categories is time: the Annunciation took place on Friday, March 25, either in the morning or midday during the spring, when the earth was blooming after winter, an idea only broadly relevant to the Vermeer painting, in that it is obviously midday light that pours through the window. The “angelic colloquy,” also discussed in the sermon, is a dissection into five stages of the biblical passage in Luke. Baxandall points to the colloquy as a guide to understanding the Virgin’s gestures in paintings that depict the Annunciation at its various moments, from the first stage, Conturbatio (Disquiet) to the last, Meritatio (Merit). What Baxandall’s discussion clarified for me was that although pictures of the Virgin were heavily coded, they weren’t dictated by the church. Within that code there was significant range for the painter’s own vision of how the Virgin’s body would express Disquiet, for example. The painted images are a combination of convention, spiritual teaching, and imagination.

But it was the second stage of the colloquy that grabbed my attention: Cogitatio (Reflection). The Virgin receives the salutation of the angel and reflects on it. Knowing this places the mirror in Woman with a Pearl Necklace in a whole new context. Isn’t that mirror, contiguous to the radiant window, a buried allusion to the Annunciation, and very likely to this second stage — Reflection?

Because I wanted to see more Annunciation paintings, I took a tour of the Metropolitan Museum, in New York, looking for them at random. I turned a corner and ran straight into the Petrus Christus painting of the event (a work that has also been attributed to Jan van Eyck) and was stopped in my tracks. I had seen it before but had never registered it deeply in my private catalog of remembered paintings. Although the Virgin’s gesture is not like that of the woman with the pearls (she has one hand near her neck, clasping the folds of her cloak, while the other hand holds a book), I had discovered a Virgin whose posture is as erect and whose gaze is as clear and unflinching as Vermeer’s woman. Between the Virgin and Gabriel is the Holy Spirit, depicted as a bird that gives off painted rays of light. The Virgin stands at the threshold of a door that divides the painting between inside and outside. The angel stands beyond the domestic interior. As I looked at this painting, it became even more apparent that my insight about the Annunciation — half unconscious as it was — rose out of not one, but many diffuse references in Vermeer’s painting — that not only the woman’s hands suggest the Annunciation, but so do the light from the window, her gaze, her posture, and that it is this accumulation of detail that produces the painting’s feeling of quiet sanctity.

There is one further thing in Woman with a Pearl Necklace that confounded me from the instant I noticed it in the gallery. Above the window frame near the folds of the curtain is a small, egg-shaped detail. The truth is that when I first looked at it, I thought: What’s that egg doing there? That “egg” is probably part of the window’s architecture, and yet it appears to be almost distinct from it. In the museum, I went right up to it, but the closer I came to it, the harder it was to decipher. It appears as light and shadow itself or perhaps paint as light and shadow itself. But what’s it doing there? We know that Vermeer changed the world he painted as he saw fit. Although he was interested in creating a feeling of realism, he changed objects, colors, shadows, even perspective at will to make what he wanted to make. Surely he wanted that oval “thing” on his window or he would have eliminated it. I started looking for that shape on other opened or shut windows in Vermeer’s work, but couldn’t find it. This round architectural detail contrasts with the linearity of the rest of the window. It echoes the shine of the woman’s earring, the subtle gleam of her pearls, the roundness of the dark covered jar, the bowl, and the roundness of her own form — the flesh of her face and arms, all the while looking decidedly egglike. No wonder scholars have gone crazy “interpreting” Vermeer. There is allegorical allusion in his paintings, signs that can be read but that are also hidden inside ordinary rooms and in the faces of “real” people, and necessarily so, because these paintings are neither one thing nor the other. They are both.

Conception and pregnancy — that’s what the Annunciation is about, after all — an explanation of the divine presence inside a human being. Natural pregnancy and its role in Dutch painting is an old dispute, and it pops up again with Vermeer, although not in regard to the woman with the pearls. Albert Blankert writes that van Gogh was the first person to suggest that the Woman in Blue Reading a Letter is pregnant and points out that the belly of Vermeer’s virgin goddess Diana “looks thoroughly bulbous to twentieth century eyes” as well.⁴ My personal response to this is that Diana doesn’t look nearly as pregnant as the woman in blue, who appears to be on the brink of giving birth. No doubt the fashion of the day promoted the big belly as a sign of beauty, but this protruding belly must have been regarded as beautiful for the very reason that it mimicked pregnancy. When he died at forty-two, Vermeer left ten minor children. Obviously, pregnancies came and went at a rapid clip in his own household, and he must have had intimate knowledge of pregnancy in all its stages. Vermeer’s attention to the physical detail of domestic life and to the women who inhabit it would necessarily have included the changing shape of women themselves. How could it not?

Neither her body nor her clothes tell us whether the woman with the necklace is pregnant. The hint of her pregnancy is in the painting’s relation to the Annunciation, to a miraculous beginning. It is in her gaze and in the luster of the pearls themselves, which signify, among other things, purity and virginity. It is in her unmoving fingers that call to mind the nearly uncanny quiet of physical gesture in early Renaissance paintings — in which the human body not only speaks for itself but also articulates the codes of religious experience. The truth is, however, that the whole painting conveys enclosure and privacy. The room, with its closed window and single, egg-shaped detail, and the rotund covered jar in the foreground that blends with the vast piece of cloth, are all lit by the enchanted light that comes from beyond the room. We are allowed to look at a world sufficient unto itself, a world that is lit by the holiness of an everyday miracle — pregnancy and birth — perceived in the painting as a gift from God, shining in God’s light, which is also real light, the light of day. The magic here is of being itself, never more fully experienced than in pregnancy — two people in one body. Isn’t this why the woman communicates no desire — only completeness — and why the light seems to hold her as much as the mirror?

Nevertheless, I want to emphasize that my reading is not meant to reduce the painting to an Annunciation either. Vermeer brought the miraculous into a room just like the rooms he knew, and he endowed the features of an ordinary woman with spiritual greatness. Woman with a Pearl Necklace is a painting that makes no distinction between the physical and the spiritual world. Here they are inseparable. Each merges within the other to form a totality. In Vermeer, the gulf between the symbol and the real is closed. Woman with a Pearl Necklace is a work of reflection at its most sublime. The viewer reflects on the woman, who also reflects and is reflected, and through this mirroring of wonder, Vermeer elevates not only his creature — the woman in the painting — but all of us who look at her — because looking at her and the memory of looking at her become nothing less than an affirmation of the strangeness and beauty of simply being alive.