Shadows And Light

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In the work of both there is often a half-submerged meeting of the sacred and the profane. A beautiful and touching example is De Hooch's Mother and Child with Its Head in Her Lap, circa 1658-60. The little girl kneeling down in that shadowed interior might be engaged in prayer, but in fact she is submitting to one of the commonest hygienic rituals of 17th century childhood --her attentive mother picking through her hair for lice.

Of the two, Vermeer was by far the less eloquent artist. His figures don't gesture for attention; narrative relations between them are never dramatic. They can be curiously self-absorbed and if not passive, then at least quiet to the point of inwardness. They had that character right from the start of his career. Thus the earliest of the 15 Vermeers in this show--because of the massive borrowing power of the Met, it contains nearly half his known output--is his one and only mythological scene, of the moon goddess Diana. The favorite Diana myth among painters showed her bathing with her nymphs (good opening for a painter to show what he could do with pretty nudes) and spied upon by a Peeping Tom of a hunter, Actaeon; whereat the virgin moon goddess, her modesty offended, changed him into a stag. In Vermeer's version, circa 1653-54, there is no Actaeon, no river, no nakedness, and instead of plunging into the stream, Diana is merely having her foot washed in a basin by a nymph--Christian paganism, complete with that image of spiky, untouchable virtue, a thistle, sprouting by her side.

By the time he was in his 30s, Vermeer had developed a unique way of rendering light and texture. Instead of building up forms with continuous movements of the brush, he used tiny luminous highlights, pasty dots and spots bringing more dissolved areas of light into focus. These gave a startling effect of studied, textural distinctness. It's as though you see every crumb in a cut loaf, every thread in a tapestry.

But he didn't let this turn into mere artifice. In Vermeer, everything is subordinated to wholeness and silence. No figures are more self-absorbed than his. That is very much part of their magic: they are so concentrated on what they are doing, and that is never public. A girl plays a virginal, its music unheard. A maid hands a young wife a letter--a love letter from someone other than her husband, we surmise, though it isn't stated. A young woman holds up a pearl to the light from a window.

These scenes aren't necessarily just slices of life. Sometimes they are suffused with symbolic references. A case in point is the exquisite Woman with a Balance, circa 1663-64. A young and beautiful housewife stands at a table on which are scattered her more precious worldly goods--strings of pearls (including a rare set of "black" pearls, which are actually gunmetal gray), gold and silver coins, and boxes that presumably contain more small treasures. She gazes with rapt attention at a jeweler's balance, which has nothing in either scale; she is checking that the empty balance hangs level.

It isn't an everyday scene, like a cook weighing flour in a kitchen. Not many women had baubles like these to gloat over. The clincher to its meaning hangs on the wall behind her: a Last Judgment scene, with the dead resurrecting under the presence of God in the sky. Their souls, the Bible says, will be weighed in the balance, that archetypal symbol of judgment whose tiny relative is held by the woman Vermeer has painted. As it is on earth, Vermeer insists, so it will be in heaven. But he's no spokesman for holy poverty. He is too much in love with the world--its pearly light, its rich surfaces, its densities and textures, and the beauty of the women in it--to pretend to be any such thing.