Still lifes

A book by Philippe Ratte

Modest elements for reading some of Vermeer's works

Johannis Vermeer (1632-1675), an exact contemporary and neighbour of Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677), lived in Delft, a citadel of the Reformation. In order to marry, he had become a Catholic. In a time of quasi-religious wars, this was openly placing the happiness experienced before metaphysical passions.
Having entered the Guild of Saint Luke in Delft in 1653, he was elected syndic in 1662, so early did his art as a painter make him a master of the Dutch Golden Age. A prodigious veneration surrounds today his work of some forty masterpieces universally admired for their pictorial perfection.
This quality, so obvious, by saturating the effect produced by his rare and precious paintings, nevertheless masks what is most remarkable about them, namely being a philosophical manifesto of unequalled modernity.
At a time when, despite the rapid expansion of a first economic globalization inducing profound intellectual renewals, the magisterium of Christianity, prey to a war of confessions to control its cultural and secular ascendancy, is prolonged, Vermeer inaugurates a civil and pacified acceptance of the world, backed by the peaceful rise of prosperity of which his native city is one of the centers. Between the fierce Calvinist fundamentalism and the sumptuous predominance of the throne and the altar, united in Rome or Versailles or in the post-Tridentine Baroque, which confront each other with fanaticism, the art of the painter from Delft offers in images an intelligence of the world based on the calm exercise of a secular art of living, grafted onto the course of work and days, serene and well done.
From the metaphysics from which he silently frees himself completely as from a vain fiction, he recovers the sense of transcendence, to spread it in floods of soft light in the atmosphere of his paintings, like an ambiance that attests to what is properly divine in human nature, however devoted it may be to the works of ordinary life alone. The genius that radiates from his paintings lies in this way of bringing back to earth the ineffable of the unheard, of which religion had made a copiously decorated reserved domain, and thereby of promoting a beautiful ethic of life in terra vivante freed from metaphysical dramatizations.
It is so new, so audacious, that in his time it would have been heretical to say it in these terms, which were still difficult to formalize as such. Vermeer therefore encrypts the message in the very learned conception of his paintings, which his virtuosity as a painter then conceals under the dazzling execution of the canvases. One must question them for a long time to discern that they all actually paint one and the same elliptical thing, a void in which the absence of metaphysical entelechies resides, and which thus opens up a space for living.
A third of a millennium later, this then secretly inchoate conception of a simply human world, and therefore called upon to become serenely convivial, may have taken over in global civilization, it remains very far from having prevailed over all the forms of fanaticism struggling to impose their chimeras. Discovering it, and savoring it, in its native state in the 34 or so duly attested paintings, is a very pure and fertile source of humanist inspiration, of which the current world has a need that is becoming vital.
The aim of this work is to make it sensitive and explicit.