Still Life (natures mortes)

A book by Philippe Ratte

Modest reading elements of some works by Vermeer

Johannes Vermeer (1632-1675), exact contemporary and neighbor of Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677), lived in Delft, a stronghold of the Reformation. To marry, he converted to Catholicism. In a time of near religious wars, this was openly placing lived happiness above metaphysical passions.
He joined the Saint Luke guild of Delft in 1653 and was elected syndic in 1662, so early did his painterly art make him a master of the Dutch Golden Age. A prodigious reverence now surrounds his work of about forty universally admired masterpieces for their pictorial perfection.
This so evident quality, by saturating the effect produced by his rare and precious paintings, nevertheless masks what is most remarkable about them: that they are a philosophical manifesto of unparalleled modernity.
Indeed, at a time when the authority of Christianity continued despite the rapid expansion of an early economic globalization that induced profound intellectual renewals, and was embroiled in a war of confessions to control its cultural and secular dominance, Vermeer inaugurated a civil and peaceful understanding of the world, supported by the peaceful rise of prosperity of which his hometown was a center. Between fierce Calvinist fundamentalism and the lavish dominance of throne and altar, united in Rome or Versailles or in post-Tridentine Baroque, clashing fanatically, the art of the Delft painter offers in images an understanding of the world based on the calm practice of a secular art of living, rooted in the course of serene and well-made daily work.
From metaphysics, which he silently completely sheds as a vain fiction, he recovers the sense of transcendence, to spread it in gentle light throughout the atmosphere of his paintings, like an ambiance that attests to what is properly divine in human nature, even when wholly dedicated to the ordinary works of life. The genius radiating from his paintings lies in this way of bringing down to earth the ineffable of the unheard-of, which religion had made a reserved domain richly adorned, and thereby promoting a beautiful ethics of life in terra viventium freed from metaphysical dramatizations.
It is so new, so bold, that in his time it would have been heretical to say it in these terms, which were moreover still difficult to formalize as such. Thus Vermeer cryptically encodes the message in the highly learned design of his paintings, which his painterly virtuosity then conceals beneath the dazzling execution of the canvases. They must be studied long to discern that all actually depict one and the same elliptical thing, a void housing the absence of metaphysical entelechies, thus opening a space for living.
A third of a millennium later, this then secretly incipient conception of a simply human world, and therefore called to become serenely convivial, may have prevailed in global civilization, but it remains far from having overcome all forms of fanaticism fighting to impose their chimeras. To discover and savor it, in its native state in the some 34 duly authenticated paintings, is a very pure and fertile source of humanist inspiration, which the current world increasingly vitally needs.
The purpose of this work is to make it perceptible and explicit.