Vermeer's Hat (22 page)
Authors: Timothy Brook
7. HENDRIK VAN DER BURCH,
THE CARD PLAYERS
. With this painting, Van der Burch tries his hand at exactly the same subject that Vermeer depicts in
Officer and Laughing Girl
, an officer courting a young woman in a domestic apartment, though with conspicuously less success. The perspectival distortion
is less compelling, the choreography less dynamic, the faces less mobile. Whereas Vermeer placed only a limited number of
things in the room, Van der Burch disperses our attention by adding other objects to the painting’s inventory of possessions:
playing cards, a blue-and-white jug with a gilded lid that could be real Chinese porcelain or a delftware imitation, a bird
cage, and a sword slung from a bandolier. Most strikingly of all, a black boy with gold earrings occupies dead centre. The
painting dates to about 1660, by which time Van der Burch had left Delft, where he trained as an artist, to pursue his trade
in Leiden and Amsterdam.
8.
LEONAERT BRAMER,
THE JOURNEY OF THE THREE MAGI TO BETHLEHEM
. Leonaert Bramer was a mentor for the young Vermeer—he interceded with Maria Thins to let him marry Catharina Bolnes—and
may have instructed him in Italian painting technique. The painting dates back to the decade Vermeer was born, the 1630s,
and appears to be one of a series of pictures illustrating the events surrounding Christ’s birth. Bramer depicts the three
kings traveling to Bethlehem from the east following a star, here personified as an angel bearing a torch. White, turbaned
in faux-Oriental fashion, and on foot, Caspar and Melchior occupy the centre of the canvas. Balthasar is behind them on camelback
in the gloom. He, along with his attendant, is black. The presentation of the three kings as being two white and one black
was standard iconography by the 1630s, but it was an innovation of the 1440s when the first African slaves started to arrive
in Lisbon.
E
IGHT YEARS HAVE passed since Johannes Vermeer painted
Officer and Laughing Girl
and
Young Woman Reading a Letter by an Open Window
. His wife, Catharina Bolnes, has spent most of those years pregnant, and if I am right in seeing her as the model in those
paintings, she appears to be pregnant again when her husband brings her into his studio to pose for
Woman Holding a Balance
(see plate 6). Catharina is looking older. Now in her early thirties, she is no longer girlish in posture or manner, and more
the mistress of her emotions. Then she was absorbed in the excitements of youth; now she calmly concentrates, without seeming
effort, on the task before her. Vermeer has darkened the studio to subdue the animation in his earlier versions of this room
by closing the lower shutters and letting the drape over the upper window block out much of the light from outside. Catharina
holds a balance. Her hand is positioned precisely at the painting’s vanishing point, but the focus of our attention is on
her face. Serenely composed, almost a mask, its untroubled concentration draws our gaze. Our eyes may dart to the strings
of luminescent pearls and the shining gold chain slung carelessly over the edge of her jewelry case, but they return to her.
The only suggestion of movement is the painting of the Last Judgment in the Flemish style hanging on the wall behind Catharina.
Her head and upper torso are framed by an apocalyptic vision of Christ with his arms raised, summoning the dead to arise and
be judged by him. His heavenly throne glows directly over the woman’s head, and mortals on either side of her look to the
heavens and clamor to be saved. Contrary to the animation and violent motion of this picture, Catharina appears as calm and
untroubled as the whitewashed stretch of wall beside the heavily framed canvas. The painting-within-the-painting is there
to guide the viewer to the theme of moral discrimination. The conscientious must carefully weigh their conduct just as Christ
will weigh good and evil at the Final Judgment. Vermeer may even have intended that we observe Catharina’s gentle posture
and think of the Virgin Mary, who intercedes on behalf of poor sinners so that they too may enter heaven.
The allegory of judgment is obvious. But let us set aside the painting’s iconography and direct our attention instead to what
the real woman in this painting is actually doing. She is holding a balance preparatory to weighing something, but what? This
painting was once known as
Woman Weighing Pearls
, but that title doesn’t fit. There are one or two strings of pearls on the table, but they have been casually set aside;
no individual pearls are waiting to be weighed. The only things on the table that she might put in her balance are the coins
along the edge of the table to her left: four small gold coins and one large silver coin. This is a painting of a woman about
to weigh money. Contemporaries would have seen this more clearly than we do, as this was a common subject for Dutch painters
at this time. Indeed, Vermeer may have taken the subject, and even the design, of this painting from a less successful picture
by his fellow Delft artist Pieter de Hooch.
When Vermeer’s painting was put up for sale in the auction of his son-in-law’s collection in 1696, it was called
Young Lady Weighing Gold
. This catalog title brings us closer to the subject,
Gelt
being the Germanic word for “money.” Weighing coins is not something we do today, but it was an essential part of economic
transactions in the seventeenth century. Silver and gold coins of the time were softer than they are today, and use gradually
wore down the metal, reducing the weight of silver or gold each coin contained. The careful householder therefore had to weigh
her coins to know how much they were really worth. This problem would have been negligible were there a standard currency
in use, but one had yet to be established. The United Provinces had a standard unit of account, the guilder, but there were
no actual guilders in circulation in the 1660s when Vermeer painted this picture, only silver ducats (one of which weighed
24.37 grams). The guilder (weighing 19.144 grams of fine silver) had been issued in the mid-sixteenth century, but was thereafter
superseded by other coins, some Spanish and some Dutch. Fortunately for the burgeoning commercial economy, the substitution
of one type of coin for another did not interfere with the main purpose of money, which is to calibrate the relative value
of objects. The real constant in these calculations was the price of the precious metal in the coin, not its face value. Still,
no European state allowed its merchants to set prices by weight in unminted silver, which was the Chinese practice at this
time. In the Dutch Republic, every commodity had a price in guilders, even when there were no guilders in circulation, and
had to be paid for in coin. In 1681, the States of Holland, the provincial government for the Delft region, decided to revive
the guilder (resetting its value at 9.61 grams of fine silver). The much larger silver ducat continued to be used elsewhere
in the Netherlands for another decade, until at last the entire Republic went over to guilders.
We cannot see the silver coin on Catharina’s table well enough to identify it. The estimated date of the painting (1664) argues
in favor of this being a ducat, not a guilder. We can corroborate this by considering its sole visible characteristic, its
size. It is much larger than the gold coins beside it. Unlike silver coins, which were minted in many weights and denominations,
most gold coins circulating in the United Provinces were of one type, the gold ducat (weighing 3.466 grams). A gold ducat
was worth roughly two silver ducats. Given a silver-to-gold ratio of about twelve to one, it should therefore have weighed
about a sixth of a silver ducat. This seems roughly to be the size differential between the silver and gold coins laid out
on the corner of the table, circumstantial evidence that Catharina’s silver coin is indeed a ducat.
Knowing something about Dutch currency does not lead us away from the theme of moral discrimination that imbues the painting.
As the woman weighs her coins, so she measures her own behavior in the light of the divine judgment awaiting her at the resurrection.
It is worth knowing that some artists used the image of a woman weighing coins to condemn the contemporary obsession with
silver, not just the sin of worldliness. But that is not the sense of this painting. Vermeer is not inviting us to condemn
Catharina. He bathes her in light, making her a figure of trust and conscience. She handles money, but her calculating of
the family’s wealth is as honorable and wholesome as the fecundity of natural increase that her pregnancy signifies. Vermeer’s
depiction is positive, in keeping with the new ethic of accumulation in seventeenth-century Holland. The capitalist economy
was in formation, and making money was a virtue, so long as it was made by fair means. This, at least, is what the Dutch middle
class now believed. Even Christ in this painting seems to bless Catharina’s accountancy.
The large silver coin on Catharina’s table is our next door into the mid-seventeenth-century world. At the end of the corridor
on the other side of this door we will catch a glimpse of the single most important global commodity of the time—silver. Silver
played an enormous role in the economy of this period, shaping the lives of all who were touched by it, including Catharina’s.
VERMEER LIVED TOWARD THE END of what has been called the silver century, which began around 1570. At no previous time had
so much of this precious metal been circulating in travelers’ satchels, on pack animals, in riverboats, and, most of all,
in the cargo holds of the Chinese junks and European carracks restlessly plying the waters of the globe. Silver was suddenly
available in unheard-of volumes, and suddenly everything was being bought and sold according to its standard. That a thing
could be “sold for its weight in silver,” the price that a mid-seventeenth-century English writer claimed Virginian tobacco
cost at the turn of the century, was an expression calculated to amaze ordinary people. The cost of something in silver could
also be taken as the height of folly, as a character in a Thomas Dekker play of 1600 observes when he satirizes a keen smoker
as “an ass that melts so much money in smoke.”
The power that silver exerted on the world was something of a mystery to those who actually thought about it. It could be
put to decorative purposes, yet its actual uses were limited. Most people wanted to acquire it, but they did so only to acquire
other things. Its own value was purely arbitrary.
To contemporary moralists from Europe to China, silver created the illusion of wealth but was not itself wealth. It was, in
the words of Paolo Xu, the Catholic convert in the Ming court, “merely the measure of wealth.” It was superfluous to the production
of real value. The ruler who was concerned about the welfare of his people should be concerned that they had enough food,
clothing, and land, not that they had enough silver. The problem with this maxim was that it no longer applied in a fully
commercialized economy. If everything could be bought and sold for silver, then silver
was
all you needed. In a partially commercialized economy, on the other hand, which is the economy that most people in the seventeenth
century inhabited, silver was useless when its supply dried up or famine drove prices beyond the reach of ordinary people,
which still regularly happened. But once silver was present in the economy, most people had no choice but to use it, whether
to buy their food or pay their taxes. They also had no choice but to acquire it by selling things or their own labor. Silver
became unavoidable.
The percolation of silver down into everyday transactions in Europe and China occurred as these economies were expanding,
which created a huge demand for it. Chinese needed to import silver to compensate for their inadequate money supply, and Europeans
needed to export it to buy their way into the Asian market. These needs created a demand for silver that stimulated supply
from two major sources: Japan and South America. It was around this structure of supply and demand that the global economy
of the seventeenth century took form. Silver was the perfect commodity that appeared at just the right time, linking regional
economies into a web of interregional exchange that set the patterns for our own global predicaments.
Where did the silver in Catharina’s coin come from? Japan was a major producer of silver in the seventeenth century, and Dutch
merchants handled much of its exported bullion, as they alone were permitted to trade in Japan. But almost none of it found
its way back to Europe. The Dutch profited from it strictly within the intra-Asian trade. So the silver in Catharina’s coin
was likely not Japanese. There were much closer silver mines in Germany and Austria, though these accounted for barely 5 percent
of world production, and most of their output was drawn into cash-poor Eastern Europe. So it is unlikely the silver was German.
That leaves the only other major world source of silver, Spanish America, either New Spain (today’s Mexico) or Peru (which
in the seventeenth century encompassed today’s Bolivia).
For the sake of marking a clear trail, let us suppose it came from the Bolivian part of Peru, more specifically from the mining
city that was more productive than any other in the first half of the seventeenth century. Let us suppose it came from Potosí.
Potosí sits above the tree line at an altitude of four thousand meters, a zone that the people of the Andes declared to be
puna
, “uninhabitable.” A great beehive of a mountain, called Cerro Rico, or the Rich Hill, stands on the barren, windswept plain.
The place would have remained forever
puna
were it not for the thick veins of high-grade silver running through the mountain. Before the Spanish Conquest, the Indians
had mined this silver, but there was a limit to their need for precious metals. The same could not be said for the Spanish.
The first Spaniards brought here by Indians in 1545 thought their wildest dreams had come true. Although the conditions on
the high plain are harsh, nothing could deter them from exploiting the mountain’s treasure. At first they used recruitment
to get Indians to mine the silver, but once the Indians discovered how dangerous and unprofitable the work was, the Spaniards
instituted the
mita
, a system of forced labor dragooning Indians into labor service from as far away as eight hundred kilometers to work in the
mines.
Almost overnight, Potosí became the largest city in the Americas. The early decades, when the ore was rich and easy to dig,
saw the city grow to 120,000 by 1570. People from all over Europe and South America showed up to live on this barren site
and produce the silver or supply the goods and services a city demands. The productivity of the mines could not continue at
that initial level, but even with their slow decline through the seventeenth century, the population continued to grow, approaching
150,000 in 1639. Thereafter it gradually dwindled, falling below the 100,000 mark in the 1680s.