We were in Brussels last weekend for a reunion of old college friends. Time was at a premium and we were not able to see everything we wanted to. Brussels is well known for its Art Nouveau buildings but unfortunately we could not fit in a tour of some of its highlights. Incidentally though we came across some interesting examples while visiting other places of interest. For example, take the shop above in a rather hipster street near the Marché aux Puces.
Just along from this shop my wife found grim memorial to some of the Jewish inhabitants of the street, with their date of deportation and date of death. Many died in Auschwitz:
For our first reunion dinner, we went to a restaurant called De Ultieme Hallucinatie, based in a house originally built in 1841 but made over in the Art Nouveau style in the early 20th century when it was owned by a pianist.
Towards the end of our meal a party arrived dressed in the fashion of the Art Nouveau period for a group meal:
The following day sauntering around the Marché aux Puces we encountered this couple also dressed in the fashion of the Art Nouveau period:
I would love to go back and explore the Art Nouveau heritage of Brussels in more detail.
As my post about Dimitris Mitropanos’s song Roza(https://wordpress.com/posts/wordscene.wordpress.?s=great+song+bu) has for some reason been generating a lot of interest recently, I thought I would translate another song in the zeïmbekiko style of the Greek rebetiko tradition – brilliantly performed here by Themis Adamantidis, Dimitris Mitropanos and Dimitris Basos.
The lyrics, by the writer Manos Eleftheriou, set to music by Christos Nikolopoulos, are again quite hard to understand. Anyway, let’s have a go and see if we can then attempt an interpretation:
At the Angels’ Bouzouki Club At night some friends of ours who are called down-and-outs watch us and wave to us from the sky they come in the darkness like pickpockets and play and feel pain and sing to us about their stories that our minds can’t grasp.
Let’s go to the Angels’ Bouzouki Club that’s like Byzantine times throw away your old black clothes and take into your soul humane voices.
At night some unknown people doing life in prison sing some songs that are hallowed now like military policeman at the gate of heaven their songs and their caress they sing their songs to us and silently weep.
Let’s go to the Angels’ Bouzouki Club that’s like Byzantine times throw away your old black clothes and take into your soul humane voices.
At night some friends of ours who are called down-and-outs watch us and wave to us from the sky they come in the darkness like pickpockets and play and feel pain and sing to us about passions that our minds can’t grasp.
So who are these down-and-outs waving from the sky? I think they are the classic rebetiko musicians whose music was that of the outcasts and those on the margins of Greek society. Their music continues to be performed in dark clubs and still speaks to us today of the pain and experiences that generated it.
They’re in the sky because they are like stars or angels, they have a sort of immortality and an aura of glory and attraction to them like the Byzantine empire for us today. But they’re not remote or indifferent because they are waving to us. Their voices are those of humane, decent people.
Even people doing life in prison sing their songs now and these songs have acquired an almost religious significance. Their music is like a caress, communicating the pain and the passions that generated it, making them cry still, even though we can’t quite grasp what the music is about.
I don’t quite understand the reference to the ‘military policeman at the gate of heaven’. Maybe one of my readers would like to have a go at explaining it or indeed give another interpretation of this beautiful song?
Vatopedi Monastery, founded in the late 10th century, is the second oldest monastery on Mt Athos but the Holy Mountain’s biggest and richest. I spent a week here in September 2022 as part of a team organised by the Friends of Mt Athos clearing the ancient footpaths between the monasteries which tend to get quickly overgrown. It was a unique opportunity to take part in the life of a monastic community, experiencing its routines, observing its rhythms and participating in its services.
I may well do a post just on Vatopedi, but here I want to focus on a particular experience. Before I went to the monastery I expressed an interest in meeting with any of the monks who were responsible for bookbinding. This has been an interest of mine since I retired a few years ago and in lockdown I developed a particular interest in making models of ancient and medieval codices. Codices were mainly written on vellum, bound in wooden boards and, before the invention of printing in the fifteenth century, were the form that books took from late antiquity into the medieval period.
Before the appearance of universities, bookbinding was often a monastic pursuit as they needed to protect and preserve the books they used for prayer and study. Through the experience of making codices I realised how meditative and relaxing a practice it can be, requiring concentration and focused attention to the exclusion of other concerns and cares. One slip can undo hours of work. I thought this trip would be a good opportunity to investigate how monks today engage with it.
One day after 4.30pm vespers followed by trapeza (dinner) at 5.30pm, I was introduced by our main contact at Vatopedi, Fr M——– [I am using the traditional way of protecting monks’ identity by using just the initial letter of their monastic name] to Fr K——–. He was a tall monk, originally from France. Now about 80 years old, he had been at the monastery for 30 years. In the 1980s he lived a totally different life in London running a restaurant in Islington. At the age of 45 he was taken by a friend to a High Anglican Church to hear a particular preacher. ‘I suddenly saw the light”, he told me.
He sold up, went back to France and became Orthodox, though he did not explain how he made the decision to convert. He waited two years to become a monk because he was very attached to his collection of birds and did not want to give them up. Eventually the French Orthodox monastery he applied to join allowed him to bring his birds with him. After a few years he transferred to this monastery on the Holy Mountain.
I was curious about how he got into bookbinding. When he ran a restaurant he decided that he wanted to have properly bound wine lists. He found a binder to do it for him and became so interested in the process that he asked this binder to teach him how to bind books. When Fr K ——— came to Vatopedi in the early 1990s there was no binder as such. The last binder in the monastery who had served in this position for 20 years had died in 1959. There were though some young lay binders from Thessaloniki working here, but they had the radio on and fooled around so he got rid of them.
He does not deal with the monastery’s old books which are looked after by a separate monk, Fr F———–. Fr K———–‘s main task is to repair and maintain the liturgical books for services. He has a young Australian monk assisting him, Father T———, who is very good at gold tooling and lettering.
The bindery is well-equipped, with several small copy presses, a fine laying press and a late19th century floor nipping press. He has some interesting books on binding, principally in English, including Arthur Johnson’s two books on bookbinding and book repair (the so-called ‘red and blue books’), as well as Johnson’s masterwork, The Manual of Bookbinding. He has a good selection of tools for binding and tooling, including lead and brass type.
I am intrigued as to where he get his supplies from. Everything not grown on Mt Athos has to be brought in by boat and I can’t believe there are many specialist suppliers in Greece. It turns out he gets all his supplies, including leather and buckram for covering books, from Hewit’s, one of the UK’s main bookbinding suppliers.
We communicate in a mixture of English and French, then just in French as Fr K——– gets tired. I wonder how he manages communicating with the other monks: does he speak Greek? “Bah! Modern Greek? I speak Ancient Greek!” It reminds me that Fr F——— who is the keeper of the old books in the monastery also doesn’t speak Modern Greek (he’s from Brazil). and communicates via email with a Greek acquaintance of mine in Ancient Greek. Extraordinary that this language is still being used today in this way!
Fr K——– shows me a couple of old books in his collection. One is a copy of the Gospels and the Book of Revelation, published by the Greek Phoenix Printing Press in Venice in 1863:
The second is intriguing. It’s a service for St Vissarion printed in Moskhopoli in 1744. Moskhopoli (modern Voskopolë) is a village in south eastern Albania and in the eighteenth century was a centre of Greek culture with the only printing press in the Balkans outside of Constantinople. Or at least it was until in 1788 it was destroyed by Ali Pasha of Ioanina in retaliation for Moskhopoli’s support for the abortive. Russian-inspired Orlov Revolt against Ottoman rule.
Just before I leave, Fr K asks me a favour. He would like to be in touch with his old bookbinding tutor, Nick Collis Bird, the man whose binding of wines lists started Fr K—–‘s bookbinding journey all those years ago. I promise to try and track him down.
Back in England, I google Nick Collis Bird in an attempt to find his address. His bookbinding company still exists, but the original firm went out of business several years ago. The new owners bought the business at auction and never met the original owner.
I also contact various friends in bookbinding who might have come across him. Eventually I track him down to an area of south west England, and then more specifically to a particular town and finally to a street in that town. I write a letter explaining the situation and offering to put him in touch with Fr K————. No response. I try another track. He is on a forum for players of a particular musical instrument, so I write to the Moderator who turns out to be a friend of his and offers to pass a message on. Silence again.
Eventually I conclude that for whatever reason he does not want to be in touch with his old pupil, and I can’t force him to respond. Reluctantly I write to Fr K——– to inform him of the outcome of my research. No response.
North of the city of Xanthi in Thrace in north eastern Greece are a group of villages known as the Pomakokhoria. They are inhabited by Bulgarian speaking Muslims, though the villages today are increasingly becoming depopulated as people move away to find work.
The first village we pass through is Sminthi which has a magnificent modern mosque and minaret, an unusual site in modern Greece. The only one I recall seeing previously was in Veroia, now converted into a cultural centre. We stop in the nearby village of Echinos right next to a war memorial that commemorates the resistance to the Nazis of a Greek Army unit in which over 300 Nazi soldiers were killed. More unusually there are two Muslim cemeteries on either side of the road. We’ve been told that a great Sufi saint is buried here. Not knowing the cultural niceties about entering a Muslim cemetery, I ask a group of old men siting on a bench at the bus stop if it’s OK to have a walk around them. “Yes”, they say. “There aren’t any snakes in there.” “Snakes?” “Yes, there are lots of snakes round here.”
Gingerly we enter the cemetery. The tombstones seem relatively recent, at least we don’t see any really old ones. Then again, the inscriptions are either in Turkish or Arabic, so it’s impossible to tell how old they are. No sign of the Sufi saint either – but how would we know? Beyond the cemeteries is an open area on either side of the road covered in rubbish and the smouldering remnants of fires. Folded tables, plastic cups, empty cans, plastic bags full of stuff. There’s obviously been some sort of local fair or celebration going on over the weekend. Ponies and cattle are truffling among the garbage for little treats.
Perhaps the Sufi saint is buried in one of the two mosques we can see up in the village. Driving up the narrow road through the village, we sense people eyeing us suspiciously. We decide to drive on. The villages we pass through do not seem to have a centre, unlike Greek villages with their central square, plane trees and little cafes. Perhaps this reflects the living of more private lives without the need for a central communal space.
This is not an area geared up for, or used to tourism. Until the mid-1990s and the end of the Cold War, the Pomaks and their settlements were contained by Greek army tanks and fences. No doubt Greece felt threatened by the inhabitants and their closeness ethnically and geographically to Communist Bulgaria. Understandably then the Pomaks are suspicious of outsiders and what they may be up to.
We head towards Thermes, higher up in the mountains and known for its thermal baths. In the lower village is a mosque and an Ottoman style bridge across a river.
The place is deserted. My wife suddenly calls me back as I have wandered off taking pictures. A man has appeared and she can’t understand what he’s saying. He’s an elderly man with a light moustache, dressed in a blue cap, blue overalls, dark trainers, and carrying a pot and some sort of spraying equipment. He asks where we’re from and he’s surprised we’ve come so far. He was born here but now many of the houses in the village are empty as people have left to go and work in Xanthi or in Germany. He looks and sounds very sad as he tell us this.
We carry on to the village of Loutra Thermon and stop at a large taverna, unusually large for such a small village. Sipping our drinks we hear the Muslim call to prayer echoing across the valley: such an unusual thing to come across in Greece, As I am paying for our drinks I ask the owner where the thermal baths are, expecting him to point them out down the road or show me on a map. Instead he takes me round the back of the taverna to a squat, white-rendered brick building and unlocks the door. Inside is a small, square sunken bath with blue tiling: water is pouring from a tap on the wall making the room warm and steamy. People come here in winter from Xanthi and even from Thessaloniki and Athens to take the waters 5-10 times. They stay in apartments in the village and eat at the taverna. Of course there’s no one around at this time of year.
The taverna owner tells me that the Roman baths are at the entrance to the village. Easily missed, even though they’re signed. Walking down the path, we notice an old building and next to it a pool surrounded by a grey metal fence. From behind the fence comes the sound of women laughing: two women in Muslim dress are in the pool while another Muslim woman and a man look on. We ask them if it’s OK to have a look round and they encourage us in. The pool is square with a few steps in one corner leading down into the water. A pipe emerges from the hillside from which hot water is gushing into the pool. One of the women in the pool is German and she has been bathing to relieve her rheumatism. She encourages us to do the same. We feel the temperature of the water in the pool and it’s as hot as bath water. Neither of us fancy a total immersion, so we scoop water from the pool and pour it over our feet for a while. Strangely, after that our feet feel refreshed for the rest of the day.
Back on the main road we see a sign to a Relief of Mithras. Up a steep path there’s a rock face and there, about half way up is a very badly worn relief depicting Mithras slaying the bull.
It’s vary hard to make out, but the following diagram on the nearby information board makes it clearer:
Beneath the main picture of the bull-slaying are scenes from the life of Mithras.
The relief was only discovered in 1973 and is in an odd location. Normally such Mithraic cult sites were underground, but this is out in the open air. The origins of Mithraism are obscure, perhaps going back to an Iranian god older than Zoroastrianism. The relief dates to the late 2nd / early 3rd century. It is likely that it was used by Roman soldiers garrisoned nearby, as apparently this cult was popular amongst the military.
Centre of the earth is a poem by the Greek poet, Kiki Dimoula, that combines a picture of Delphi in late autumn, its historic past and long dead visitors with the memory of her own lost husband. It flips back and forth between the site’s deep history and the its present day ruins, with the repetition of the word ‘sarcophagi’ acting as a visible symbol of its decline, as do the fragmentary exhibits on the on-site museum she mentions in one of the later stanzas. The Pythian priestess, the Oracle, predicted death, but no one listened to her (‘But life/Shuns her predictions’). Here’s my translation:
November in Delphi is being reconstructed. After the rain on the metopes of its absorption. Lingering clouds look like thrones. Friezes of yellow leaves decorate The earthquake-proof palaces of winds.
A procession of steps. The local powers that be lead it – sarcophagi. Then come kings, pilgrims to the Prophetess, war leaders, driven by ambition, with gifts for its oracle, eternal pot-bellied lumbering folk with their many concubines. On both sides of the stream of people, bodyguards, sarcophagi again, with their leg coverings – nettles and dry grasses.
On the way, I made A crown of thought for you, as a heroic deed: In your absence you grow and spread the possessions of the missing. Stone ushers in the theatre. In the officials’ row sit thymes. Parasites, theatregoers, the surrounding rocks Hang, as if they had climbed up there, in the wake. In the leading role, the tragedian – the curtain. Applause of the enthusiastic decline, bees and other buzzing stingers mellifluously call for an encore hovering baskets strew our leading lady interpreter with freshly cut butterflies.
High up, from the stadium, battle cries are hurled Running races are cheered the winners are declared one by one as they finish.
I keep following. Cisterns, altars of victims Aqueducts of motives, the most ancient Pythia: The sarcophagus again. But life Shuns her prediction.
The pause for thought I make for all the broken perfections: “on the lower part of the marble woman runner”, the helpless foot stepping towards the lost body, only the doubled-up movement of the anonymous dead warrior next to his veteran’s shield and “the broken mirror of the young slave” – now how will enslavement be reflected? The Sphinx reflects the unanswerable.
Coffee stalls. Something for the road. Sandwiches soft drinks, bottled freshness of water.
Marbles again, dedications in stone, inscribed. I read them with difficulty. I learnt the hard way how it is deciphered but not how it is carved. Slowly spelling it out I reconstruct Just the word: ‘AGITATED’. Just that? No, not just that. Known all over the world: Agitated. The oracle. Centre of the earth.
What we knew about Delft before going there came from Vermeer’s only landscape, the masterpiece known as the ‘View of Delft’. A serene and hypnotic picture that I spent a long time looking at in the Vermeer Exhibition at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. From a distance it has a smooth sheen with stunning reflections that is dispelled when you get closer to the canvas and see the brush strokes and impasto work.
In the top foreground a rain cloud is passing overhead, giving way to a blue sky with fluffy white clouds. Some sharp-eyed people have made out the time on the clock on the building in the centre middle ground which indicates 7.10. Others have worked out that it may have been painted in August sometime between 1659-61.
He plays a few tricks with the perspective, for example in the relative positioning of the towers of the two churches the Oude Kerk to the left and the Nieuwe Kerk on the right.
The three little groups standing on the quay are intriguing: when you get close to the painting you can see there’s hardly any details of their faces and their features are just conveyed with a few dots of paint.
My first encounter with this painting was through Proust who saw it at an exhibition of Vermeer’s work at the Jeu de Paume in Paris (probably one of the first major exhibitions of Vermeer’s work after his rediscovery in the late nineteenth century) shortly before he died in 1922. He was deeply impressed by the painting and in his novel, A la recherche du temps perdu, transformed his own experience of the painting into that of the dying writer, Bergotte who became obsessed with ‘a little patch of yellow wall’ in the painting. It’s impossible to say which particular patch Proust was referring to.
Amazingly the general viewpoint from which Vermeer painted this work still exists. It is called the Hooikade, a small road off the Irene Bouledard (sic). It is likely that he painted the scene from the 2nd floor of a house here.
Delft itself is a university city with a compact centre, crossed by canals and with sprawling suburbs stretching out to the horizon on all sides, as I discovered when I climbed the 376 steps to the top of the Nieuwe Kerk. Naturally the city makes the most of its famous son, but it’s beautiful in its own right.
Our hotel is in the Beesten Markt (the old cattle market) where Vermeer’s father was born in 1591. Before that a monastery stood on the site but it was pulled down in the late 1500s after the iconoclastic frenzy and the closure of monasteries that accompanied the revolt against Spanish rule and the influence of the Reformation.
Vermeer was born in 1632 in a house just down from the Guild of St Luke, the association of professional artists and artisans that Vermeer would lead later in his life. The original building was torn down in the 1830s, so the building there now is a replacement.
Vermeer was brought up in an inn called The Flying Fox, originally located on the corner of the lane between the central square, the Markt, and the Guild of St Luke. Of course it no longer exists, but this is where it would have stood:
Vermeer’s house was on the corner of the canal called the Oude Langendijk that runs parallel to the Markt, and a narrow street called Mollenport. It’s not clear whether the house that stands there today is the same building or one rebuilt at some later stage. On the other side of the Mollemport is a Catholic Church built in the 19th century, a reminder that in Vermeer’s time this part of Delft was known as Papenhook (Catholic corner).
Amazingly, there is a contemporary document that details the rooms in the house and their contents. It was drawn up as an inventory of Vermeer’s estate after his death as he died in debt. It’s a sad reminder of how little the family actually owned, though it is possible that his widow spirited away some of their belongings before the inventory was taken, From the document it is clear that Vermeer’s studio was on the first floor overlooking the Oude Langendijk and the Markt. It makes sense that he would have had a north-facing room for painting as northern light is less changeable. It might also have been quieter in his household for him to work on the first floor (he had 15 children after all), but the noise from the street, canal and the main market square must still have been quite considerable.
The Nieuwe Kerk today has a wonderful carillon that sounds every 15 minutes, In Vermeer’s time the church also had bells but I’m not sure whether they would have been linked to the clock as a carillon ring. If so, that would have been another distraction that intruded into his consciousness as he worked at his easel.
Vermeer left no personal documents (letter or diaries) and so scholars have had to mine the city archives for references to him. Thee are loans that he took out, his membership of the Guild of St Luke, births marriages and deaths – and that’s about it. A rare exception is a mention in a book by a Frenchman called Monconys who visited Delft in the 1660s with the French ambassador:
“At Delphes [sic] I saw the painter Vermeer who didn’t have any of his works: but we saw one of them at a Baker’s that he had paid 500 livres for, although there was only one figure in it and for which I would have though paying 6 pistoles would be paying too much.”
No indication of where Vermeer learned to paint, who he might have been apprenticed to, his relationship with other painters in Delft or elsewhere in Holland. No links with other distinguished citizens, such as Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, an early developer of the microscope, and an exact contemporary of Vermeer’s. If he was a friend of Vermeer’s it is not clear why he undertook this rather clinical inventory.
The early 1670s were a traumatic time for Vermeer: with the country at war the bottom fell out of the art market and this had a drastic impact on Vermeer’s situation as he was an art dealer as well as a painter. According to his wife, Vermeer fell ill, presumably due the stress of his financial situation and was dead within 24 hours, at the age of 43. He is buried in the Oude Kerk, the Catholic Church where his wife’s family were buried as opposed to the Neue Kerk where his own family were buried. This is his simple grave:
There’s a more elaborate modern memorial in the church – but I prefer the original one
After our visit to the Vermeer exhibition and several hours of intense concentration, we did not have the energy for an exploration of the Rijksmuseum’s various collections. We decided instead that we would visit the top floor of the museum to see the Gallery of Honour, containing some of the museum’s most prized paintings, many from the Dutch Golden Age.
One of the painters featured prominently is Peter de Hooch, a contemporary of Vermeer in Delft and who also painted interiors and domestic scenes. How does a painter create the illusion of space in a two dimensional medium? It seems to have been a preoccupation of some of the finest painters of the Dutch seventeenth century. In this first one, for example, de Hooch is showing a mastery of these skills in an interior setting with the two doors opening off the main room, giving the illusion of depth to the scene. Other painters explored the interiors of churches.
Here’s a painting of the back garden of a family home, with a man (husband or suitor?), pipe in hand, looking a bit too avidly at the girl squeezing a lemon into her glass (again that theme of women drinking alone). The scene is similar in some respects to Vermeer’s Little Street.
The stars of the show though are the Rembrandts. This is a self portrait as the Apostle Paul.
A depiction of a couple as Isaac and Rebecca:
These portraits of Marten Soolmans and his wife Oopjen depict very wealthy members of Amsterdam society. Soolmans owned a sugar refinery and made a fortune from sugar imported from Brazil on the back of slave labour. Amsterdam was one of the main ports through which sugar was imported into Europe.
The Wardens of the Amsterdam Drapers’ Guild or The Syndics could have been a dry commission, but Rembrandt succeeds in making it interesting through a simple device. He has them all looking in the same direction, as if they have just been interrupted by the viewer. I enjoyed trying to work out the point in front of the canvas where all their eye lines came together, approximately a quarter of the way in from the left hand side.
I really like the almost photographic realism of these two companion portraits of a husband and wife:
The culmination of the Gallery of Honour is the large room at the end dedicated to a vast, single painting, Rembrandt’s The Nightwatch.
Surrounded on 3 sides by a glass cage, the planting has been undergoing restoration for the past few years mainly caused by the deterioration of its base. In fact the painting was originally bigger than this but a portion of the painting had to be cut off to make it fit into the Town Hall where it used to hang. A copy of the painting as it used to look hangs nearby. The cut off section has since disappeared.
There is so much going on in the painting and it’s all very chaotic: Rembrandt paints them as they are in real life, still mustering, rather than in a more formal pose. Someone fires a rifle, a dog is running away from the explosion, the little girl mascot is visibly frightened by the gunshot, a drum is being played, there’s a lot of chatter going on, everyone seems to be looking in different directions. You realise how different Rembrandt’s approach is if you compare it to similar commissions of militia bands painted in frozen poses. Out in front stands their leader, Captain Frans Banning Cocq, with his deputy, Willem van Ruytemburch. The Captqin has his arm stretched out to his right, about to give the order to his militia band to move out.
No doubt the band performed a useful law and order function, but they were also an aspirational group to belong to. It was a place where you could show off your fine clothes and weapons, but also a means of social climbing.and getting closer to government. In the background peering out over the Captain’s head.is a face that seems to be smiling which has been interpreted as Rembrandt , perhaps saying to his friends; ‘Hey, look at me with the super rich!’
The physical context of the painting is illuminating. The Rijksmuseum was purpose built in the 1880s at a time when there was something of a national identity crisis in the Netherlands. The solution was to look back to the Dutch Golden Age of the 17th century and its great artists. The gallery where The Nightwatch is kept was purpose-built to house the painting and it stands at the end of the Gallery of Honour in an almost altar-like position. Around the tops pf the walls are names in gilded lettering of people from Rembrandt’s lifetime. More widely, streets and squares were named in honour of the artist. It’s interesting to see how art and artists can be put to civic and political uses well beyond their original intent.
It was a fitting end to our visit to the Vermeer exhibition and to the Rijksmuseum. We only scratched the surface of its holdings and I am sure we will be back to explore its other treasures.
Hidden away off a side road in central Amsterdam is an impressive group of houses surrounding a central green, a place of great calm in a noisy, modern city. The Begijnhof housed a community of women who were not nuns, but who wanted to lead a life devoted to prayer and good works outside of Catholic orders, without taking formal vows.
These beautiful houses date mainly from the 17th and 18th centuries, though the history of the Beguines goes back to the 14th century.
Amazingly this little Roman Catholic community survived for over 200 years in the middle of a Reformed Protestant city. It’s a great example of the tolerance of the Dutch state and Amsterdam in particular. The Beguines practised their religion in their own property and not in public. There are other examples of ‘secret churches; in Amsterdam which were tolerated precisely because they were hidden away.
The original church was given to the English community in the early 17th century and the Beguines had to convert two of their own houses into a church.
The last Beguine died in 1971, but there are still over 100 women living here.
This is the last part of a series of post about my visit to the Vermeer exhibition at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam – the first parts can be found here: part 1, part 2 and part 3.
Musical instruments and music making feature in several of Vermeer’s canvases. This is one of my favourites. The girl playing the virginal is turned towards the viewer, her face half in shadow, but the play of light on her back and clothes is brilliantly done. A prominent picture of Cupid on the back wall hints that she is in love and the landscapes on the wall and the lid of the instrument suggest peace and harmony.
Her expression is once agin hard to read, but there is a suggestion of a smile
Another picture of a girl playing the virginal is much cruder. It has been suggested that this is not by Vermeer because the finish is so different from his other paintings, particularly in the rather basic handling of light and shade. Perhaps it was never finished.
It contrasts really strongly with a similar painting which uses light in a much subtler way, especially as it falls on the folds of her dress.
Two particular paintings depict intimate interior scenes. In the first one a girl in the, by now familiar from other paintings, yellow and fur-trimmed coat tries on a pearl necklace while admiring herself in a small mirror on the left hand wall. A bowl and make up brush lie on the table, emphasising that she is concerned about her appearance,
One curious feature of the painting struck me as I looked at it: what is the white object between the table legs in the centre foreground? The painting is so small and, even getting as close to it as I dared without getting thrown out, I could not make it out. So I took a picture of it on my phone and this is what it shows:
It’s a map. Is it a clue to the origin of the necklace? Is it part of a letter sent to the girl? It is so prominent that Vermeer clearly meant it to be seen, but what he meant by it is impossible to tell. He is always drawing us in to look more closely at what’s going on.
The second intimate interior also demands close attention. A woman holds a balance in her right hand, as if letting it settle until it’s in perfect equilibrium before she weighs some of the pearls and gold on the table in front of her and spilling out of her jewellery box. The light from the window on the left is softened by the curtain that adds a yellow cast to the light in the room. Her expression is calm and she is fully absorbed in what she is doing. Her coif is undone, as if indicating that she is relaxed in this sealed environment where she has closed the curtains to be alone with her treasures. Her dress has a bulging waist, a fashion trend of the time, like the woman in blue reading a letter by a window,
The painting in the background depicts the Last Judgement where the souls of the dead are weighed in the balance. Vermeer seems to be suggesting that the soul of the lady, obsessed in this world with worldly treasure, will ultimately have to be weighed in the balance to determine her place for eternity.
What is quite astonishing about this small picture is that you have to get up really close to it to see the balance pans and the lines of the balance’s arms.
Two late paintings by Vermeer, The Geographer and The Astronomer may have been intended to hang together. The exhibition only had one of these, The Geographer, a beautiful painting with an amazing sense of space and a mellow golden light filtering through a window.
A man in scholar’s garb is bent over a table covered with a map, two different coloured carpets pushed to one side, as he pauses, compasses in hand, looking not out of the window but into the middle distance, absorbed in his thoughts. His left hand rests on a book. Behind him is a cupboard with a globe and books on top, and to the right are part of a chair and a map on the wall. Other maps lie on the floor behind him.
Vermeer used the same model for the other painting, The Astronomer, and its has been suggested that the man is Anthonie van Leeuwenhoek, an exact contemporary of Vermeer who was born in Delft, ran a draper’s shop there, developed the first microscope and went on to become the father of microbiology. They must have known each other but there is no evidence of a link between them, apart from the fact that Leeuwenhoek was an executor of Vermeer’s will. The way he carried out this duty and treated Vermeer’s widow though do not indicate that he was close to Vermeer. In any case the man in this painting does not look like other portraits of Leeuwenhoek.
The final painting in the exhibition is unexpected and to my mind disappointing. It’s called The Allegory of the Catholic Faith and is full of religious symbols culled from contemporary religious texts.While he uses some of his tracks of the trade, for example in the painting of strange glass ball hanging from the ceiling, it feels lifeless. The symbols swamp the painting, pushing out any human interest and narrative enigma.
One of the odd things about Vermeer is that although he was born into the (Calvinist) Dutch Reformed Church, he converted to Catholicism when he married (his wife was from a Catholic family) and they lived in the area known as Papenhoek (Papists’ Corner) in Delft. I think that would have been a big thing at the time as it went against the current of the age in Holland. I wonder what his Protestant family made of his conversion.
Continuing my series of posts on the recent Vermeer exhibition at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. You can find part 1and part 2 here.
From here on Vermeer’s main focus was on paintings of interiors, often with a window to the left of the scene, that depict the light as it falls on the protagonists and objects in the room. Almost always the narrative is obscure, rendering them strange or ambiguous at best: we just do not know what is going on. Here’s an early example:
A solider almost in silhouette, still wearing his hat and sword sash, sits chatting to a smiling girl who has a glass in her hand. He seems much larger than the girl (emphasised by his large hat), even allowing for Vermeer using perspective to focus on the girl. The light from the window beautifully illuminates her face, coif and upper body, and twinkles on the studs on the back of her chair. She seems to be drinking alone as there’s no sign of the man’s glass. Again there’s that troubling theme of women drinking in the company of non-drinking men that started in The Procuress. On the wall behind them a map of Holland takes up half of the painting. What point is Vermeer trying to make with it? Maps are another frequent prop in Vermeer’s paintings, they are often a way of brining the outside world into an otherwise closed domestic interior. But is that what he is doing here? What is really going on in this painting? It seems the soldier is paying court to the girl, judging by her reaction to him. There’s no solution to this puzzle, we are just left guessing.
Here’s another example. A girl sits at a table downing a glass of wine. A man, still in hat and cloak, stands next to her, his hand on a pitcher of wine, ready to recharge her glass. She is neglecting her music, a stringed instrument sits on the chair in the foreground, while her music lies discarded on the table. This is difficult to read partly because there is no interaction between the two characters in the painting. The painting in the background has faded so we cannot see whether it provides a comment or counterpoint to the scene. However, the stained glass in the window is very clear and prominent: what is it hinting at? Again there’s no definitive answer.
Vermeer’s technique varies from painting to painting: sometimes the pictures are bright and clear and the edges of objects are clearly delineated; in others the colours and edges are much more diffuse and impressionistic. He clearly became fascinated with the quality of light and how it changes the further you get from the light source (ie the window).
Another key theme is letters: reading them, receiving them or writing them :
The girl’s expression is unreadable. In the background, not shown in my photograph, is a painting showing Cupid. The implication is that it’s love letter. The girl’s reflection in the window is incredibly well done although arguably the reflection is at the wrong angle. In the foreground is a table covered with a carpet, a fruit bowl pushed roughly to one side, its fruit spilling out of it. Carpets on tables are another feature of Vermeer paintings. In 17th century Holland they were a novelty, mainly coming from Turkey, and too precious to be used as a floor covering.
Another letter themed painting (below) with a cryptic narrative. It’s impossible to read her expression: is it good or bad news? To modern eyes, she looks pregnant, but the consensus seems to be that her dress with its swelling waist is a fashion trend of the time and indeed that it would not have been acceptable to depict a pregnant woman at that time. The map on the wall behind suggests the letter writer is travelling, maybe at sea.
Unusually the next painting shows a girl writing a letter engaging with the viewer as she pens her missive with a quill. The yellow coat with white fur trimming she is wearing recurs frequently in Vermeer’s interiors.
Maids play an important part in Vermeer’s letter writing pictures: as servants they could move around the city more freely than their mistresses and could be used as messengers. In this painting, the mistress writes her letter while the bored maid passes the time by looking out of the window. The background painting is clearly visible here, but I do not understand what the subject is and how it is commenting on the subject of Vermeer’s painting. His depiction of the light is superb, as it hits the curtain, illuminates the maid, becoming much softer and more diffuse as it reaches the table and highlights the girl writing her letter.
The next is my favourite of the letter paintings: a maid delivers a letter to her mistress who is in the process of writing a letter. The servant’s smile indicates that she is perhaps bringing good new, but it’s the mistress’s expression of surprise that Vermeer captures so superbly with her hand raised to her chin. They almost look like two separate paintings: the maid looks as if she is part of some medieval painting while the mistress is depicted with almost modern photographic realism.
The final letter painting is a picture within a picture: the main characters are framed by a doorway from which a curtain has been pulled aside to reveal an inner room where a mistress holding a lute is interrupted by a servant bringing a letter. Again the maid is smiling while the mistress looks up at her questioningly. The paintings in the background may indicate travel – perhaps the letter writer is away at sea. I find this framing device rather clunky and overblown with symbolism. Sheaves of music lie discarded under the chair on the right of the door. Just inside the entrance are a pair of slippers and a broom leaning against the wall. Apparently the slippers are a symbol of licentiousness, while the broom is a reference to a Dutch expression ‘married over the broom’ meaning living together outside of marriage.
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