A Lady Standing at a Virginal

critical excerpt

c. 1672-1673
Arthur K. Wheelock Jr. Vermeer: The Complete Works, New York, 1997)

c. 1670-1672
Walter Liedtke Vermeer: The Complete Paintings, New York, 2008)

The fine, plain-weave linen support has a thread count of 14 x 14 per cm². The original tacking edges have been removed. Cusping is visible along top and bottom and very faintly along both sides. The support has been lined. The double ground consists of a pale gray beneath a pale, warm gray buff. The first layer contains lead white, chalk and charcoal black; the second contains lead white, chalk, and a red-brown earth.

The flesh color was painted with green earth over a pink layer; the shadows with two additional layers, a mixture containing green earth followed by a deep red shadow. The blue upholstery was underpainted with a a gray-blue layer; the highlights were modeled with a blue, then a pale blue layer and and the shadows with gray. The outlines of the tiles at the- bottom of the wall were scratched in the wet paint. A pinhole by which Vermeer marked the vanishing point is visible in the paint layer on the sleeve of the woman's dress.

There is some abrasion in the three paintings within the painting, in the lady's right cheek and the dark blue of her tunic, and in the blue upholstery. The ultramarine pigment in the darker blues of the chair has deteriorated.

* Johannes Vermeer (exh. cat., National Gallery of Art and Royal Cabinet of Paintings Mauritshuis - Washington and The Hague, 1995, edited by Arthur Wheelock)

literature

exhibitions

Not all critics agree that the present painting and the Lady Seated at a Virginal were conceived as a pendant, although, following Walter Liedtke's reasoning, the National Gallery in London has equipped them with identical frames and now exhibits them side by side.

To be truthful, there exists much more evidence that joins the two works than separates them. In favor of the pendant hypothesis, firstly, are their near identical dimensions. The two young women play music on a finely crafted standing virginal decorated with faux marble side panels. Both perform in the right-hand corner of a room and are dressed in stylish clothing of the day. They both turn to look at the viewer as if they had been interrupted by someone outside the picture. Both rooms exhibit fine marble flooring with diagonally-set black and white slabs. A picture-within-a-picture hangs on the background wall presumably as a visual comment on the scene below.

Obviously, the pendant format does not imply identical treatment of a given motif. In fact, Dutch painters relished the opportunity to reveal opposing qualities of the same subject. Many facts suggest that they represent opposite aspects of a single concept such as Sacred and Profane Love.

The overall atmosphere and compositional dynamics of each work are markedly different. The standing woman plays erect, her pose recalling the perfection of a classical column, bathed in sunlight which floods the room through an open window. Oppositely the seated woman crouches ever-so-hesitantly over her virginal shrouded in near obscurity. The blue curtain catches whatever light might have leaked through the closed shudders of the window.

Key indicators of the opposing forms of love are the background pictures. The heads of both paintings occupy the extreme corner of each large-scale painting which curiously remind the modern viewer of cartoon speech balloons. The painting of the Cupid, encased in its austere rectangular frame, is generally interpreted in the light of a 17th-century emblem from Otto van Veen's Amorum Emblemata advising that one must have only one lover (in Van Veens version the Cupid holds aloft a card with a Roman numeral I while in Vermeer's version, the same card is inexplicably empty).

In the other work, a low-life bordello scene painted by the Utrecht artist Dirck van Baburen in a gaudily painted gilt frame suggests, as Walter Liedtke wryly observes, "something more like one love and hour than one for life." Liedtke further posits that while the seated lady is certainly not a prostitute, her attitude about amorous affairs is illustrated by her relaxed demeanor and the "Arcadian landscape - the easy path - painted on the virginal lid." Her standing counterpart may have chosen the steep and rocky but virtuous road (chosen by Hercules) of the landscape lid.

In Dutch 17th-century painting, the most common subjects for pendants were the five senses and the four seasons which were repeated in endless variations. Portraits of husband and wife were equally created as a pendant although the portrait category was the most conservative of all and left relatively little latitude for experimentation even in the hands of the most component masters like Rembrandt or Frans Hals.

Otto van Veen
Perfectus amor non est nisi ad unum
Engraving from
Amorum Emblemata
Antwerp, 1608, p.55

The 1531 the publication of first emblem book (Emblematum liber) of the Italian jurist Andrea Alciato, launched a literary fashion would last for two centuries and touch most western Europe countries and in the last half of the 1600s, provide inspiration for some of the works of Vermeer. Vermeer experts have often cited the emblem "Perfectus amor non est nisi ad unum" (a lover ought to love only one) in Amorum emblemata (1608) by the humanist Otto van Veen, as a possilbe link to the Cupid with upheld hand in the repesent picture. The sentiment of Vermeer's painting is reinforced or put into focus by the emblem's caption, "a lover ought to love only one" with which an educated Dutchman would have been familiar. However, critics have noted that the upheld card in Vermeer's painting is blank and does not contain the number "one" which appears in Van Veen's illustration. Since one of the principle characteristics of Vermeer's art is the play between visual and virtual credibility, it is most likely the exclusion is deliberate. The two 1608 editions of Amorum emblemata were followed by a third in 1659.

An "emblem" in this sense refers to a didactic or moralizing combination of picture and text intended to draw the reader into a self-reflective examination of his or her own life in a interesting manner. Emblems generally consist of three parts: a short, often Classical, motto (lemma, inscriptio), a pictorial representation or icon (pictura) and the explanation of the link between them in an epigram (subscriptio). More complicated associations of emblems could transmit information to the culturally-informed. However, the aim of the emblem was essentially to make morality more attractive although emblematic art also constituted a sort of "pattern book" with a broad influence on all the arts occupies a central place in recent research.

When he is silent, a foolish man differs
not a bit from the wise. Both tongue and voice
are the index of his foolishness - therefore let
him press his lips, and with his finger mark his
silences, and let him turn himself into a Pharian
Harpocrates.

"Silence"
Andrea Alciato
Emblematum liber
Emblem 11

Emblem books were published in vast quantities. Alciato's Emblematum liber was reprinted 49 times, and 90 translations and adaptations all over Europe. Their popularity is often thought to reflect the seventeenth-century mind-set with its tendency to think in analogies and allegories.

Love emblems, mainly Petrarchist in tone and content, were particularly successful in the Netherlands, from c. 1600 onwards. Typical emblems were the half-moralizing and half-playful. The perspective of the male lover is dominant, although his role is that of ecstatic victim.

Many emblem books were intended for the "courting youth" young men and women in search of a spouse a topic which obviously made them fecund resources for interior painters who explore ritualized, burger courtship and love letter motifs. Some contained both emblems and songs. Hooft's Emblemata amatoria is one example (with 71 pages devoted to emblems and 73 to songs and sonnets).

Eddy de Jongh has shown the major influence of the emblem on Dutch 17th-century painting, and recently the impact of the love emblem on occasional poetry has been demonstrated by P. van Huisstede en H. Brandhorst. The resulting insights in textual and pictorial symbols shared between different art forms make comparative emblem studies useful to scholars in a number of disciplines. Besides this, studying the emblematic tradition provides us with knowledge about concealed aspects of the cultural and mental history of the period.

Critics have frequently underlined that Vermeer's late works show no trace of the years of disaster that tormented the Dutch Republic whose long run with good luck came to an end. In 1672, Louis XIV overran the lowlands sending waves of shock throughout the country. The Dutch defense had been poorly organized and some towns capitulated without firing a shot. In Vermeer's hometown Delft, the citizens rioted. To impede the advance of the French troops, large areas of the countryside were flooded as had been done against the Spanish years before. This year had been named rampjaar or "year of desaster."

Fortunately, the city walls of Delft were never attacked although Vermeer's household, with numerous children to support, was severely tested by the collapse of the art market. His wife would later testify that the artist had hardly earned anything from his own work and that he was forced to sell the works of other artists in which he dealt in at a great loss. He may have painted very little in his final years distracted by his service in the civic guards and his own bad health.

Vermeer's characteristic monogram was carefully painted with light toned pigment on the shadowed side of the virginal as indicated above. However, it cannot usually be distinguished in reproductions.

Such is the power of Vermeer's work that each detail, no matter how minute, has been subjected to intense scrutiny by art historians. Like no other artist, he seems to have possessed an almost magical power which allowed him to imbue the breath of humanity in even the insignificant object of his compositions.

Rodney Nevitt has singled out the small Delft wall tile to the left of the lady's satin gown and has identified it as a fishing Cupid. Such motifs were frequently drawn from popular literary sources. The present Cupid is similar to the fishing Cupid in a print from Hooft's Emblemata amatoria (see left) which plays on the conventional comparison of courtship to fishing. In Vermeer's tile, the fishing rod is visible, the proportions of the figure are consistent with Cupid, and the dark shape on his back can only be his stubby wings. No doubt, contemporary viewers would have been familiar with such designs on their own walls and would have responded to the Cupid in Vermeer's tile. They may have been amused by the close proximity of Cupid who seems to arouse with a discreet poke the austerely posed lady rather than keeping his mind to his fishing.

illustration from
Pieter Cornelisz. Hooft, Emblemata amatoria
Amsterdam, 1611,
Koninklijke Bibliotheek The Hague

The theme of love seems to concord with the presence of the virginal. One vryerijboek (manual for young lovers) advises young women: "Learn ...to steal hearts/ With Clavecimbel-playing."

Considering the confrontational gaze of the lady and the large-scale painting of a Cupid on the background wall, Nevitt, therefore, submits that Vermeer's Lady Standing at the Virginal "fishes for us, we fish for her, or Cupid fishes for us both."

Vermeer exploited every aspect of the painter's technical repertoire in order to strengthen the thematic content of his compositions. In this work, the orthogonals of the linear perspective converge at the vanishing point located near the breast of the standing young musician. Consequentially, the observer's eye is subliminally led to the thematic heart of this painting as well, love, which issues from the heart. In fact, art historians have long known that not only Cupid (who is portrayed in the large ebony-framed picture in the background) but music had direct associations with love in 17th-centuy Netherlands.

In 1435/1436 Leon Battista Alberti wrote De pictura, a treatise on proper methods of showing distance in painting in which the basic of linear perspective were for the first time codified. Alberti's breakthrough not only made it possible to construct the illusion of coherent three-dimensional spaces in painting, but to requalify the art of painting which had been relegated to the mechanical arts from classical times.

The practice of perspective was still highly esteemed in Vermeer's time. One of the few instances his name was mentioned in contemporary writing, he was noted for his skill in perspective.

Almande De Symmerman [236 KB] very likely Almande The Carpenter (anon.) from The Susanne van Soldt Manuscript (1599)

Malle Symen [236 KB] "Silly Simon"
(Jan Pzn. Sweelinck) from The Leningrad Manuscript (1646)

Courante Daphne [236 KB] The popular melody Daphne as a French "Courante" dance (anon.) also from The Leningrad Manuscript (1646)

* all three music files were kindly selected and performed for the Essential Vermeer website by Joop Klaassen, contributor to the Stichting Clavecimbel Genootschap Nederland.

The Virginal

The virginal (or virginals), together with the harpsichord, has its origin probably in the medieval psaltery with a keyboard applied for playing polyphonic music (i.e. melody with accompanying chords). The virginal is mentioned for the first time c. 1460 in a treatise by Paulus Paulirinus of Prague. Although limited in its tonal resources, the virginal occupied a crucial position in the musical life in the 16th and 17th centuries because it was smaller, simpler and cheaper to make than the harpsichord, rarely represented in paintings.

The main center of virginal- and keyboard production was undoubtedly Antwerp, with the renowned Ruckers and Couchet families. Italy was the second most important center. After King Henry VIII purchased five virginals it enjoyed considerable appreciation in England as well. Until the 18th century the virginal remained in use both as solo instrument (even in music making private circle) as well as for accompaniment of the singing voice or melodic instruments, like the viola da gamba.

The virginal nromally had a rectangular case, although polygon forms in various sizes were also built. The metal strings, only in single choir, runs roughly parallel to the keyboard. They are plucked by plectra mounted on jacks. The jacks (one for each key) are arranged in pairs and placed along the line running from the front of the instrument at the left to the back at the right. They pluck in opposite directions so that the pairs of jacks are separated by closely spaced pairs of strings. Each pair of jacks is usually served by a single slot in the soundboard, together with another slot below in a thin guide above the keys. Leather on the soundboard and lower guide provides a quiet bearing surface for the jacks.

The typical Flemish "muselar" type (probably invented by Hans Ruckers) has the keyboard to the right side, their strings plucked at a point near the centre for virtually their entire range, producing a powerful, flute-like tone. Since the jacks and keys for the left hand are inevitably placed in the middle of the instrument's soundboard, mechanical noise from these is amplified. The central plucking point in the bass strings makes repetition difficult because the still-sounding motion of the string interferes with the ability of the plectrum to connect again. Thus, the muselaer is better suited to chord- and melody-music without complex bass parts.

The spinet virginal has its keyboard placed off-centre to the left. The jacks run in a line close to the left-hand bridge; therefore the point at which the jacks pluck the strings is close to the mid-point in the treble and well away towards the left end in the bass. Thus the timbre of the spinet gradually changes from flute-like in the treble to reedy in the bass.

One of the curious features of Vermeer's rendering of light is the double shadow. Double shadows are caused by the overlap of two shadows cast by light entering the room through two different windows. The first time they appear in Vermeer's oeuvre is in the Music Lesson where they are plainly visible to the right of the hanging mirror and to the right of the erect virginal lid. Double shadows rarely appear in the works of other artists and imply how closely Vermeer studied the optical reality that was before him in his studio. Painters were recommended to eliminate them lest they confuse the viewer. However, Vermeer did not adhere blindly to the reality he observed but utilized its most distinguishing aspects to exalt the pictorial and thematic reality of the work at hand. One scholar has noted that in respects to the shadows produced by a scale reproduction of the room depicted in the Music Lesson, the shadows in Vermeer's painting are narrower.

The double shadows in the present work are more clearly defined than those in the Music Lesson which could be caused either by greater intensity of light or by stylistic considerations. They appear on the right-hand side of the gilt frame and the large ebony framed Cupid. P. T. A. Swillens, who first noted double shadows in his monographic study of 1950, included a diagram which illustrates how the longest shadows are cast by light entering through the window farther from the viewer (the one nearly attached to the background wall) while the second is cast by a second window nearer to the viewer. This second window appears in the Music Lesson but is only implied by the double shadows in the Lady Standing at the Virginal.