Contributions by Alexis Belis, Carmen C. Mtertens, Nadine M. Cook, Brian F. The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, v. Cornelia Reiter. Costello, Jane. DAgostino, Paola. Metropolitan Museum Journal , Vol. Daskalakis Mathews, Annie-Christine. Dauterman, Carl Christian. Davidson, Marshall B. Dawson, Aileen. De Montebello, Philippe. De la Croix, P. Dean, Bashford.
Dennis, Faith. The Passions of Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux. Draper, James David, and Guilhelm Scherf. Augustin Pajou: Royal Sculptor, — Olson, and Burkard von Roda. Playing with Fire: European Terracotta Models, — Draper, James David.
The Arts Under Napoleon. Eames, Clare. Eisler, Colin T. Eisler, Colin, and James Parker. Fahy, Everett. Farina, Viviana. Faxon, Alicia Craig. Feingold, Lawrence. Font, Lourdes M. Friedmann, Herbert, and Howard Hibbard. Ostoia, and Margaret R. Galitz, Kathryn Calley. Gardner, Albert TenEyck. Gardner, Elizabeth E. Gill, Kathryn. Gillies, Linda. Gordon, Alden R. Grace, Priscilla. Grancsay, Stephen V. Gregory H. Centeno, Janet G. Douglas, Christina Hagelskamp, John T. Haynes, Robyn E.
Hodgkins, Edward A. Kennedy, Sarah Kleiner, Michele D. Thomas, and Anna Vila. Griswold, William. Hackenbroch, Yvonne. Hale, Charlotte. Harris, John. Hauser, Walter. Haverkamp Begemann, Egbert. The Robert Lehman Collection. Hecht, Johanna. Heckscher, Morrison H. Hibbard, Howard. Hunter-Stiebel, Penelope. Husband, Timothy, and John Goldsmith Phillips. Impey, O. Ives, Colta Feller. Picturesque Ideas on the Flight into Egypt.
Ives, Colta, and Susan Alyson Stein. Goya in The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Ivins, W. How Prints Look: Photographs with a Commentary. Ivins, William Mills. The Unseen Rembrandt. Kahr, Madlyn Millner.
Kanter, Laurence B. Karpinski, Caroline, A. Hyatt Mayor, and Edith A. Hyatt Mayor, and John J. Karpinski, Caroline. Kaufmann, Thomas DaCosta. Kessler, Hans-Ulrich. London: The Society, Knauer, Elfriede Regina.
Smith, and Dirk Syndram. Koeppe, Wolfram. Making Marvels: A Picture Album. Kugler, Georg. La Rocca, Donald J. How to Read European Armor. LaRocca, Donald J. Laing, Alastair, et al. Pierre-Paul Prud'hon. Lawrence, Elizabeth N. Le Bourhis, Katell, ed. Le Corbeiller, Clare. China Trade Porcelain: Patterns of Exchange. Eighteenth-Century Italian Porcelain. Gold Boxes: The Wrightsman Collection.
Leopold, Jan Hendrik. Liedtke, Walter A. Vermeer and the Delft School. Liedtke, Walter. The steady performance of domestic chores was often praised in Dutch literature and pictures of the period. To the lower right is a Delft tile depicting Cupid brandishing his bow.
To the right of the foot warmer is a Delft tile decorated with the image of a traveling man, to judge from his walking stick and knapsack. This may suggest that the woman is thinking of an absent lover. The image on the Delft tile to the far right appears to be deliberately indecipherable. Finally, in earlier Dutch and Flemish paintings of cooks and kitchen maids, including comparatively understated works by Dou, a pitcher tilted forward as here or held in some suggestive way refers to female anatomy Vermeer may or may not have intended his pitcher as such an erotic allusion , but he certainly meant for the sophisticated viewer to recall earlier paintings of comely milkmaids and kitchen maids, and the reputation of milkmaids in particular for sexual availability.
In his earliest known paintings, Vermeer reviews various subjects and styles in Dutch art, as if considering alternative paths he might pursue.
In Diana and Her Companions , of —54 Mauritshuis , The Hague , Vermeer, as might be expected of a young artist in Delft, treats a mythological subject in a manner favored at the nearby court in the Hague. However, unlike court favorites like Gerrit van Honthorst and Jacob van Loo, Vermeer presents the goddess as chaste, her companions as loyal and serious, and the pregnant Callisto in the right background as ashamed. In composition and to some extent in palette and execution, the mythological painting recalls Van Loo, but in Christ in the House of Martha and Mary , of about —55 Scottish National Gallery , Edinburgh , Vermeer emulated more famous masters: Hendrick ter Brugghen, the Caravaggesque master from Utrecht; and the internationally successful Fleming Anthony van Dyck.
The white daylight and the sculptural figure of Mary in the foreground recall the Dutch painter, while the fluid folds, agitated contours, and elegant pose of Christ recall Van Dyck. Again, feminine virtue comes into question: the fussy hostess Martha as opposed to the deeply thoughtful Mary , of whom Christ gently approves. Vermeer has successfully brought the effect of sunlight dancing over the objects to life.
He used small brushstrokes and dots — an almost impressionistic pointillist technique — to paint the areas illuminated by the sun. Daylight The daylight shining through the window creates distinct contrasts of dark and light. He deliberately used light and dark to strengthen his composition and to clearly position the woman in the kitchen. Nail At first sight, the wall appears to be completely empty. The shadow cast by this nail does not correspond with the light shining through the window.
This shadow suggests a much higher light source than the window at eye level. Wall Vermeer originally positioned a rectangular object on the wall, perhaps a map. He eventually decided to remove this object from the painting. The void that this created. The Milkmaid. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. To appreciate the exceptional quality of this canvas, which has a remarkable impact on anyone who has the fortune to see it, it may be helpful to decipher Vermeer's intentions.
Oddly, even though Vermeer's Milkmaid has been scrutinized from head to toe, art historians have generally ignored the question of what she is doing. Obviously, she pours milk and does so in a particularly thoughtful way, but for what reason? Art historian Harry Rand addressed the question in great detail and his theory is reported below. First of all, the woman Vermeer depicts is not the home's owner, she is a common servant, not to be confused with the other servants called kameneir , who attended the personal needs of upper-class women and functioned simultaneously as a sort of guardians of their mistress.
Vermeer's unassuming maid is slowly pouring milk into a squat earthenware vessel which is commonly known as a Dutch oven. The deeply recessed rim shows the vessel was meant to hold a lid to seal the contents for airtight baking. Dutch ovens characteristically were used for prolonged, slow cooking and were made of iron or in the case of the present painting, of ceramic.
Rand posits that the key to the contents are the broken pieces of bread that lays before her in the still life assuming she has already made custard in which the bread mixed with egg is now soaking. She now pours milk over the mixture to cover it because if the bread is not simmering in liquid while it is baking, the upper crusts of the bread will turn unappetizingly dry instead of forming the delicious upper surface of the pudding.
The maid takes such care in pouring the trickle of milk because it is difficult to rescue bread pudding if the ingredients are not correctly measured and combined. The foot warmer with its smoldering ember on the floor below reinforces Rand's hypothesis. The maid's kitchen is not properly heated. In the best well-to-do houses, two kitchens were often found, one "hot" for daily cooking of meats, breads etc.
The cold kitchen did cause the all-important butter to melt and allowed the cook time to fold it into dough or crusts. Thus, Vermeer describes not just a visual account of a common scene, but an ethical and social value. He represents the precise moment in which the household maid is attentively working with common cooking ingredients and formerly unusable stale bread transforming them into a new, wholesome and enjoyable product.
Her measured demeanor, modest dress and judiciousness in preparing her food convey eloquently yet unobtrusively one of the strongest values of 17th-century Netherlands, domestic virtue. The maid, of course, could have been making something far more simpler than Rand's tasty pudding, simple pap for small children made of bread and milk, ingredients present in Vermeer's painting.
The Bakery Job Berckheyde Oil on canvas c. It is more likely than not that the bread in Vermeer's Milkmaid was not made at home but purchased at the bakery shop, perhaps from one of Vermeer's collectors, Hendrick van Buyten, who owned the largest bakery in Delft. It is known that the Vermeer family had run up a considerable debt for bread which Vermeer's wife, Catharina, paid off Van Buyten with a picture by her late husband.
The number of bakeries was considerable in 17th-century Holland, and like most merchants, bakers usually set up their operations in their own homes. Because their ovens were considered fire threats to adjacent property, they were often forced to live and do business in stone buildings.
Since rye bread was the main food for the people, the price and quality of the rye bread were strictly regulated, but always low according to the bakers. They tried to make the bread smaller, but the authorities appointed official controllers—obviously unpopular—to measure and weigh the bread in the shops.
But besides common rye bread, bakers produced fine breads in various kinds of quality and taste. The regulation concerning white bread and other luxurious kinds of bread were not as strict as for rye bread. The bread baker was not allowed to make biscuit, pie or pastry, since the guild had been split up and each delicacy had its own guild. In a work by Job Berckheyde, a baker is shown blowing a horn to announce his new production of bread, rolls and pretzels all ready for sale.
Contredanse [1. Vermeer specialists have long been puzzled by a presumed anomaly of the perspectival construction of the clothe-covered table. Only recently has its real construction been understood. Dutch art expert, Taco Dibbits, has revealed that the table was, in effect, was a Dutch 17th-century gateleg table with, when open, an octagonal top. Such a table would have been readily understood by Vermeer's contemporaries.
In the diagram below, the white lines trace the visible orthogonals, which, correctly converging at the picture's vanishing point, inform the height of the painter's eye as he painted the picture.
The yellow lines trace to the perimeter of the folded table. About this year Vermeer paints his first true genre piece , A Maid Asleep. This work is only one or two steps removed from The Procuress , a low-life brothel scene of the kind which is very popular among Dutch burgers. The artists' palette in A Maid Asleep is warm fairly somber.
A rich oriental carpet delimits the foreground and creates a flat space of both paintings. However, the horizontal and vertical organization of the later painting's planimetric surface, which would become a hallmark of the artist's oeuvre, appears for the first time.
In respects to his contemporaries, Vermeer tends to minimize narrative and overt didactic messages. Maria Thins, in the first draft of her testament, leaves to Vermeer's daughters jewels wrings bracelets and gilded chains and the significant sum of three hundred guilders to Vermeer and Catharina, Vermeer's wife.
In the same testament Maria Thins wills to Vermeer's first child, Maria, two hundred guilders. The child's name is an almost certain sign of good will that existed between Vermeer and his mother-in-law.
In Nov. This money may be a kind of advance payment on the purchase of future works. Van Ruijven is now considered Vermeer's only patron although he occasionally sold works to others.
The framemaker Anthony van der Wiel, who had married Vermeer's sister Gertruy, registers at the St Luke guild as an art dealer. Both Pieter de Hooch and Vermeer begin to paint the genre interiors refining a regional south Holland type, lending it a more realistic qualities of space, light and atmosphere.
The Dordrecht landscape artist Aelbert Cuyp borrows warm light and hilly scenery from Italian landscape painters. The Corsini pays Guercino ducats for the Flagellation of Christ painted in Guercino is remarkable for the extreme rapidity of his execution. He completes no fewer than large altar-pieces for churches, and his other paintings amount to about In he begins his frescoes in the Duomo of Piacenza. Guercino continues to paint and teach until to the time of his death in , amassing a notable fortune.
Universal Mathematics Mathesis Universalis by John Wallis amplifies the English mathematician's system of notation, applying it to algebra, arithmetic and geometry. Wallis will be credited with inventing and introducing the symbol for infinity; he demonstrates the utility of exponents, notably negative and fractional exponents. A 4-year Dutch-Portuguese war begins over conflicting interests in Brazil, but Johan de Witt will end the hostilities with a peace advantageous to the Dutch.
Coffee advertisements at London claim that the beverage is a panacea for scurvy, gout and other ills. The Flushing Remonstrance is written to Nieuw Amsterdam's governor Peter Stuyvesant December 27 which is probably the first declaration of religious tolerance by any group of ordinary citizens in America. The first London chocolate shop opens to sell a drink known until now only to the nobility. Although this kind of subject is first experimented by Pieter de Hooch and other predecessors, Vermeer purges the scene of its anecdotal character, concentrating on formal compositional values and rendering of light.
From the beginning of his career, Vermeer demonstrates himself not so much as an inventor but one who is able to elaborate current pictorial conventions in the light of his unique personal experience.
He is unique among Dutch artists in his ability to incorporate the fundamental, moral seriousness of history painting into his representations of domestic life. In these years, Vermeer probably begins to distance himself from his family of origin.
This fact is seen in his failure to name any of his children after his mother or father as was common practice of the time. His first two daughters, born before , were named Maria and Elizabeth after his mother-in-law and her sister.
Pieter de Hooch : paints Courtyard of a House in Delft , one of his finest works. De Hooch's courtyards likely inspire Vermeer's Little Street.
Amsterdam naturalist Jan Swammerdam , 21, gives the first description of red blood cells. He will complete his medical studies in but devote himself to studying insects see science, , tadpoles, frogs and mammals rather than practicing medicine. Richard Cromwell succeeds his father as English Lord Protector. Around or , Vermeer's irascible brother-in-law Willem Bolnes leaves his father's house in Gouda to live on one of the family's properties in Schoonhoven.
He incurs in debts and borrows money from his mother, Maria Thins, since his father becomes too impoverished to help. Willem apparently has no work of any kind. He later becomes a problem for Vermeer and his wife. In the late s Vermeer, paints two exceptionally luminous interiors, inspired by genre models of the time. This technical artifice conveys a sense of brilliancy rarely seen in any other of his works.
Vermeer never again paints a member of the lower working class. Jan van der Weff d. Johan Willem, Elector Palatine, whom he had met in , appoints him Court Painter in at a salary of 4, guilders on condition he work for him six months of the year.
In this term is increased to nine months, and he is made a knight. Jan Janz de Heem d. From to he works in Utrecht with his father who sometimes retouches the son's work. There has been much confusion between the work of father and son. Jan Jansz is last recorded in a document of Christiaan Huygens of Holland uses a 2-inch telescope lens and discovers that the Martian day is nearly the same as an Earth day. He also discovers the rings of Saturn and is able to construct a chronometer for use at sea; however, it is influenced by the motion of the ship and does not keep correct time.
English physician Thomas Willis , 38, gives the first description of typhoid fever. Elementa curvarum, written by Jan De Witt b. Holland, January , d. Vermeer turns to a new and more complex type of composition in the late s or early s in which he explore the amorous relation between educated men and women.
The box-like, three-dimensional effect of these pictures is fruit of the artist's interest in perspective as an expressive means. The study and practice of perspective is held in high esteem throughout Europe. Vermeer is appointed one of the headman of the Guild of Saint Luke to a term of two years. This fact has been interpreted as a testimony of the high esteem in which the artist was at the time held.
However, by the time Vermeer is elected headmaster, many of the painters resident in Delft had left for the more prosperous Amsterdam and so his election may have less significance than usually thought. Vermeer and his wife bury a child in the Old Church. The same document states that at the same time, Vermeer and his wife are living in the house of Maria Thins on the Oude Langendijk in Delft. At the time, the household includes Vermeer, his wife, his mother-in-law, and three children, not counting an infant who had died and at least one female servant.
The house has a basement, a lower hall with a vestibule, a great hall, a small room adjoining the hall, an interior kitchen, a little back kitchen, a cooking kitchen, a washing kitchen, a corridor, and an upper floor with two rooms, one of which is taken up by Vermeer's studio.
Vermeer's family situation is unusual. Very few married men in the Netherlands live with a parent or parent-in-law for an extended period of time. Vermeer's marriage too, must be considered exceptional in as much as he marries outside his own family's religion and social class. He moves from the lower, artisanal class of his Reformed parents who lived on the Delft Square to the higher social stratum of the Catholic in-laws who instead live in the so-called "Papist Corner," the Catholic quarter of the city.
The burial record of his child is the earliest known notice of the artist's residence in Maria Thin's house. Jan van Mieris d. Son of the famous Frans van Mieris, Jan paints principally history subjects, but his earliest works were apparently genre scenes in his father's manner. Jacob van Ruisdael paints Jewish Cemetery. The painting's ruinous scene exemplifies the trend toward turbulence in Dutch landscape at mid-seventeenth century.
Adriean Coorte d. Coorte devotes himself to the rendering of simple objects in small paintings. His paintings often have strong illumination that gives the composition an enchanting stillness, which contributes to Coorte's appeal. Alessandro Scarlatti d. Marcello Malpighi discovers that the lungs consist of many small air pockets and a complex system of blood vessels. By observing capillaries through a microscope he completes the work of Harvey in describing the circulation of the blood.
Robert Boyle announces in New Experiments Physico-Mechanical Touching the Spring of Air that removing the air in a vacuum chamber extinguishes a flame and kills small animals, indicating that combustion and respiration are similar processes. May 28, George I, king of England — , is born. Charles made a deal with George Monck, a general of the New Model Army, and with the old parliamentary foes of his father.
The British experiment with republicanism comes to an end with the restoration of Charles II. The Dutch crafted an early version of a boat they called a " yacht. In the s, the British began to dominate the trade in port wine from Portugal after a political spat with the French who deny them their wines from Bordeaux. Brandy is added to the Portuguese wines to fortify them for the Atlantic voyage. In the View of Delft , Vermeer's largest canvas , the artist continues to explore visual effects produced the camera obscura, a precursor of modern camera.
The View of Delft is sometimes considered to be the first true urban landscape in western art history. Other than the extant View of Delft and The Little Street archival records raccount that Vermeer paints another cityscape demonstrating the artist's more-tha-sporadic interest in the field.
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