Travels in Vermeer by Michael White Page B

third character, addressed more and more directly as Vermeer matures. I gaze now, a little voyeuristically, over the officer’s shoulder at the girl, evaluating her much as he might. Who is she? I wonder. His body language is tense, his right arm akimbo, his huge right hand massively crumpled on his right hip, where she can’t see it, but I can. The officer’s face is shown in three-quarter profile, from the rear—the protruding nose, the merest glint of an eye. I can’t read his apparently conflicted and withheld intentions, but there’s more, much more than a hint of threat in him. He makes me wonder: As a man, how often have I presented myself in such a way? How often have I been the shadow looming in a room?
    And still her unguarded sweetness comes shining back. No matter how I see her, what is undeniable is the intent, native warmth of her smile, framed by the bonnet—as it is in Woman Holding a Balance, as it is with his other beneficent creatures. Apart from her startling flush or the apparently lewd gesture of her left hand, her face—her unguarded sweetness—is still the focal point, deepening the work by denying easy resolution. It knocks me flat.
    It is a purity of love that permeates the lighted cube of space. Her right-hand edge is traced with light. Her white collar is shadowed just at the edge dun-gray, a bit darker than necessary, in order to contrast more decisively with the whitewash . Her bonnet is one of the characteristic, subliminal miracles of its type. It features a shadow on the side that is similar to the shadow-hands that gently support the heads of his later women. Folded behind the head, following the curve of the skull, it forms an illumined sliver of crescent moon. Like the more dramatic hands in the later works, this moon isn’t immediately obvious, but once it is seen, it can’t be unseen. In any case, this slender figment of moon seems to cup the lovely girl’s skull, protecting her, cradling her with a sidelong halo.
    All this, again, in service of what ? For Vermeer doesn’t follow nature, exactly, and he doesn’t exactly follow light. It’s the light of love he cares about: her lit face facing down the dark. Her purity, the purity of love envelops the officer too, and envelops me as well. She is not Mary Magdalene. She is no more nor less, thank God, than her mortal, bought-and-paid for self; her plaintively, lewdly beckoning hand; but she is enough. She is all there is.
    The male/female relationship, Snow points out, is seldom taken as subject beyond this point. What happens now is that the solitary women take center stage, and the dialogue in the genre scenes is reconfigured between viewer and subject. The dramas embodied in the early scenes are internalized; the apparatus is stripped away. The hungering gaze of The Girl with a Pearl Earring , for instance, addresses me—just as I gaze back at her—with an immediacy and urgency that Vermeer had mapped out, figure by figure, in these few early works.
    2. Maps
    The Dutch were the world’s cartographers, and maps and globes are among Vermeer’s stock props. The map on the back wall in Officer with Laughing Girl is easily one of his best. It’s an infinitely detailed depiction of seventeenth century Holland, based on a published map of the day that Vermeer probably owned (since it appears in several paintings). Looking at it, at first I don’t recognize it as Holland. (Later, I will learn that the convention of orienting maps with north upward wasn’t standard in Vermeer’s day.) The top of the painting shows the seacoast—so that north is right, south is left. What’s even more confusing to the modern eye is that the painting reverses what we think of as traditional colors for land and sea: the sea is brown, the land blue. Only the tiny sailing ships placed all over the brown Zuiderzee help identify it as water. The effect is, at least,