The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Johannes Vermeer · also called The Allegory of Painting · oil on canvas, about 120 by 100 cm, upright · a painter seen from behind at his easel, painting a young woman dressed as Clio, the muse of history, with a laurel wreath, a trumpet and a book, under a wall map of the Seventeen Provinces, a curtain drawn back at the near left · undated, usually placed about 1666 to 1668 · Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna · scored as the single canvas, one object with no versions
Mode
An allegory of painting dissolved into a Dutch studio interior; the painter at work, shown from behind, and the viewer behind a curtain
Mythos
The artist and the muse, built as the picture’s action: History crowned and posed, with Fame’s trumpet and History’s book; a lost unity in the map and the eagle
Phase
One moment of work: the wreath being painted, the first marks of the picture within the picture
Presentation
Oil on canvas, about 120 by 100 cm, upright; two figures, a curtain, a table, a map, a chandelier and a marble floor, lit from an unseen window at the left
Register
One register, a cool stillness, rising at the map, the model’s face, the brass and the curtain; no grandeur and no terror
Scale
One studio, two figures, one hour of daylight, with a country and a former sovereignty on the wall
Governing Proposition
A painter sits with his back to us in a studio, painting a young woman dressed as Clio, the muse of history, and on his canvas only her wreath has been begun. A curtain has been drawn back at the near edge, a map of the Netherlands hangs on the wall behind, and an unlit chandelier crowned with an eagle hangs above. The wager of the canvas is that an allegory of painting can be made not as an emblem but as a room lit from one window, in which the art that gives history its fame is shown at work, the man who makes everything we see is the one face withheld, and renown is the first thing the brush lays down.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The canvas is upright, about 120 centimetres high by 100 wide, and it shows a studio. At the near left a heavy figured tapestry has been drawn back like a curtain, with a chair before it. Behind it stands a table holding a plaster face mask, a large open book, a folded length of silk and a sketchbook or folio. Beyond the table a young woman in blue stands with her eyes lowered, a laurel wreath on her head, holding a trumpet and a thick yellow bound book: the attributes Ripa’s Iconologia gives to Clio, the muse of history. Seated on a stool with his back to us, a painter in a black slashed doublet, red stockings and a beret rests his right hand on a maulstick and paints the leaves of her wreath onto a canvas on which nothing else has been begun.
Behind them a large map of the Seventeen Provinces covers the back wall, a crease running down it and a border of town views along its edges. Above hangs a brass chandelier crowned by a double-headed eagle, with no candles in it. The floor is black and white marble. The light comes from a window at the left that the picture does not show. There are two figures and no others: no reflection, no window, no third person in the room. The canvas is signed on the lower border of the map, to the right of the model’s head. It is undated and usually placed about 1666 to 1668, and it is also called The Allegory of Painting.
What is scored is that one canvas, in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna: one object, with no versions. Vermeer’s other allegory, the Allegory of Faith in New York, is context and is not scored, nor are his interiors, the emblem books or the studio pictures that came before. The canvas is read object by object, as its maker built it, and what it holds is a claim about the art that made it. It is also a picture its maker kept, and that fact runs through what follows: it bears on the swerve, on the reach and on the long survival of the image, and it is the first reason the canvas stands where it does.
Movement II
The picture comes out of two traditions. One is the allegory of painting: Pictura, the art personified, a figure with her mask and her brushes as the emblem books give her, to be read off by her attributes. The other is the Netherlandish studio picture, the painter shown at his easel, from Saint Luke painting the Virgin to the studio scenes of Gerrit Dou and others. Each came with its conventions. The allegory was abstract and legible, a figure standing for an idea. The studio picture showed a painter, often himself, at a trade.
Vermeer joined them and changed both. The allegory is dissolved into a genre interior, painted with the same daylight and the same patience as a woman reading a letter. The muse is a young woman in a borrowed costume, posed in a room. The mask, one of the emblem’s attributes, is a plaster cast lying on a table. The painter is shown from behind, at work and unidentified. And the viewer is placed behind a curtain that someone has drawn aside, an intruder at a private act. No one had made the allegory a lived room in this way, and the turn is real.
The stake was modest. This was no commission and no public wager. Vermeer kept the picture, and his family fought to keep it after him, which says that he valued it and not that he risked anything by it; the wager was placed on his own proven path, the lit interior with one or two figures, in a picture he did not have to sell or show. It refines his manner rather than turning from it, and the turn of its century is elsewhere. Its force in its own time was therefore private. The canvas reorganised what an allegory of painting could be, from emblem to room, but it passed from its maker’s family into obscurity, under another painter’s name, and redirected nothing in its own century or the next.
Movement III
The making carries the meaning, and it is at its fullest in the objects. The map is paper creased and slightly buckled, a printed image painted as a thing in light, with its border of towns and its lettering held at the scale of the room. The chandelier is brass modelled by reflection alone, each arm turned and the eagle legible, every surface of it caught in the same daylight as the map behind. The tapestry of the curtain is a heavy weave given in small points and broken colour, near and soft, against the sharp distance beyond it.
One window lights the whole room, and every surface is consistent with it, the shadows cool and transparent. The painter’s black and white doublet holds its pattern flat without losing its fold, and the striped light on it is answered by his red stockings. The begun canvas on the easel, a pale ground with the wreath laid on in blue, is painted with a different handling from the painting that contains it, so that two stages of one art stand side by side. The costs are slight. The painter’s figure is a little stiff, and the still life on the table a little crowded.
Take the two farthest points of the picture: the curtain at the very front, dark, blurred and enormous, and the towns along the map’s far border, tiny and exact. They obey one law, daylight from the left at one temperature, and a focus that softens what is near and sharpens what is far, the same for a cloth, a face and a printed city. Clio is lit exactly as the mask and the stool are lit, so that the figure of History is also a girl in a studio. The range is wide for one room, from a national map and an imperial emblem to a painter’s stocking, and it holds without a break of register; only the painter’s scale against the model is slightly uncertain, and the space between them compressed. The height the picture reaches is of the same kind throughout, a cool stillness, very high for a room and without grandeur, terror or scale: one hour of light.
Movement IV
On the painter’s canvas only the wreath has been begun. He is crowning Clio, and the first thing his brush lays down is her renown: painting is the art that gives history its fame, and the picture says so by the order of the work. The one figure whose face is never seen is the one who made everything that is seen, and the maker stands anonymous before what he makes. The model is costumed and lit, history posed, and making an image is shown as an act of staging. These are claims about the art and the place of the artist, and they hold outside Delft.
Take the objects away one at a time. The curtain cannot go: it is the hand that has drawn the picture open, and the viewer’s place behind it. The painter’s back cannot go, nor the model, whose lowered eyes give the room its hush. The cast mask is the art’s past, a dead face beside a living one. What could go is little: some of the silk and the folio on the table, and the chair, which doubles the curtain’s work. The form is the knowledge. Only a picture seen from one place can make the viewer an intruder; in words the painter would have a face; the picture within the picture shows the finished work and its first marks at once; and the upright format stacks history on the wall over its muse over its maker on his stool.
The archetype is built, not hung: the artist and the muse, the muse made a model and the model a muse, with Fame’s trumpet and History’s book given as one scene. Behind it lies a second structure, the lost realm. The map is of a Netherlands still whole though long divided, and its crease runs down it; the eagle over the studio is the one sign of a former sovereignty, and the painter wears an old costume. The world painted is a world remembered. The limits are plain. The allegory’s terms come from Ripa, and its first viewers would have decoded them; much of the depth of map and eagle is brought by interpreters rather than compelled by the canvas; and the orders held, art and its labour, history and fame, the state and the art’s past, leave out the family, the sacred and the natural world beyond daylight.
Movement V
Vermeer kept the picture and did not sell it, and after his death his widow fought to keep it from the creditors. It then passed into obscurity, and for nearly two centuries it went under another painter’s name. It was in a private collection in Vienna until 1940, when it was bought for Hitler; it was kept in a salt mine before it came to the museum. The image outlived all of it, and that is itself evidence: after about 358 years the form is whole, every element that carries the meaning legible, the signature still on the map’s border. The fabric is in good order for its age, with abrasion and old retouching whose extent is not given here. The charge is presence. Its centuries were not continuously seen.
Its yield began with the rediscovery of Vermeer that followed Thoré-Bürger’s articles of the 1860s, and the questions it raises are still argued. Is the painter Vermeer himself? Why the antique costume? What does the map, its crease along the line of the old division between north and south, say about the Netherlands of the 1660s, and why the Habsburg eagle, as imperial nostalgia or as the art’s own history? Is the model Clio or Fame? Why begin with the wreath, and what did the camera obscura do here, or not? The canvas is a central case in Svetlana Alpers’s The Art of Describing (1983), for Dutch art as an art of describing and of mapping, and in 1934 Dalí took its painter’s figure from behind into The Ghost of Vermeer of Delft Which Can Be Used as a Table. That reach is real and late, and the literature circles one set of objects and one allegorical key.
Among the neighbours on the desk it stands a tenth below View of Delft at 8.8, which it beats on The Unconcealment, The Archetypal Deep, The Made and The Inner Law, levels on The Imperishable and trails on the other seven, most widely on Pressure on Tradition; four tenths above The Milkmaid at 8.3, which it beats on every axis but The Imperishable; and six tenths above Girl with a Pearl Earring at 8.1. It stands a tenth below 8½ at 8.8, the artist and his muse on film, and below The Arnolfini Portrait at 8.9, the nearest of its kind, level with it on The Made and The Inner Law; Las Meninas, at 9.2, the painter at work in a court room, beats it on every axis but The Sublime and The Archetypal Deep, where they are level. What holds it from the summit is swerve and reach: a turn taken on its maker’s own path, and a picture kept out of the world that would have answered it. What it has is a painter laying down the wreath first.
Act III · The Twelve
Take each object away and ask. The curtain cannot go: it is the hand that has drawn the picture open, and the viewer’s place behind it. The painter’s back cannot go, for the picture is about a man whose face is withheld while he makes. The model is both the subject he paints and the subject of the picture, and her lowered eyes give the room its hush. The map carries the world the studio stands in; its crease and its border of towns make history geography. The unlit chandelier with its eagle is the one sign of a former sovereignty, and the cast mask is the art’s past, a dead face beside a living one. What yields a little is the still life on the table, where the silk and the folio could be fewer, and the foreground chair, which doubles the curtain’s work.
Score: 8.8 / 10
What the picture discloses can be stated. Painting is the art that gives history its fame: the painter is crowning Clio, and he begins with her wreath, so that renown is literally the first thing the brush lays down. The maker is anonymous before the work: the one figure whose face is never seen made everything that is seen. The world painted is a world remembered, an old costume on the painter, a map of a Netherlands still whole though long divided, a Habsburg eagle over a Dutch studio. Making an image is staging: the model costumed and lit, history posed. These claims hold outside Delft. It meets the gate and no more, because the allegory was one its first viewers would decode from Ripa, and the condition disclosed is that of art and fame more than of people living.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The elevation is real and of one temperature, the cool stillness proper to Vermeer, and it recurs across the field: in the light from the left along the creased paper of the map and down its border of towns; in the model’s face, half lit under the wreath; in the brass of the chandelier, each arm and the eagle caught in the same daylight; in the heavy tapestry of the curtain, near and dark against the luminous depth beyond it; in the painter’s red stockings and the striped light of his doublet. For a picture of a room the height is very high. Range and kind hold it below the top: no grandeur, no terror, no transport by scale, only one hour of light in one room.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Myth is built at the centre, not hung on the wall. The archetype is the artist and the muse, and it is the action of the picture: a man seated before a woman crowned as History, making her image, so that the muse is made a model and the model a muse. Fame in the trumpet, History in the book and the art that serves both are given as one scene rather than an emblem. A second structure is the lost realm: the map of the united provinces and the eagle over the room set the act of painting inside the memory of a divided country. The particulars stay particular, a Delft girl in a blue wrap, a real map with a real crease. It meets the gate and no more: the terms come from a handbook, and much of the depth of map and eagle is brought by interpreters rather than compelled by the canvas.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The inheritance is twofold: the allegory of painting, Pictura with her mask and brushes as the emblem books give her, and the Netherlandish studio picture, from Saint Luke painting the Virgin to the studio scenes of Dou and others. The departure is real. The allegory is dissolved into a genre interior, painted with the same daylight and the same patience as a woman reading a letter; the painter is shown from behind, at work, unidentified; the viewer is placed behind a curtain, an intruder in the studio. The stake is modest. This was no commission and no public wager: Vermeer kept the picture, which says he valued it, not that he risked anything by it. It refines his own manner rather than turning from it, and the turn of its century is elsewhere.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Substitute another form and most of what the canvas knows goes. It knows the studio as someone who has stepped round the curtain knows it: the curtain at the near edge, dark and close, is the threshold, and only a picture seen from one place can make the viewer an intruder at a private act. The painter’s back can be shown only in an image; in words he would have a face. The picture within the picture, where only the wreath is begun, shows the finished work and its first marks at once. The light falling alike on map, eagle, model and mask argues that one attention makes history and studio equal, and the upright format stacks history over its muse over its maker. It is held below the top because the allegory’s terms are lent, not formed.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Evidence over promise: about three and a half centuries, with active yield since the rediscovery of Vermeer in the nineteenth century. The open questions are real and still argued. Is the painter Vermeer himself? Why the antique costume? What does the map, its crease along the line of the old division between north and south, say about the Netherlands of the 1660s, and why the Habsburg eagle: imperial nostalgia, or the art’s own history? Is the model Clio or Fame? Why is the canvas begun with the wreath? What did the camera obscura do here, or not do? The painting is a central case for Svetlana Alpers’s account of Dutch art as an art of describing and of mapping, The Art of Describing (1983). It is held below the top because the literature circles one set of objects and one allegorical key.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The field is Dutch painting of the 1660s and the European studio picture after it. The intrinsic force is high: the canvas reorganises what an allegory of painting can be, from emblem to lived room, and puts the painter’s act inside the daylight of the genre interior. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: heavily discounted, since Vermeer kept the picture, it passed from his family into obscurity under another painter’s name, and it stayed in private keeping in Vienna until 1940, redirecting nothing in its own century or the next; then delayed and named, in the Vermeer revival after Thoré-Bürger’s articles of the 1860s, in Dalí’s The Ghost of Vermeer of Delft Which Can Be Used as a Table (1934), which takes this painter’s figure from behind, and in the argument of Alpers and her successors. Real, late, and narrower than its force.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across about 358 years: the top row of the table, centuries with the form whole. Every element that carries the meaning is legible: the curtain, the map with the painter’s signature on its lower border, the eagle, the wreath and trumpet, the begun canvas. The fabric is an oil on canvas in good order for its age, with abrasion and old retouching whose extent is not given here. Presence is the charge: nearly two centuries in obscurity and under another painter’s name, private keeping until 1940, then a dictator’s purchase and a salt mine before the museum. The image outlived all of it, which is itself evidence; but its presence was not continuous, and its centuries are fewer than the oldest works’, so it stands at the lower end of the top row.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Command of oil on canvas, judged against the same anchors as any medium, and the making is load-bearing. The map is paper creased and slightly buckled, a printed image painted as a thing in light, with its border of towns and its lettering at the scale of the room. The chandelier is brass modelled by reflection alone, each arm turned, the eagle legible. The tapestry is a heavy weave given in small points and broken colour, near and soft against a sharp distance. One window lights every surface consistently, the shadows cool and transparent. The painter’s black and white doublet holds its pattern flat without losing its fold, and the begun canvas, pale ground and wreath laid on in blue, has a handling of its own. The costs are slight: a painter a little stiff, a still life a little crowded.
Score: 9.6 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the tapestry curtain at the very front, dark, blurred and enormous, and the towns along the map’s far border, tiny and exact. They obey one law: daylight from the left, falling on everything at one temperature, and a focus that softens what is near and sharpens what is far, the same for a cloth, a face and a printed city. The allegory and the room obey the same law. Clio is lit exactly as the mask and the stool are lit, so that the figure of History is also a girl in a studio. The range is wide for one room, from a national map and an imperial emblem to a painter’s stocking, and it holds without a break of register. What resists is small: the painter’s scale against the model is slightly uncertain, and the space between them compressed.
Score: 9.3 / 10
The figure describes a small form. The orders held in one studio are several, and the room integrates them: art and its labour, a man at work among the tools and models of his trade; history and fame, in Clio, her book and her trumpet; the state and its history, in the map of the provinces with its seam and its towns and in the eagle of a former sovereign; the past of the art, in the cast mask and the old costume; and consciousness, in the model’s lowered eyes and the painter’s absorbed back. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: no family, no sacred, no natural order beyond daylight, and no labour but the painter’s own. It clears its floor of 6.0 by a point and four tenths.
Score: 7.4 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.7 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Made at 9.6 and The Inner Law at 9.3, with The Imperishable at 9.2 and The Living Form at 9.1. A map, a chandelier and a curtain each made a distinct problem of light and solved in one daylight, with the begun canvas painted in a handling of its own; one law of focus from the blurred curtain to the exact towns; a form whole after about 358 years through obscurity, a false name and a salt mine; and a threshold, a withheld face and a picture within the picture that only an image could make.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.4: art and its labour, history and fame, the state and the past of the art are held in one studio, and the family, the sacred and the natural order are absent. Above it, Pressure on Tradition at 8.2: a canvas its maker kept, which went under another name for generations, redirected nothing in its century, and its reach is late and named. Then The Swerve at 8.4: a real turn from emblem to lived room, taken on the painter’s own proven path with little staked. They are one fact: a private picture about the public work of art, made with full command and kept from the world that would have answered it.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.8 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 9.1, The Made at 9.6, The Inner Law at 9.3, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 9.2 clears the bar of 8.5, and The Unconcealment and The Archetypal Deep meet it exactly at 8.5, but The Swerve at 8.4 falls short by a tenth and Pressure on Tradition at 8.2 by three tenths. The Universal Minimum is met: no axis but The Encompassed falls below 8.2, against 7.5. The Encompassed, which is exempted from the minimum, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.4. The twelve sum to 104.5, an average of 8.71 that displays 8.7, in Tier IV; the summit is withheld on the Epochal Gate, and the aggregate, three tenths short of 9.0, would withhold it besides.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of the canvas as it now hangs in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, and of its composition, its objects and its history of ownership. No image or written source was consulted. The work scored is the single canvas: oil on canvas, about 120 by 100 cm, undated and usually placed about 1666 to 1668; one object, with no versions. Not in the unit, and neither scored nor credited: Vermeer’s other allegory, the Allegory of Faith in New York, and his interiors, which are context; the Pictura of the emblem books, Ripa’s Iconologia and the Netherlandish studio picture, which are the inheritance; and Dalí’s picture and the writing of Alpers, which are reach. Abrasion and retouching are weighed only as facts of survival and are not charged to the painter. No words are quoted: the canvas carries none but a signature, and none of the documents that describe it is quoted. Facts that could not be verified are not given, among them the exact dimensions, the letters of the signature, the edition of Ripa the attributes follow, the maker of the map, the pigment of the model’s blue, the extent of the abrasion and retouching, the dates, names and wording of the transfer after the painter’s death and of the dispute over it, the painter to whom the canvas was later given, the collection that held it in Vienna and from when, the place and year of its recovery and of its entry into the museum, a later claim for its restitution, and whether Alpers’s book gives the picture a chapter of its own.