EthnologyPerspective as Process in VermeerAuthor(s): Christopher HeuerReviewed work(s):Source: RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, No. 38 (Autumn, 2000), pp. 82-99

Perspective as process in Vermeer

CHRISTOPHERH EUER

Vermeer is a cup of honey full to the brim, the inside of an egg, a drop of molten lead. When one has looked at Vermeer's paintings, everything that the great painters insist upon letting us see of their technique, their know-how, their procedure, seems to be vanity, feebleness, or vulgarity, a kind of bluff. Vermeer. . . hides all that he knows, all that he does.1

These words appeared in the Paris weekly L'Opinion during May of 1921. Written by

the critic Jean-Louis Vaudoyer, they spoke to a view of Johannes Vermeer's art that?

not only through its evocations of eggs, drops of lead, and cups of honey?assumed

that a virtually alchemical process was at work in his canvases. The placid, mirrorlike

surfaces, the apparent erasure of painterly texture, and above all, the cool,

seemingly unobtrusive perspective of works like The Art of Painting (fig. 1) led

Vaudoyer to assume that Vermeer's art-making was, if not magical, then virtually

photographic in nature. Traces of traditional technique, such as brushstrokes, were

nowhere to be found. The quiet, introspective Delft pieces were then, as now,

contrasted with the theatrical, expressive, and tactical works of painters like Titian

and Rembrandt.2 For Vaudoyer, the

thick impasto of these latter artists (which was so frank about its status as paint)

remained a rather distracting effect. Today, however, such dynamic traces resonate

with discourses of gesture and the bodily in art history, and thus the apparent

absence of visible marks in Vermeer often make him an exemplar of purely "optical"

strategies of representation.3 In these accounts, it is Rembrandt (fig. 2) who

generally trumps Vermeer as the true progressive artist of the seventeenth century,

his violent handling of the brush and his bold treatment of the quotidian providing

an easy connection to modernist conceptions of the creative process as a subject of

art. In his use of perspective, however, Vermeer may also have something to offer.

Linear perspective inW estern art is a compositional element that provides a

systematic fiction of depth, variously defined as a visual cone (Euclid), a window

(Alberti), or a "seeing through"

(D?rer).4 The perspective in Vermeer's paintings, although a longstanding subject of

hard-science technical inquiry in this century, has remained largely unexamined as to

its role in narrative and meaning. In most accounts, perspective is left strangely

under-emphasized as a component of painting-beholding dialectics. Much of this has

to do with the assumption that perspective, as a kind of invisible scaffolding beneath

pictures, must always act as a closed, irretrievable, and above all, past ingredient of

seventeenth-century art. The findings of technical examinations conducted for

Vermeer exhibitions in Washington and The Hague in 1996, however, suggested

alternatives. Here, physical evidence of carefully placed pinholes was discovered

with X-radiography (fig. 3), causing quite a stir. Yet most of these traces had long

been visible to the naked eye. The very tangible presence of these and other "by-

products" of perspective techniques?chalk lines, canvas punctures, nail marks?

unsettled not only the idea of Vermeer's process as "hidden," but also of perspective

as a hermetic, abstract, and purely uncommunicative element of painting. In the

present essay, I am interested in how the study of perspective in paintings may be

used for purposes other than the reconstruction of past workshop practices. I

propose to consider how physical leftovers from an ostensibly preliminary episode in

a paintings' making (perspective construction) condition our understanding of

Vermeer's meaning in the present. The role that disconnected, often sloppier

residues of painting (for example, drips, splashes, traces of the brush or the palette

knife) play in the interpretation of a work tends to be viewed as an issue of facture,

o? making. Yet such residues are equally elements of texture, as contoured layers of

pigment that intercede between the viewer's eye and the image on canvas.5

Elements like underdrawing, submerged reworkings of a composition, and?

significantly?perspective construction, when brought to light through scientific

examination, can be meaningful to the observer as well, yet for more than

connoisseurship. Unearthing the physical stuff of a painting's making, of course,

brings to light material, as much an integral part of the artwork's subject as its

putative subject matter?the mimetic image. In certain works by Vermeer,

perspective traces not only abet this mimetic project but actually supersede it to

become the primary subject of representation. In this, perspective can function as

both texture and facture when elements like vanishing points can be actively beheld.

When they are, the overlapping processes of both making and beholding a painting

(fig. 1) come together.

Speculation about the actual techniques Vermeer and many of his contemporaries

used to create illusion has been widespread. His supposed experimentation with the

camera obscura during the 1660s has generated debate over the applicability of

proto-photographic devices to early modern painting in general.6 Although much

investigation of Vermeer's work in this vein has attempted simply to recreate the

conditions under which the canvases were made, recently it has been suggested the

camera obscura may not have been used alone (if at all). Rather, such devices may

have been used in tandem with perspective construction.7 The scientific

investigations of Vermeer and his fellow Delft painter Peter de Hooch at exhibitions

in The Hague and London that attempted to unearth material evidence of

perspective processes used infrared photography, stereo microscopy, and

radiography. In some de Hooch works, traces of chalk underdrawing were, in fact,

detected, but for the most part, such investigations proved fruitless, as most traces

of large-scale perspective construction appear either never to have been present, to

have simply disappeared, worked into layers of pigment in the painting process.8 Yet

one mark of perspective construction that was consistently detected had frequently

been visible with the naked eye. This was the vanishing point where orthogonals

converged. De Hooch's Woman and a Child from 1658 (Aurora Art Fund) contains a

small disruption in the paint surface where a pin was once inserted into the white

ground, while Vermeer's 1667 The Art of Painting in Vienna (fig. 1), displayed such a

point below the lower rod of the hanging map (fig. 3).9 These small cavities, which

have also been discovered in Dutch works by de Lorme, El inga, van Vucht, and

others, mark

the spot where the artist would have inserted a pin attached to a chalked string, held

this cord taut along the intended orthogonals, and then snapped it repeatedly

against white ground, moving it slightly, in order to leave straight lines behind.10

The chalk lines would have then been traced with graphite or paint on the white

ground of the canvas, but the nail would sometimes remain embedded in the surface

well into the painting process. Like the theory of linear perspective itself, the origin

of this nail practice lies most probably in Quattrocento Florence. Following

Brunelleschi's famous demonstration in front of the Baptistery in 1413, painters like

Veneziano, Piero della Francesca, and Uccello all are reputed to have experimented

with pin- or nail-hole techniques.11 Small pin-depressions have been found in

Masaccio's Trinity fresco in Santa Maria Novella, and in the so-called Citt? Ideale in

Urbino,12 and like those from the Netherlands, they appear to have been placed

according to one of three methods. Brunelleschi's single point method (often

erroneously credited to Alberti) rested upon the placement of a central "point of

flight" from which projected the organizing rays of the composition. Meanwhile the

bifocal method?also known by Brunelleschi but popularized by Vignola? eliminated

the need for this central punctum, positing two convergences outside of the picture

plane along a horizon; these foci were known as distance points. Of the methods,

Vignola claimed, the first technique is better known, easier to understand; but more

time-consuming and a nuisance to use; the second method is more difficult to

comprehend, but easier to execute.13 The tiers points technique, used by de Hooch

and Vermeer, in essence combined these previous two, negotiating something of a

middle path in terms of complexity. Outlined first in Jean Per?lin's De Artificiali

Perspectiva in 1505, and later taken up by Jean Cousin,

the procedure involved drawing three different sets of orthogonals, two of which

converged at points outside of the picture (again, distance) and one which remained

in the center. The so-called "vanishing point," thus paired with the exterior "distance

points," allowed for the construction of a believable-looking illusion without

recourse to mathematical formulas; indeed, the procedure remained, particularly

during the seventeenth century, a system more related to carpentry than geometry.

A writer like Abraham Bosse, unsurprisingly, thus depicts lines of sight as strings, that

is, as beatable physical entities in his 1664 Algemene manier tot de Praktyck der

Perspective. These spring and uncoil atop imaginary ladders or cluster tightly in the

hands of dandified geometers (fig. 4). Elsewhere the same author advises would-be

perspectives to avoid mathematicians and philosophers when looking for help with

constructions, urging them instead to seek out surveyors, bricklayers, and cabinet

makers, for "they are more versed in the tangible practice of Meet-konst

(measurement)" and thus grasp the key elements of the art.14 At least one Dutch

artist from the seventeenth century appears to have done just that: Pieter

Saenredam consulted the Haarlem surveyor Peter Wils for advice with his

architectural paintings throughout the 1630s.15 More than eight of Vermeer's works

exhibit physical traces of this method. And Pieter de Hooch, the son of a master

bricklayer, appears to have adopted the technique as well, for evidence has been

discovered in over a dozen of his interior scenes, including Couple with a Parrot iron)

1677 (Cologne, Wallraf-Richartz Museum) and Woman with a Child from 1661 (Los

Angeles, Getty Museum). Over time, Vermeer sunk the lines of his horizons and

reduced the span taken in by his distance points, essentially narrowing the viewing

angle of the beholder, reducing marginal distortions in elements like floor tiles. De

Hooch, meanwhile, was less rigid in his application of preexisting perspective

methods, occasionally introducing multiple horizon lines or other deviations from a

standard grid, which could account for different levels of depth in a scene. Thus in

some of his works, second or ?/7/rc/pinholes are actually visible. In the Courtyard in

Delft from 1658 (fig. 5), there are two depressions in the canvas along what appears

as the inside wall of the brick doorway, betraying evidence of a slightly altered

perspective

system. Here, the twin points have been charted using the three-point method along

slightly different horizons to provide a structure but, curiously, a mutable one. This

more "experiential" approach to the illusion of space was a practice initially

developed by architectural painters like Pieter Saenredam and adopted by fellow

Delft painters who specialized in church interiors. Emanuel de Witte and Hendrick

van Vliet, for example, frequently introduced multiple viewpoints and perspectival

"errors" in their paintings of the 1660s and 1670s to create a more complex sense of

space.16 Many of these works combined fragments of views taken from different

parts of a building's interior, resulting in a finished picture hardly "correct" by any

optical standard, but which indeed accounted for the activity of the roving human

eye. This "freer" method of space evocation did not discard perspective completely

(as is sometimes claimed), but rather allowed for multiple angles to co-inhabit the

canvas, assuming the presence of a mobile, projective viewer.17 Modern pictorial

reconstructions of early modern perspective do not account for these multiple

spatial constructions in a single picture, however. Such diagrams, common in

technical literature, exhibition catalogues, and thematic monographs (fig. 6)

oversimplify perspective somewhat by treating it as nothing but a preparatory

element made obsolete by the completion of the work. Demonstrative orthogonals

and horizon lines, mapped over paintings, can create an altogether different visual

artifact than the painting itself, one where (as in scientific examination) the

seemingly invisible is somehow brought to light. This schematizing makes the picture

appear as if it contains a code to be cracked, a puzzle to be solved, and has thus

wrongly influenced much thinking about perspective. The exaggeration of straight

lines gives the impression that

perspective is a dead element from the painting's past construction, something that

must be drawn out and recovered only hypothetically from deep in within the

canvas.18 Perspective itself becomes relegated to a mere preliminary role in the

story of a painting. With explanatory diagrams, a narrative of making often seems to

end abruptly once the finished painting is on the wall or reproduced in print. III. In

the seventeenth century, the idea of a single, formulaic grid, one step away from a

finished painting, was unknown. The perspective available to most early modern

artists was instead a diffuse, fragmented, and pluralized affair.19 Many textual

sources that individuals like Vermeer and de Hooch may have turned to for

instruction on the subject used vastly different means to teach their truly

heterogeneous topic; writers on the subject commonly acknowledge the complexity

of perspective to the reader, who was only in rare instances assumed to be an artist.

Alberti's 1435 Delia Pittura had established the metaphor of the "window" above all

as an imaginary aid in explaining perspective to students. Using purely textual

description, Alberti emphasized that measurement (and even the plotting of nail-

points) could be crucial in the production of a picture.20 In the sixteenth century,

meanwhile, authors began to add lengthy equations to their texts coupled with

elaborate instructions and diagrams (fig. 7). Barbara's Practica della perspettiva, first

published in 1568, is typical (fig. 8), promising to reveal the "obscure and difficult"

rules of linear perspective. However, only one of Barbara's diagrams is what today

might be considered explicitly pedagogical. Peppered with references to antiquity,

the book is aimed largely at proving why one perspective method is superior to that

of previous authorities, digressing at length into histories of Euclidean geometry

and scenography. Such rhetorical embellishment resulted from a humanist sense of

aedificatio rather than clarity? visual aids, generally woodcuts, only sporadically

appear. Predominantly, textual exegesis characterizes the treatises of Benedetti

(Rome, 1585), Commandino (Venice, 1588), and particularly Lomazzo (Milan, 1584)

as well. The latter, particularly, offers long and tedious explanations with few or no

clarifying diagrams.21 Hans Vredeman de Vries's hugely successful Perspective

(1604-1605) attempted a different tact. Geared not toward artists but to "all lovers

of perspective," the book consisted of two volumes of plates, which demonstrated

an idiosyncratic strain of Viator's technique. Windy textual addresses to the reader

accompanying these images said almost nothing about how the shapes should be

drawn; instead, they were concerned almost obsessively with Vredeman's own

achievement, presenting the "admirable" qualities of the plates. Begging the reader

to appreciate his inventive

ability and knowledge, Vredeman offers page upon page of eerie, geometric

landscapes as products of his method alone?unlike a writer such as Barbara, for

example, he makes no claims whatsoever as to the superiority of his work. In

rambling, complicated sentences Vredeman refers readers to earlier sections of the

book, then back to other figures, and then to publications from south of the Alps and

elsewhere. This brand of active perusal?itself a form of travel for the reader?is

intrinsic to the study of perspective, for it parallels the darting activity of the mobile

eye. In Vredeman's treatise, it is the viewer, the possessor of the eye, who is thus

upheld as a fundamental component of the perspective system. Vredeman's well-

known plate 30 makes plain the importance of the embodied beholder for his

schema (fig. 9). A centrally placed viewer, ensnared in a web of orthogonals, unifies

the scene with his eyesight as gesturing onlookers align themselves along diagonals.

None of the figures look out, but the complicity of the beholder/perspectivist in the

upholding of illusion is made quite clear. As in Vermeer's Art of Painting (fig. 1 ), the

turned back of the central figure invites us both to look over his shoulder and

simultaneously to identify with his working process. Perspective illustrations

throughout the second half of the sixteenth century increasingly included this kind of

human staging in their explanation, indebted largely to the final pages of D?rer's

Underweysung der Messung (fig. 10), which depict the concretization of Alberti's

window metaphor (and the use of strings as drawing aids). Illustrations showing

either viewers or students hard at work on perspective become common. Jean

Dubriel's 1642 Perspective Practique, which depicts an apprentice using a drawing

frame to render a landscape, is one example. As a teaching tool, these illustrations

often supplanted the line-and-letter diagrams of earlier works like Barbara's,

accounting for the participatory presence of a maker within the

perspective act.22 The sum expression was that perspective was a process made up of

manual, human application as well as simple results that today are too often presented

as the sole component of the craft. For the most part, however, perspective books

remained no less mysterious in their explanations; they simply shifted outward to

acknowledge explicitly the human viewer's involvement in the making of illusion.

One marvelous page designed by Hendrick Hondius for Samuel Marlois's 1629 work

on perspective, suggests this in an illustration of Alberti's visual pyramid (fig. 11).

Here, geometrical diagrams appear in sequentially numbered succession, gradually

describing the rendering of a cube in perspective. In figure 7, as if on cue, a calipers-

clutching human figure suddenly appears, his right eye forming the originating point

for the visual rays. By figure 8, he has disappeared, but thanks to his presence the

cube has, as it were, sprung to life in the scene. The standing geometer here

manifests the implicit role of the beholder in the process of perspective.23 Books on

perspective like Marlois's inevitably contributed to the cultural milieu of de Hooch

and Vermeer. Yet going through them?looking, reading, copying, thinking, correcting,

erasing?was never a simple or even a practical act, as modern perspective analyses

sometimes imply. In fact, after the late sixteenth century, few of the books

contained any real new ideas at all, and certainly none aimed explicitly at the

student of painting. Dutch treatises, in particular, suffered a reputation of being

particularly useless?in 1628 one reader of Vredeman's Perspective quipped ". . . it is

about as easy to learn something [from this book] as to grab a bird out of the sky. ... I

have never met anyone who has learned anything from [its] prints."24 But nowhere

in Vredeman's book does "learning" come to figure; had Vredeman actually been

alive to read such a comment, the idea that perspective was simply a means would

have seemed preposterous to him. For, like the layering of paint on a canvas, the

construction of a building, or the sculpting of a marble block, an artist's engagement

with a perspective treatise remained a process like any other endeavor, one of

laborious trial-and-error and potentially full of misinterpretation, confusion, false

starts, and repetition?in sum, not at all dissimilar to the looping vagaries of a bird in

flight. "Working through a perspective treatise is not only like making a picture,"

James Elkins has noted, "it is making a picture."25 That is, it is a task often less

explanatory than poetic, and thus potentially aberrant, elliptical, and abstruse,

similar to the reading of many modern writings on perspective, from Warburg to

Panofsky to Damisch.26 In all cases, the demands made on the reader highlight his or

her own complicity in the generation of meaning and undermine the assumption that

perspective and its application is always synonymous with some kind of cool

mathematical logic. The constructions found in Barbara, Hondius, and Vredeman

demonstrate the more inelegant and eccentric aspects of perspective as a manual

process of making, highlighting the fact that the reader exists as a

separate entity. These works are not dry Cartesian proofs or even meditative exercises,

but almost contemplations of a kind of homemade algebra, subjective to the extreme.

Is perspective really the issue in Vermeer, however? The fame of much seventeenth-

century Delft art rests largely upon its artists' supposed eschewing of linear methods

of composition in favor of light, color, and surface. Today commentaries often echo

Vaudoyer's suggestion that Vermeer's images must have sprung forth "by a kind of

magic."27 Perspective's origins as a drawing technique have traditionally located itw

ithin a graphic tradition of representation. Conversely, color and light have been

more closely linked to an optical one. This art

historical categorization is ultimately traceable to W?lfflin, Riegl, and Gombrich, but

their recent reformulation by Harry Berger, Jr., provides the more relevant grounds,

it seems, for considering Vermeer: In the graphic mode, things are painted as they

are known or thought to be, that is, as people imagine they really are and appear. ...

the images produced in the graphic mode are governed by prevailing conditions of

objective appearance. It is reflexive in that the graphic image is conspicuously

displayed a product of analytical observation and knowledge. . . . In the optical

mode, things are painted as they are seen, or, more pointedly, in such a manner that

the way they are shown modifies, obscures, or conflicts with their objective structure

and appearance. ... the optical mode enjoins the observer to peer into shadow,

distinguish figures from space where chiaroscuro overrides the individual forms, sort

out the motions of figures from those of light, shade, and paint.28 The rush to posit

graphic modes of representation as somehow contrary to, or of a different nature

than, optical ones in terms of illusion is understandable, but perhaps not entirely

applicable to the seventeenth century. First, the presence of the vanishing point on

the canvas in a sense sees a component of the graphic mode acting in an ostensibly

optical fashion. It is a tiny, physical disruption, a touchable "thing" and at the same

time one element of a spatial abstraction. The palpable nail hole remains part of the

overall representation, demanding that the viewer indeed "shuttles" back and forth

before the canvas to sort out what is what.29 Second, the idea that perspective is a

purely "objective" process is suspect, as even a handful of idiosyncratic perspective

treatises has demonstrated. Yet third, and most significantly, linear perspective in

the seventeenth century was often a complement of, and hardly an alternative to,

color in the construction of illusion. Rather, it was but one more component of the

Dutch notion of houding. Variously translated as "conception," "attitude," "aspect"

or even "union," houding was defined in a 1670 book by William Goeree as

that which binds everything together in a drawing or painting, which makes things

move to the front or back, and which causes everything from the foreground to the

middleground and thence to the background to stand in its proper place without

appearing further away or closer.30 The term is a compositional one. Goeree's

explanation is concerned with spatial effects in a painting, less with how they are to

be achieved than the results they will produce. The definition makes no prescriptions

as to what methods should or should not be used, suggesting again that the

boundaries between linear and coloristic strategies for art-making may have been

somewhat indistinct. Goeree is also rather vague in his terminology. His avoidance of

concrete examples here for the expression "everything" (alles) suggests that he may

be referring to elements other than simply the mimetically depicted human figures

or objects in the picture. Possibly the compositional lines and pigments?just as much

as the subjects?are to appear, as he claims "as if they were accessible with one's

feet" (als of sijn met de voeten toegangelijk ware)?as well.31 The "graphic"

perspectival skeleton beneath a composition would then be understood as a subject

just as worthy of the picture as the scene it helped to counterfeit. V. The correlation

between perspective as a model of drawing and of seeing the world remains a

contentious subject in the art, philosophy, and psychology of this century. Erwin

Panofsky's famous dismissal of Renaissance perspective as an accurate reproduction

of vision (1927) was among the first to suggest that cognitive processes may be

conditioned by specific cultures. Since then, perspective has often been viewed as a

rough abstraction, with no more claim to essentialism than any other stylistic

convention.32 As an oppressive and confining compositional relic in art, perspective

has become suspect, the optical burden photography and film are cursed to bear,

and which the avant-garde is bound to renounce.33 It remains emblematic of an

ideology that shackles representation to scientific exactitude and quantification, and

subjects human expression to the model of a capitalist account-book. And when

deployed in scenes like Vermeer's, which often depict burghers^at leisure,

perspective further perpetuates hazy associations with some kind of merchant

bourgeois ideology, which immobilizes and excludes viewers before an arbitrary

construct.34 As a paradigm of experience, meanwhile, Renaissance perspective is

seen?not incorrectly, in many ways?as incapable of accounting for the vagueness,

uncertainty, and volatility of individual lives and bodies in space.

Hubert Damisch, however, has suggested something of the opposite. In his ambitious

Origin of Perspective (1987) he synthesizes several older art-historical and

psychological analyses to offer the claim that perspective in fact makes subjectivity

possible. Rather than harnessing the viewer to a single, objective viewpoint, Damisch

claims that perspective allows the act of seeing to become visible, making the

beholder's visual options clear. By fixing the anterior viewer, and acknowledging his

presence, perspective in essence points like a twin index not simply back to the

process of a painting's creation, but also out to the subject beholding, addressing

him as through an utterance, which "assigns the subject a place that gives

meaning."35 In this process, perspective functions dietically?it expresses spatial and

temporal information about its place of origin, indicating the presence of the viewer

as if by a demonstrative pronoun. With this, perspective allows for the involvement,

not the exclusion, of the subject into a kind of discourse. The locus of perspective's

enunciation to the viewer here becomes the vanishing point, which, like the

perspective treatise explicitly oriented towards the viewer, reflexively posits the

existence of a separate entity through its own act of self-designation. The point thus

maintains a dual existence as both an internal and external component of a system:

within it as one element of illusion and outside of it as a kind of meta-linguistic

marker of that system as a construct?a reminder that we are specific and particularly

located, corporeal individuals looking at an image from a point of view.36 Now,

there seem to be a number of problems with Damisch's idea?most noticeably the

supposition that pictures work exactly like language and that beholding is something

like the act of listening.37 And the pictures he discusses (the two Ideal City panels in

Baltimore and Urbino) are from the fifteenth century, not the seventeenth, and put

basically, are simply more perspectival-/oo/c/V?g than many works by Vermeer. But

his theory is not completely inapplicable, for it actually suggests (if indirectly) an

alternative to perspective's "rational" side. If a perspective system is functioning to

reference the viewer, it is not, Christopher Wood has noted, doing so in grammatical

terms. Rather, the system "operates within the terms set by the fiction proposed by

the picture," and thus remains, indeed, something more haphazard, less

predictable.38 The beholder of the

painting is needed to complete the perspective system, as in the Renaissance

treatises' illustrations and directives, but he does so in an unchartable way. Consider

the case of Vermeer's famous Milkmaid in the Rijksmuseum (fig. 12). In this work,

there is a small, painted nail in the upper center of the canvas, which is made to cast

a shadow on the white pitted wall. X-ray reflectography of the canvas, which took

place for a 1995 exhibition, revealed that the nail falls not far from where there once

had been a large map, later painted over.39 This piece of information about the

work's construction, of course, speaks more to the^noment of the painting's

production than to our present-day moment of its interpretation. But in both

moments perspective works as a process. As they now appear, the represented nail

and holes tell the story of previous attempts to hang a painting or a basket like that

adorning the upper left.40 But the pock-marked wall also refers to the work's

construction?pointing to the one-time existence of a real nail in the center of the

canvas. Meanwhile, a small physical depression in the surface four centimeters

above the woman's right hand addresses viewers as a physical evidence of this

perspective (fig. 13). It serves to remind the viewer of his active complicity in the

creation of this linear system of illusion and, correspondingly, of the role that he, like

the mimetic subject on the canvas, plays in the production of meaning. The

generation, articulation, and reworking of potential meanings that is prompted by

the painting?but ultimately supplied by the viewer?remains in itself as active a

process as Vermeer's application of paint. And in the end, this introspective process

is paralleled almost uncannily by the workings of perspective. Partial and intrusive

(once discovered), the texture of the piece signifies "another state of painting"

within the picture? the state of craft, of materiality.41 For viewers today the pinhole

unsettles the conceptual primacy of the mimetic narrative, making the perspectival

grid or system itself something of the main subject of the painting instead of the

pouring of milk and its

connotations of domesticity, motherhood, and productivity. In 1669, an art collector

from The Hague named Peter Teding van Berckhout got at this after he visited

Vermeer's studio in Delft. Describing the works that he saw there to his diary, he

named not pictures of objects or people, but rather "extraordinary .. . and curious

perspectives."42 To Teding van Berckhout, perspective effects remained an artistic

endeavor and a subject unto themselves, as in the treatises. For rather than simply

providing the stage sets for an artistic production, perspective became the play,

unseating the depicted genre subject as the primary focus of interpretation. At the

closing of the exhibition that Jean-Louis Vaudoyer had so enthusiastically reviewed

in 1921, one of his readers was provided with a personal tour. Marcel Proust, an avid

(if cloistered) subscriber to L'Opinion, was escorted to the show by Vaudoyer in

October of that year, but apparently understood Vermeer somewhat differently than

his journalistic companion. For the novelist, the paintings remained objects more

expressive, processural, and introspective. Vermeer's work had first struck the

delicate Proust during a visit to the Mauritshuis in 1902, and in the intervening

period, he had, of course, produced a text in which The View of Delft figured

continuously, The Remembrance of Things ftsf.43 Itw as hardly the muted finish of

Vermeer's work that was so intriguing in the book, but rather its very active

harmonization of "patches" of color, light, and space. This harmonization, readable

in discrete visual passages, spurred the very subjective ordering of experience in

Proust's literary characters. As Bergotte gasps in The Captive: . . . these

resemblances, concealed, involuntary, which broke out in different times ... at

remote intervals I recaptured in my life as starting-points, foundation-stones for the

construction of a true life. .

Proust recognized the manner in which seemingly unconnected aspects of a painting

can cohere and evoke, and how the traces of things supposedly past can impart

meaning through their reception in the present. As I have suggested, it is possible

that in certain Vermeer paintings the remnants of perspective technique can work

this way as well. For, as the traces of making persist, so does their signification of

process, and such "remote intervals" of composition on the canvas?as points?most

certainly emerge as well as vanish.