The Denuded Muse: The Unmasking of Point of View in the Cartesian Cogito and Vermeer's The Art of Painting

Abstract

Vermeer's The Art of Painting is something of an anomaly. Despite a few early attempts at biblical themes, only two of the thirty-odd pictures he is known to have painted are allegories: The Art of Painting and the Allegory of the Faith. His paintings do often have elusive moral undertones. The Procuress recalls the parable of the Prodigal Son, and Woman Holding a Balance, where the subject is doubled by a depiction of the Last Judgment hanging on the back wall, tropes the theme of weighing and balancing to some obscurely exemplary or minatory effect. For all its charm as a genre scene and brilliance as a technical exploration of the realm of visual appearances, Officer and Laughing Girl can be glossed as a cautionary tale, a liaison dangereuse. Indeed, if we take the map of the Netherlands behind the girl's head into account, we can even read it as a political statement warning against naive reliance on the friendly professions of the military at a time when Dutch liberty was still in its first youth. But such readings are novelized rather than allegorical. As Svetlana Alpers (1976) would insist, Vermeer's paintings are essentially descriptive rather than narrative; they aim at reproducing natural appearances rather than at converting them into stories.l And where they do tell stories, the effect is anecdotal rather