WITH AN ARTISTIC VISION: THE OPTICS OF VERMEER’S ALLEGORY OF PAINTING

WITH AN ARTISTIC VISION:

The Physiological and Metaphorical Optics of Vermeer’s Allegory

Large but not monumental in size, Vermeer’s great manifesto, The Allegory of Painting, still dominates not only its crowded room in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna,  but also our minds,  as we reflect upon its  enduring theme and its many remarkable qualities. 

Vermeer brilliantly places himself at the visual and optical center of the painting,  even though he could not have seen himself in this pose as he was painting.

The painter in the Act of Painting. What better allegory of Painting? It is also a theme called Recursion (repetition), a fundamental principle of symmetry and beauty. 

The woman in the painting is a Muse - is she Clio, the Muse of History, or perhaps Fama, or maybe the goddess Pictura? We think back to Cesare Ripa and his early 1600s treatise, the essential Iconologia where he represents Pictura as a Muse of Art (see other posts I have written on this theme). 

Note the many metaphorical and artistic allusions:

There is a painting within a painting (think Las Meninas by Velazquez, painted around the same time). There is the “fuzzy painting on the back wall”- an iconic Vermeerian conceit - is it a historical map?

Vermeer scholar Walter Liedtke describes this painting “as a virtuoso display of the artist's power of invention and execution, staged in an imaginary version of his studio ..."

According to Albert Blankert "No other painting so flawlessly integrates naturalistic technique, brightly illuminated space, and a complexly integrated composition."

(Johannes Vermeer, The Allegory of Painting, also called The Art of Painting, or The Painter in his Studio

Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna c. 1668)