Free Travels in Vermeer by Michael White

feels overtly religious. She looks beatific, I think; she looks like purity incarnate. Vermeer is inside his recurring room, his dream, and he approaches the presence of this woman with utter reverence. She stands before a table scattered with pearls and gold coins and chains, delicately holding a balance between right thumb and index finger. She is checking its accuracy by weighing nothing. (Much ink has been spilled on what the balance pans contain. The painting was traditionally called The Gold Weigher . But it’s clear, now that the work has been thoroughly cleaned, that each pan holds a small highlight of reflection and nothing else.)
    Edward Snow concludes his beautiful book, A Study of Vermeer , with a discussion of this painting. He obsesses over the contrast between the woman’s serene balance and what is depicted in the painting hanging directly behind her. It’s an apocalyptic, Bosch-like Last Judgment with a seated Christ raising both arms above a writhing horde of naked sinners. Snow believes the baroque, moralizing Christian values as reflected in the wall painting are directly contradicted by the secular scene before it. He sees this triumph as the essence of Vermeer.
    I crane in close to see the Last Judgment. It’s a let down, though, for as close as I get, I can hardly make out anything in the wall painting behind the woman. I polish my glasses on a shirttail and try again. I can more or less see where Christ is, and a few flame-like shapes of the sinners beneath him, but that’s about it. This might be partially due to the lighting in the small temporary space—there’s either not enough of it or too much reflection off the glass and/or the painting’s glaze. For whatever reason, the painting-within-the-painting is largely illegible, as such details often are in Vermeer’s work.
    Yet when I step back and look at the woman again, I’m as defenseless before her as I was before The Milkmaid, in the Rijksmuseum . My body feels weightless, almost insubstantial, just as it did then. I stand so still I have to remind myself to breathe. But the lady here is very different: small-boned, long-limbed, her heavy-lidded attention settled sweetly on her task. One of the mysteries hovering over her—as well as the Amsterdam letter-reader—involves her bell-shaped appearance. A sliver of yellow-gold blouse peeks out from her dark blue morning coat trimmed with white fur (the same jacket as in two other Vermeers), and calls attention to the noticeable swell of her midriff. It’s difficult to tell if she’s pregnant or if Vermeer was simply accurately portraying a Dutch fashion of the time, as some experts claim. And maybe Vermeer didn’t intend her pregnancy—or anything else about her—to be read literally. There’s simply no way to know. I stare at her in childish wonder.
    In The Milkmaid , I stared at the maid’s big, work-hardened left hand steadying the heavy pitcher from beneath, her wrist tanned where the mustard-yellow sleeve has been turned back. If that painting is earthen, the later Woman Holding a Balance is delicate, pure spirit. (This shift was true for Dutch art in general during Vermeer’s life, as tastes evolved from rustic to more refined, or bourgeois, subject matter.)
    I notice the softness embodied in the sunlit fingertips holding the balance, the woman’s little finger extended horizontally as if to steady the gesture. The fingertips of the other hand light softly on the table’s edge, so softly she seems to lend support as much as seek it. The ink-blue tablecloth is pushed roughly back, revealing not only the jewelry and gold coins lying about the naked tabletop, but the table’s massive, intricately carved underpinnings as well. It’s about the connection, the give and take between the darkness of the world and the woman’s calming touch. Her figure is a bright star pulsing quietness into my heart.
    3.