Free Travels in Vermeer by Michael White Page A

Shadow Hand
    There is a third hand in this painting that I can’t help gazing at for a good half hour. I’ll explain. The woman is wearing a linen cap or headdress, meant to protect the hairdo, like the one in The Milkmaid . The cap in Woman Holding a Balance is disturbingly crisp. The creases in the fabric about her brow look as if they would be sharp to the touch. The charcoal and umber shadow along the right side of her head is nuanced and striking. Very powerfully the shadow suddenly takes the shape of a human hand, and it’s eerily well defined. Almost as if by touching them with his fingers, Vermeer works with the textures and folds of the linen, subtly coaxing form from the natural drape of the cloth, so that the hand doesn’t seem contrived. I first became aware of this effect, this shadow hand, from a paragraph in Edward Snow’s Study of Vermeer . Snow describes the hand first as a “touch of death” that later grows benign. Standing here, I see it only as helpful, caressing the left side of the woman’s face, gathering all the painting’s tenderness there, at once a spiritual gesture and an optical trick.
    I look at the shadow, look back at the balance. The woman herself is the equipoise the balance only alludes to: her right hand effortlessly holds the scales at rest, her left hand lightly touches the table’s edge. It’s startling even now, as I write this, to recall the luminous, almost sculptural serenity of her face—braced by the shadow hand, and by her body’s fullness, so sweetly borne.
    4. The Wall
    I pore over the white-washed wall. I’m especially delighted to find a trompe-l’oeil nail with a tiny shadow here, above and to the left of the maid’s face. This effect seems to have been reproduced almost verbatim from The Milkmaid —as if to link the two great women, the two great masterpieces. But the plaster this time looks smooth to the touch, more elegant, befitting the lady’s status. All around her, the delicate umber shadows spread to the corners. I wear my eyes out staring at the nuances, as though the wall were an unabridged dictionary in a tiny font.
    Finally, I marvel at the ruffs on the woman’s morning jacket that really are as irresistibly touchable as a painter could make them, and at the jewelry that consists mostly of carefully placed highlights on opaque dabs of paint—like the famous earring. Then I take a step backward in this room, where the teeming Dutch and Flemish still-lifes press in all around. I’m reminded that Dutch art of the Golden Age—whether portraits or still-lifes, or the genre scenes that dominated through the 1650s—tends to share one overriding concern: to “follow nature,” as Rembrandt advised. And, in fact, as I slip into the next room—the one that contains A Lady Writing —I’m immediately drawn into the orbit of a Rembrandt. It’s a portrait of his wife Saskia, from 1634. The expressiveness of details—the impossibly fine articulation of her bountiful red-gold curls, the evanescent lace at her throat—is simply beyond comparison. Similar details in Vermeer seem humble, if not willfully crude, in contrast.
    What then is the source of Vermeer’s authority? Why is it that Dutch schoolchildren, on viewing the trickle of milk in The Milkmaid for the first time, exclaim: “It really pours!”
    But no one can answer such questions. I leave that room, as well, and take a random stroll through corridor after corridor of the vast collection. There are many rooms filled with busy tableaus, large-scale pictorial histories that leave me cold today. It’s as if I were walking through the Gallery of the Western World, the landscapes and portraits leaning toward me on each side, the walls receding into the distance as far as the eye can see—when suddenly, the lights go out, and the hall, the great cathedral of canvases, goes dark.
    And