Vermeer's Hat Read Online Free PDF

executing grand designs, but for improvising. The age of discovery was largely over, the age of imperialism
     yet to come. The seventeenth century was the age of improvisation.
    The changes this impulse toward improvisation evoked were subtle but profound. Consider again Dong Qichang, the artist from
     Shanghai to whom I have referred. Dong Qichang’s was the first generation in China to see European prints. Jesuit missionaries
     brought some to China to convey their message in visual form and help converts imagine the life of Christ. In Dong’s own painting,
     1597 marks a major shift in style that set the foundations for the emergence of modern Chinese art. It has been suggested
     that the visual devices in European prints may have impelled him toward this new style. Or take our artist from Delft. Vermeer
     was among the first generations of Dutch painters to see Chinese painting, rarely on silk or paper, more commonly on porcelain.
     It has been suggested that his use of “Delft blue,” his preference for off-white backgrounds to set off blue materials, his
     taste for distorting perspective and enlarging foregrounds (he does both in View of Delft ), and his willingness to leave backgrounds empty betray a Chinese influence. Given what little we know of Vermeer, and how
     well we know it, it is unlikely that evidence will ever come to light that allows this suggestion to be proven or disproven.
     It is simply an idea of influence, but something that would have been an impossibility a generation earlier. Hints of intercultural
     influence of this sort, so fine as to be almost imperceptible, are just what we should learn to expect as we go back into
     the seventeenth century.
    Seen in this way, the paintings into which we will look to find signs of the seventeenth century might be considered not just
     as doors through which we can step to rediscover the past, but as mirrors reflecting the multiplicity of causes and effects
     that have produced the past and the present. Buddhism uses a similar image to describe the interconnectedness of all phenomena.
     It is called Indra’s net. When Indra fashioned the world, he made it as a web, and at every knot in that web is tied a pearl.
     Everything that exists or has ever existed, every idea that can be thought about, every datum that is true—every dharma, in
     the language of Indian philosophy—is a pearl in Indra’s net. Not only is every pearl tied to every other pearl by virtue of
     the web on which they hang, but on the surface of every pearl is reflected every other jewel in the net. Everything that exists
     in Indra’s web implies all else that exists.
    Vermeer would have appreciated the metaphor. He loved to put curved surfaces into his paintings and use them to reflect everything
     around them. Glass spheres, brass utensils, pearls—like the lenses he probably used to help him paint—were suitable for revealing
     realities beyond what was immediately there. In no less than eight of his pictures, Vermeer paints women wearing pearl earrings.
     And on these pearls he paints faint shapes and outlines hinting at the contours of the rooms they inhabit. No pearl is more
     striking than the one in the Girl with a Pearl Earring . On the surface of that large pearl—so large it was probably not a real pearl at all, but a glass teardrop varnished to give
     it a pearly sheen—we see reflected her collar, her turban, the window that illuminates her off to the left, and, indistinctly,
     the room where she sits. 2 Look closely at one of Vermeer’s pearls, and his ghostly studio floats into view.
    This endless reflectivity, writ large, nods toward the greatest discovery that people in the seventeenth century made: that
     the world, like this pearl, was a single globe suspended in space. It was their burden to confront the idea of the world as
     an unbroken surface on which there is no place that cannot be reached, no place that is not implied by every other place,
     no event