Lisa Vergara

How exciting to hear Lisa Vergara, who teaches at Hunter, articulate how Vermeer's "composition and rhetoric coincide," in "Antiek and Modern in Vermeer's Lady Writing a Letter with Her Maid."

She speaks of how his "famous formal manipulations work expressively: for each painting he invented a special decorum of scale, space, color, light, focus, and touch, keyed to the figural subject." 


And of his "devices—visual comparisons, echoes, rhymes, repetitions, concatenations, whatever we choose to call them..."


And, "the whole chiaroscuro arrangement, down to the floor of black and white tiles, confirms the densely plotted nature of the work." 

Later, unfortunately, she goes a bit overboard, speculating that the picture "might represent on one level Vermeer's complex response to his own personal circumstances...aspects of Vermeer's life discovered through archival study and intimate social history...."


Namely, his financial instability, his living amongst Catholics, his many children, the illiteracy of his wife, his mother-in-law's "patrician income," his own rise from "the artisan class of his family...."

Lawrence Gowing felt differently: "Vermeer is well protected; little of life or personality ever pierces his armour. And when some disturbing experience does penetrate within the shell he proceeds to enclose it in a pearly covering of style until its sharpness is assimilated." 

I go with Frank Stella: "What you see is what you see,"

although, unfortunately, in Stella's case, he saw less and less, and showed more and more.