Violence

Speaking of Vermeer's complex life, about which we know virtually nothing, Bryan Jay Wolfe, professor of American Studies and English at Yale, in Vermeer and the Invention of Seeing, in a chapter titled "Transgression" goes:

    "Vermeer's private life was filled with violence. His maternal grandfather, who worked at one point as an engraver in a counterfeiting ring, later turned state's witness and provided testimony that led to the beheading of the scheme's two leaders. Vermeer's father, as a young man, had twice been involved in public brawls, both times with knives, one leading to the death of a soldier garrisoned in Delft. Catharina Bolnes, Vermeer's wife, came from a family traumatized by domestic abuse. Her father, Reynier Bolnes, once attacked his wife, Maria Thins, who was then pregnant, with a 'stick.' Reynier Bolnes verbally assaulted Maria Thins and forced her to eat her meals alone. She in turn sent several petitions to the magistrates at Gouda in an effort to secure a judicial separation. The sparring between husband and wife divided the Bolnes family into partisan camps. Maria received the support of her sister and brother (who was himself stabbed in a fight with one of Reynier Bolnes's brothers), while Reynier enlisted the assistance not only of his siblings but of his son, Willem, who consistently sided with his father.

    "Years later, after the warring couple had separated, Willem came to lived with his mother in Delft—at the same time that Vermeer and his wife shared her home in the Catholic quarter of the city. Wellem's violent behavior toward his mother so frightened her—he called her, among other things, an 'old Papist sow' and a she-devil'—that she retreated to her room, where, in a sad repetition of history, she had her meals brought up to her. According to subsequent depositions, Willem also attacked  his sister Catharina (Vermeer's wife), 'threatening on a number of occasion to beat her with a stick, although she was in the last stage of pregnancy.' Willem had previously beaten her with a 'steel-tipped stick.' Maria Thins eventually petitioned the Court of Delft to commit her son to a private house of correction. She won her suit; Willem, however, would later taunt the family with threats of marriage to a servant of questionable reputation who was employed by the house of correction.


    "I wish to understand the constructed nature of Vermeer's serenities, the way that his silences incorporate rather than neutralized aggressions internal to the act of painting. If Vermeer domesticates the forces of history, if he renames truth as something mundane and housebound, then he also rewrites violence as more than the clash of armies by night. His painting reach into that inner violence, that heterodox mixture of love and aggression, that animates not only domestic life in burgher cultures, but those forms of painting that spring from domestic life."