Interpretation and Ambiguity in Vermeers Woman Holding a Balance

Toby Lloyd-Jones 2010

July 2010

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This essay will focus on a painting by Dutch seventeenth century artist Jan Vermeer (1632-75), Woman Holding a Balance (ca 1662-64; Figure 1). I will draw parallels between painting of the period, Vermeers work in particular, and my own photographic practice. I will also demonstrate how a number of interpretative strategies have been adopted in order to understand this particular painting; strategies which can also be usefully applied to my current series of photographs on crematorium waiting rooms (for an example, see Figure 2). These strategies include (a) attributing allegory and symbolic meaning; (b) adopting a de-narrativised descriptive mode; (c) a broad range of psychological approaches; and (d) a form of critical analysis, namely deconstruction, proposed by Mieke Bal. I will conclude that Bals analysis offers an exciting challenge to art historys traditional pursuit of original meanings, intentions and audiences.

Fig. 1. Jan Vermeer, Woman Holding a Balance, ca. 1662-64.

How can a painting inform photographic practice? In fact, Dutch golden age painting shares a number of features with photography. As Svetlana Alpers has noted,1 many characteristics of photographs, most notably those that make them seem so real, are common also to Northern European painting, namely fragmentariness, arbitrary frames, and the immediacy of realism that photography gives through reproduction which is (to a certain extent) unaided by man. Indeed, it is no surprise that Vermeer used a camera obscura in the construction of his paintings2 and that there was a renewed interest in Vermeer with the invention of the camera.3

Moreover, as we shall see, the (a) use of symbols; (b) quality of light; (c) nature of time; (d) incorporation of the limitations of the means of production within the art object itself; and (e) dialogue between the mundane and transcendent, are all aspects of Vermeers paintings that have also emerged in my photographs during the course of the project. Let us now turn to the different interpretations of Woman Holding a Balance.

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Fig. 2. Weston-super-Mare Crematorium, February, 2009.

1. Allegory/symbolic meaning

Valerie Hedquist4 provides a useful description of Woman Holding a Balance:a dark, sombre ambience is created in which a solitary, pregnant woman, dressed in a dark blue jacket and white headdress, stands balancing scales before a table covered with pearls, ribbons, and coins. The only suggestion of the outside world is a diagonal beam of light that slips in through a golden curtain at the upper window to illuminate the warm orange colour of the womans protruding abdomen. In the background, a painting of the Last Judgement is positioned so the figure of Christ, judging the damned and the saved, is placed directly above the head of the standing woman. In contrast to the worldly maps found in other genre paintings, the large, prominent placement of the Last Judgement imparts a religious orientation to this depiction.

As Hedquist goes on to describe, the inclusion of the Last Judgement has led to a number of allegorical interpretations of the painting. The most common is that the action in the painting of Christs spiritual weighing of souls, determining individuals fate, contrasts with the worldly vain woman weighing precious materials on temporal scales. However, this account runs into difficulty as it is now accepted that the woman does not weigh anything at all, but instead balances empty scales.5 Alternative, and perhaps better interpretations emphasize the transitory nature of life and the importance of temperance and moderation, justice and the divine truth of revealed religion. 6,7

The light in the painting, beaming from top left to bottom right, may also be interpreted symbolically. The pregnant woman has been portrayed as representing the Virgin Mary bathed in the light of the annunciation, at the moment of incarnation, when Jesus first comes to earth.8,9 In a significant proportion of my photographs I

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have come to realize that I have included a similar symbolic light. Not as an affirmation of religious significance, but rather as symbolic of birth, perhaps spiritual re-birth and optimism in contrast with the rooms themselves which are strongly associated with death and reflection on mortality.

2. The art of describing

Alpers10 details how Dutch art, in comparison to Italian art of the same period, is less insistent on a monocular, static viewpoint (as though looking through a window) and sought instead to describe the textures and colours of the world of opaque and flat surfaces with no clearly situated viewer. Dutch art was also interested in mapping the world in two dimensions and tolerant of the intrusion of verbal descriptions11 into seemingly realistic images. In a similar fashion, the composition of my photographs plays with the fact that they are bounded two dimensional surfaces which convey an illusion of depth. Furthermore, the places depicted in the photographs often contain verbal representations, most notably signs and symbols which are not only informative but also prohibitive and constrain action (e.g., no smoking signs).12

Figure 3. Cardiff Crematorium, January, 2009.

The result of this, according to Alpers, is that Dutch art produces a greater denarrativization and detextualization than the art of the south. An excellent example is how time is depicted in Vermeers paintings as frozen and extended; elliptical, impregnated moments that never really resolve themselves.13 The woman in the painting appears to be waiting for the scales to balance before she weighs something. The movement of the scales is held in the moment just prior to balance being achieved. This notion of stillness, and associated concepts of anticipation and portent, are something which I have been determined to explore from the outset.

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Finally, Alpers also describes how Dutch art was influenced by science and in particular, Keplers insight that the means of observation can distort what is being observed. As a consequence, Vermeers paintings incorporate the means of production, in particular the use of the camera obscura, within the painting itself. As one example, it is generally accepted that the small globules of paint found in paintings such as The Lacemaker, are painted equivalents of the circles of confusion, that is diffused circles of light that form around unfocused specular highlights in the camera obscura image.14 In a similar fashion, as Brian Jay Wolf notes15, Vermeer uses incongruous perspectival systems that undercut his spaces, gnawing through the viewers need for spatial certainty.

Importantly then, Vermeers painting is not a copy done after a camera obscura or as a photograph (as has been claimed) but rather a display of the meeting place of the world seen and the world pictured.16 Vermeer critically reflects on the nature of representation. In a similar fashion, my photographs attempt to capture this meeting place between perceiving and representing, for instance in how the view through windows to the outside is lost through the use of long exposures in order to capture interior detail or how a wide angle lens can lead to the distortion of oval shapes close to the edge of the photograph (see Figure 3). These emergent properties add to the meaning and atmosphere of photograph in interesting ways.

Finally, we should note that despite Alpers considerable insights, her strong opposition between narration and description is open to criticism. According to Jay,17 rather than placed in opposition both scopic regimes may be more appropriately conceptualized as revealing different aspects of a complex unified phenomenon.

3. Psychological approaches

There have been a broad range of psychological approaches to interpreting the paintings of Vermeer and here I present three contrasting examples in order to give a feel for this strategy.

Edward Snow,18 developing the work of Lawrence Gowing19, uses many concepts taken from psychology. For Snow, Woman Holding a Balance is about calm, comfort and reassurance. For instance:

Against the violent baroque agitation of the painting behind her, the woman asserts a quiet, imperturbable calm, the quintessence of Vermeers visionshe exists as a moving embodiment of mortal life and what is given to us in it. And in all these oppositions, her triumph feels effortless.

According to Snow, the virtue depicted in the painting is not moral but ontological; the painting is about feminine power and capacity rather than temperance or moderation. The woman is the centre of the equilibrium that holds her world in place.20

More recently, psychology has been merged with biology and computer science in a new discipline called cognitive neuroscience. Adopting this approach, Carlos Espinel21 has attempted a more extreme form of interpretation in describing how the mind/brain sees Woman Holding a Balance. For instance, Espinel asks how it is that we see the womans image as if suspended in time. He suggests that the key is luminescence (i.e., light emission). Highlights of high luminescence in her head-dress, fur and fingernails connect with the action of weighing and are contrasted with surfaces without luminescence. Cognitive neuroscientists have found that the perception of motion and stillness depend on luminescence: for instance, in Mondrians paintings juxtaposed stripes of colour, if equiluminescent, appear to be

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moving. For Espinel then, neuroscientific knowledge of how the brain operates can be useful in understanding visual effects in Vermeers painting.

In a third and final form of psychological interpretation, Michael Fried has written extensively about the notion of absorption in both painting and photography.22 In essence, Fried argues in praise of absorption, the idea of the work of art excluding the viewer, treating the viewer as if they were not there. He cites painters such as Chardin, Greuze and Stella, and photographers such as Wall, Gursky and Hofer as championing this pictorial autonomy. Vermeer could be seen as another example; the woman is absorbed in waiting for the scales to balance and is completely unaware of us, the viewer. In a similar fashion, my own photographs can be seen as objects-in-themselves, documents independent of the viewer. At best however, this can only be seen as a partial interpretation. Moreover, as Mark Durden comments23, a number of examples of the work that Fried describes do not fit well with his thesis.

An additional possibility is that Vermeers painting in fact plays with the binary opposition of entering into and rejection from the illusory space of the picture. For instance, the table, dark blue shape on the left and black area beneath in Woman Holding a Balance may be seen as blocking entry into the picture whereas the area in front of the woman allows access. As noted earlier and consistent with this idea, Vermeer uses a number of binary oppositions in his work.

4. Deconstruction

The final strategy, deconstruction, is a method of critical analysis which is adopted, interrogated and developed by Mieke Bal in her interpretation(s) of Woman Holding a Balance. The analysis centres on a concept taken from the work of Jacques Derrida, namely dissemination.24

Bals use of dissemination is based on three tenets that challenge traditional art historys pursuit of origins, that is original meanings, intentions and audiences: (a) intertextuality, which essentially entails the dispersal of origins through the artist constructing new images and texts from the earlier images and texts produced by a culture; (b) polysemy, the fact that viewers bring their own cultural baggage to images and so there can be no such thing as a fixed, predetermined or unified meaning; and (c) the dynamic location of meaning. In the case of Woman Holding a Balance, Bal shifts the location of meaning via the nail and hole to be found in the upper left of the painting (see top middle region of Figure 4).

Bal questions why the nail and hole are there, are they simply meaningless details or do they have deeper significance? For instance, do they suggest that the painting of the Last Judgement has been moved to a better position that visually offers a more convincing balance? Are they a commentary on the difficulty of judging (for God) and balancing (for the artist in creating a work of art)? Do they unsettle the established poetic description of stillness? And so on. In fact, Bal uses this analysis to discuss the ways in which meaning can be produced, whether in the image and/or in the viewer and through social and political power relations.

Bal engages in what she calls reading in the naval mode, a reading that acknowledges both visuality and discursive elements in the painting but also leaves room for a marginal other. She acknowledges that her reading cannot be a full, comprehensive description of what we see in the painting. Indeed, her analysis does not lead to insight, neatness and clarity. Rather, it makes art history messy, which is all for the better.25

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Fig. 4. Top left section of Woman Holding a Balance

5. Conclusion

We have seen that one can adopt one of a number of interpretative strategies in attempting to understand and derive meaning from a particular work of art. Overall however, there is appears to be a tension between strategies that are predicated on determining original meanings, intentions and audiences and those that challenge the pursuit of such origins. For Bal in particular, meaning does not lie solely in the work of art but rather lies in an event: it is an action carried out by an I in relation to what the work takes as you.26 This, to me, would seem to be best way to approach my photographic series on crematorium waiting rooms. The photographs are open to a number of interpretations which are dynamic and may change over time. This certainly has been my experience during the course of making them.

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Notes

1. Alpers, S (1983) The Art of Describing; Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (p. 43). Penguin Books; London.

2. Wolf, B.J. (2001). Vermeer and the Invention of Seeing. The University of Chicago Press: Chicago and London.

3. Jay, M. (1994). Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (p. 132). University of California Press: Berkley, Los Angeles, London.

4. Hedquist, V. (2001). Religion in the art and life of Vermeer. In Franitz, W. (Ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Vermeer. Cambridge University Press: London.

5. Wheelock, A. (1984). Exhib cat. Philadelphia, pp.342-3.

6. Snow, E. (1984). A Study of Vermeer. Berkeley: London.

7. Wheelock, A. (1995). Vermeer and the Art of Painting. New Haven: London.

8. Hustvedt, S. (2005). Mysteries of the Rectangle. Princeton Architectural Press: New York.

9. Hedquist, pp.122-3.

10. Alpers, ch. 4 and 5.

11. Jay, p. 60.

12. For a discussion of such signs and symbols, see also Auge, M. (1995). Non-places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. Verso: London.

13. This is the American photographer Gregory Crewdson describing the nature of time in the paintings of Edward Hopper in Crewdson (2004). Aesthetics of alienation. TATE ETC, 1 (1), pp. 42-47. However, it can be applied also to the paintings of Vermeer, which influenced Hoppers work.

14. Wolf, p.32.

15. Wolf, p.112.

16. Alpers, p. 35.

17. Jay, p.15.

18. Snow (1984).

19. Gowing, L. (1970). Vermeer. Giles de la Mare: London:

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20. Snow, p. 160.

21. Espinel, C.H. (1998). Art and neuroscience: How the brain sees Vermeers Woman Holding a Balance. The Lancet, 352, December 10/26.

22. See Fried, M. (2008) Why photography matters as art as never before. Yale University Press: New Haven and London. See also, Fried, M. (1980). Absorption and theatricality: Painting and beholder in the age of Diderot. University of California Press: Berkeley

23. Durden, M. (2009). Michael Fried: Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before. Reviewed by Mark Durden. Photoworks, May-October, pp80-83.

24. Bal, M. (2001). Dispersing the image; Vermeer story. In Looking In: The Art of Viewing. Routledge: London and New York.

25. Bal, p.67.

26. Bryson, N. Introduction. In Bal, M., 2001. Looking In: The Art of Viewing. p. 5.

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References

ALPERS, S (1983) The Art of Describing; Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (p. 43). Penguin Books: London.

AUGE, M. (1995). Non-places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. Verso: London.

BAL, M. (2001). Dispersing the Image; Vermeer Story. In Looking In: The Art of Viewing. Routledge: London and New York.

BRYSON, N. (2001). Introduction. In Bal, M., Looking In: The Art of Viewing. Routledge: London and New York.

CREWDSON, G. (2004). Aesthetics of alienation. TATE ETC, 1 (1), pp. 42-47.

DURDEN, M. (2009). Michael Fried: Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before. Reviewed by Mark Durden. Photoworks, May-October, pp80-83.

ESPINEL, C.H. (1998). Art and neuroscience: How the brain sees Vermeers Woman Holding a Balance. The Lancet, 352, December 10/26.

FRIED, M. (1980). Absorption and theatricality: Painting and beholder in the age of Diderot. University of California Press: Berkeley

FRIED, M. (2008) Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before. Yale University Press: New Haven and London.

GOWING, L. (1970). Vermeer. Giles de la Mare: London:

HEDQUIST, V. (2001). Religion in the art and life of Vermeer. In Franitz, W. (Ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Vermeer. Cambridge University Press: London.

HUSTVEDT, S. (2005). Mysteries of the Rectangle. Princeton Architectural Press: New York.

JAY, M. (1994). Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (p. 132). University of California Press: Berkley, Los Angeles, London.

SNOW, E. (1984). A Study of Vermeer. Berkeley: London.

WHEELOCK, A. (1984). The framing of Vermeer. Exhib cat. Philadelphia, pp.342-3.

WOLF, B.J. (2001). Vermeer and the Invention of Seeing. The University of Chicago Press: Chicago and London.

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