The immense success of the Vermeer retrospective at the Rijksmuseummuseum in 2023 verified how much the painter of the small yellow wall section, of the Milkmaid or the Young Girl with a Pearl Earring, was at the firmament of the art we admire.
Yet the body of work thus assembled by the master of Delft speaks more. Active at a time and in a place where the rigorism of the Reformation had outlawed religious painting, this convert to Catholicism made use of the then-popular still life — valued as a moral emblem — to reclaim only the essence of themes hitherto conveyed by the fixed figures of the Christian Golden Legend (Annunciation, Nativity, Last Judgment, etc.), and to communicate that essence silently through compositions in the manner of Stilleben, yet depicting people very much of their own time, fully of their time, or by slyly subverting classical themes acceptable to all. Preserving only the ineffable, he transmits it wholly into the naturalness of the ordinary, which he re-enchants stripped of all pathos.
Each of his canvases thus transcribes, within the order of everyday life, the presence of a transcendence made immanent by the light that governs the whole picture. Each becomes a manifesto of the idea that the Spirit pervades all human life, without any need to seek a metaphysical specification for it — a subject over which his contemporaries have been tearing one another apart for a good century. Vermeer's painted oeuvre (1632–1675) therefore presents itself as an encrypted demonstration of an implicit thesis dangerously unfashionable in his time, even unthinkable: that disputes about the divine are pointless because life in terra viventium proceeds perfectly well without them, here below where we live. Endowing that idea with the innocent excellence of beautiful paintings as its vehicle was a clever, refined, and safe way to make its truth felt without having to state it outright. It was also a firm declaration of the nobility of the painter's art, uniquely able to reveal the invisible immanence of the divine in the serene naturalness of lives in this world.
This silent hymn to the necessary and sufficient plenitude of life in its century calmly establishes a philosophy of living, stripped both of anxieties and of the dogmas of faith, without falling into a gloomy materialism. As far removed from Calvinist austerity as from Tridentine baroque—which he equally renders obsolete—Vermeer, without words, invents the serene, smiling classicism of a world happily attending to its daily affairs. Thus, under the painter's skill deployed to this end, an authentic philosophy emerges that, at the very dawn of the great transformation beginning in the seventeenth century, sketches the true design of modernity. With his neighbour and exact contemporary Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677), Vermeer lays the foundations for a possible harmony for humanity, entrusting itself cheerfully to the fortunate course of life, having set aside both the rod of civil and theological authorities on the one hand, and the itch of the uprisings that challenge them on the other — the salutary harmony of good commerce among people, a matrix of sympathy that, three centuries later, for our time, assumes the value of an axiological ideal to be urgently cultivated, after having nourished the hopes of the Enlightenment, whose light in his canvases brilliantly sketched the dawn.