A time when every picture told a story
Using six of Vermeer's greatest paintings, Timothy Brook explores the roots of world trade
- The Observer, Sunday 29 June 2008
- Article history
Vermeer's Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global World
by Timothy Brook
Profile £18.99, p288
Vermeer compresses a whole world into the cool, lucid, quietly domesticated rooms he painted; his flat rectangles of canvas somehow square the circle and stretch to the round edges of imagined space. Mirrors on the walls multiply observed reality, windows open on to an exterior we cannot see and the curved surfaces of a wine glass or a water pitcher reflect objects outside the painting's proper scope. If you look at it closely enough, the earring worn by one of his subjects turns into a microcosm: a pearl, like the Earth explored and exploited by 17th-century cartographers and merchants, is a globe.
Canadian Sinologist Timothy Brook discovered Vermeer when he fell off his bicycle in Delft during a university vacation. He paid homage at a slab on the floor of the Old Church, beneath which the painter is supposedly buried; to see the 35 extant paintings, however, he had to travel to galleries dispersed between Berlin and Manhattan. Now he has assembled half-a-dozen favourites and used them as a pretext for his own allusive, exploratory forays to the ends of the Earth. In Brook's view, the globe that shimmers on the reflexive surface of Vermeer's pearls is a model of the new world that opened up in the 17th century - 'an unbroken surface on which there was no place that could not be reached, no place that was not implied by every other place'. Electronic communication has accustomed us to living on a planet where events happen everywhere simultaneously. That global consciousness began, Brook argues, with the voyaging of Dutch traders in the 17th century and its restlessness, its accumulated loot and the casual violence with which it trampled the ancient, idiosyncratic sense of locality are all on display in Vermeer's sedate scenes of people flirting, playing music or reading confidential letters.
Brook's eye soon strays beyond the pictorial frame or conjures up the invisible vistas through Vermeer's open windows. The floppy hat worn by a visiting cavalier in one painting prompts him to think about the beavers that were skinned to make felt, which leads to an account of the fur trade in eastern Canada. Another painting shows a woman weighing unstandardised coins in a balance; this is Brook's cue for an essay on the 'global life' of silver, a new commodity that obsessed the century.
Because space on the globe is circular, all these associative routes lead to China, which is Brook's academic speciality. A porcelain dish in another of Vermeer's rooms reminds Brook of 'the very thing that was synonymous with China itself - china'. Samuel de Champlain, who stormed across Quebec slaughtering Mohawk warriors and trapping beavers, turns out to be searching for an overland route to China and its fabled wealth.
Once Western trade opened up that closed realm, merchants found ingenious ways to despoil it: the English encouraged the Chinese addiction to opium, which helped reverse the deficit racked up by their bulk-buying of tea. This sordid episode inevitably conjures up the poppy fields of contemporary Afghanistan, miraculously unmolested by the US marines who roam through them. Now, as in the 17th century, a global world is a scene of collusion and seamy complicity, a place where greed and guilt are democratically shared.
The woman who weighs silver does so in front of a painting that shows the Last Judgment, a preview of God's strict accountancy in the next life. The allegories that interest Brook, however, are economic, not moral: the people in the paintings he examines exhibit possessions that testify to their status - a Turkish rug (used as a tablecloth because it was too valuable to be trodden on) or a black slave boy whose role in the household is more decorative than functional.
Descartes, exiled in Amsterdam in the 1630s, described the city as 'an inventory of the possible', storing 'all the commodities and curiosities one could wish for'. Imagination was coming to mean the capacity to fantasise about instant riches; realism, in painting as in literature, is acquisition by other means. But do the objects Vermeer painted retain their ostentatious price tags? Brook is so intent on cost and the grim injustice of expropriation that he can seem crassly unresponsive, indifferent to the almost beatific peace of the paintings.
Vermeer's View of Delft is a solemn idyll that captures the mood of all our becalmed afternoons; a cloud overshadows the town, threatening a downpour that is mercifully postponed. Here is a thing of beauty that keeps its promise to be a joy for ever. But Brook ignores the charmed stasis of the image and is content to point out the future headquarters of the Dutch East India Company and the boats of the local fishermen, who profited from the 'global cooling' that drove herrings south from Scandinavia into Dutch waters.
His chapter on the painting in which a woman reads her mysterious letter, Young Woman Reading a Letter at an Open Window, glances at the blank space behind her, which he calls 'one of the most richly textured empty walls in Western art'. Since no economic signs are inscribed on the wall, he says no more. But its rich texture makes it a symbol of painting, a text compiled from strokes and scratches that are as eloquent as words. Leonardo said that the crumbly surface of an old wall could suggest all the images an artist needed. There is just such a patch of apparently insignificant wall to the left of the View of Delft: a meagre slice of yellow, fondly warmed by the sun. This scrap of masonry so transfixes the writer Bergotte in Proust's Remembrance of Things Past that he dies babbling its praises, as if it were the single memory that he most wished to salvage from a life that has suddenly concluded. 'Little patch of yellow wall,' he murmurs as he expires, 'little patch of yellow wall.' That is a true appreciation of art. Brook knows everything about price, but rather less about value.
一、從台夫特看世界
二、維梅爾的帽子
三、一盤水果
四、地理課
五、抽煙學校
六、秤量白銀
七、旅程
八、結語：人非孤島
●內容大要在 某幅畫中，一名荷蘭軍官彎身靠向一名大笑的女孩。另一幅畫中，有個女人在窗邊秤銀子的重量。又一幅畫中，水果從瓷碗中滿出，掉在土耳其地毯上。維梅爾的畫 作，以其美麗和神秘叫人看後久久難忘，但那些以高明手法呈現的場景，其背後有著什麼故事？一如卜正民教授在《維梅爾的帽子》中所闡明的，這些看似溫馨小品 的畫作，其實開啟了歷史之門，通過那些門，可一探過去一個快速擴張的世界。
那軍官頭上的時髦帽子，以海狸毛皮製成，海狸毛皮則是歐洲探險家在美洲以武器從原住民那裡所換來。海狸毛皮反過來又為那些想找出通往中國之新路線的水手，提供了航行探險經費。而在中國，歐洲人將以採自秘魯的白銀，購買數以千計在當時荷蘭繪畫裡頻頻出現的瓷器。
卜 正民探明那個成長快速的貿易網，將海狸毛皮、土耳其地毯、或中國瓷碗帶進台夫特某個客廳的貿易網。走訪荷蘭的法國人笛卡兒，稱荷蘭的碼頭，「貨物無奇不 有」。《維梅爾的帽子》正告訴我們那些貨物多麼無奇不有，以及欲取得那些貨物的強烈欲望，如何以任何人所無法想像的程度，徹底改造世界。此書讓我們對維梅 爾的畫和那些畫所描繪的時代，都有了嶄新而深廣的理解。
| 維梅爾的帽子-從一幅畫看十七世紀全球貿易 |
| Vermeer's Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global World |
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| 作者：卜正民（Timothy Brook）著 |
卜正民 Timothy Brook
英 國牛津大學邵逸夫漢學講座教授，加拿大英屬哥倫比亞大學的聖約翰學院院長，撰寫或編纂了十二部書，包括已翻譯成數種語言的得獎作品《縱樂的困惑：明代的商 業與文化》。他還主編了一套六冊探討中國史的書籍，由哈佛大學出版社出版。二○○五年獲加拿大歷史協會頒予該會每五年評選一次的最高歷史學獎項 Francois-Xavier Garneau Medal，二○○六年獲頒古根漢學術獎（Guggenheim Fellowship）。
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