7. Using this knowledge in studying and appreciating Vermeer.

Part of an essay on Vermeer, brain channels, neural stimulus, visual perception and art appreciation

A 20,000-word essay on the interface between the fields of Vermeer, Art History and cognitive science, neuroscience and neuresthetics

written by Vermeer specialist, art historian Drs. Kees Kaldenbach, Amsterdam.

Chapters:

1) Foreword
2) Introduction and terminology. houding, perception of reality, realism, illusionism and trompe l’oeil
3) Understanding Vermeer’s Perception of Reality; a Discussion of Characteristics
4) Brain and colour
5) Form as registered by the brain
6) Facial recognition, depth, movement, fine vs broad
7) Using this knowledge in studying and appreciating Vermeer
8) Workshop matters, Painters’ Supplies, Palette, The fijnschilder style versus the loose style, fourteen Qualities listed by Philips Angel
9) Naturalness, enticing the viewers
10) Delft artists influencing Vermeer
11) Vermeers Early, Middle, Late period. Camera Obscura
12) Vermeer’s World of Interiors: a Reality or a Construction
13) Landmark Vermeer literature (in print on paper form)
14) Digital Art History Studies and Presentations on Questions - on Perception of Reality in Vermeer Paintings
15) External CD-Rom, DVD, film material on Vermeer
16) Selected Bibliography

Updated June 9, 2016. Updated 15 February 2017.

3.2.5. Using this knowledge in studying and appreciating Vermeer

Results from studies in the area of cognitive science and vision science may form a useful guideline for discussing formal elements in paintings, especially realistic-looking ones.
When observing such paintings people are seeking for meaningful perception and mental pleasure in their private feast of firing neurons (this goes as well for looking at scenes in social life and scenes in nature).[1] Watching a scene in nature, observing patterns and finding corresponding areas and flecks of shapes or colour (this is perceptual grouping, also called ‘feature binding’) forms a human neural activity, which in itself is a fully rewarding act, taking place within the lower, limbic brain, the seat of human emotion.[2]
This area of emotional feedback and its interdependence with perception is quite fascinating. Another neurologist, Ralph Ellis proposes that the visual brain is mainly driven by the limbic system – the latter producing emotional consciousness. These emotions motivate us to select those events in the outer world, which may be of importance for us, either for basic needs for pleasure seeking and meaningful existence. We do consciously observe what we emotionally need and then we only recognize those parts, which we have formerly conceptualised. Thus we only consciously observe after we have primed ourselves to do so, that is after we have developed a readiness, a desire to see.[3] On a meta-level we may very well love art so much because we use art to explicate life and to give meaning to life; we symbolize and feed our emotions with the aid of art. [4] Art does not trigger emotions but enables us to experience, mutate and deepen an emotional state.
“[Art] presents us with a favourable opportunity to allow ourselves to move. […] The painting is not so much a bearer of meaning, which has ‘one correct interpretation’, as it is a matrix of symbolization possibilities, presenting us with the tools to use in intensifying, explicating and carrying forward our own emotional lives.”[5]

These ultimate rewarding deep patterns may be triggered by many Vermeer paintings – through their colour, form and in their social contents. A strong emotional response to a Vermeer painting has been reported thousands of times in speech and writing by art specialists and lay persons alike. These varying emotions range from confrontations with the largest Vermeers – The View of Delft (Mauritshuis, The Hague) each time causing “an emotionally moving experience” for Albert Blankert[6], to The Little Street (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam) in which another viewer reported emotion felt in observing the smallest of white elements – the weather-beaten whites on the lower wall and the composition-binding white areas of paint scattered in this painting.
Vermeer offers us yet more: the tendency to isolate the single human figure within the composition– thus increasing the effect of presenting essentials, simplicity and outline over complexity - and to stress the femininity of the women depicted (thus triggering a double peak-shift causing even more rewarding neural activity). These elements are common in many Vermeer paintings, forming another criterion of enjoyment of fine art, which is effective in our brain-response, according to Ramachandran.[7]
"There's a sort of bootstrapping going on," Ramachandran said, "with messages going back and forth between the pleasure centres and the visual centres. There is no physical evidence yet for that, but we know the connections exist"[8]

Ramachandran listed seven rules for triggering an enhanced aesthetic experience[9].
1) Peak shift, triggering autonomous brain parts
2) Group formation by repeating colours and shapes
3) Isolation of visual clues
4) Contrast in colour or luminosity
5) Dislike of an unusual vantage point
6) Cloaking and veiling the image.
7) Less is more[10]
8) Symmetry
9) Visual repetition and rhythm[11]

It is immediately clear that Vermeer scores high on all or nearly all of these rules.

Ramachandran in the interview with Freeman, page 18: “More specifically I argue that in order to understand any complex mental attribute in humans – be it humour, art, dance, or sex, one needs to have in place three cornerstones: First, the underlying functional logic (e.g.what I call ‘laws’). Second he evolutionary rationale, i.e., speaking teleologically, why do the laws have the ‘form’ that they do? (e.g. evolution has wired into your brain the ‘rule’ that grouping is pleasing and attention grabbing). Third, an understanding of what is the neural hardware in the brain that mediates the law in question.”

This fascinating field of perception and neuroscience may yield more important research into the perception and evaluation of Vermeer’s art. Given my own background in the field of art history, not neurobiology, I can only remain interested as a reader from the sideline.

3.3. A painter in Delft

Before entering into a full discussion of Vermeer’s artistic periods, and finding out how his particular variation on realism and illusionism went off at a such a wonderful tangent, I will start by discussing actual day to day studio craftsmanship in the workshop if a seventeenth century painter.
Following that section, some developments in the Delft school of painting will be discussed, lightly touching upon the wider stylistic development in Dutch seventeenth-century painting outside Delft. This overview presents an outline of Vermeer’s specialization in the face of current developments in realism, illusionism and trompe-l’oeil.

3.3.1. Craftsmanship

Seen from a seventeenth century European perspective, realism in Dutch painting was a unique phenomenon. In the early part of the century it was already commonly recognized that its nature and its abundant realism, especially in what we now call genre painting, was extraordinary. More than any other previous fine art style or fine art period, Dutch early seventeenth-century art had been moving towards an immediate and a near-photographic representation (to frame it in nineteenth century terms), seemingly devoid of personal or artistic touch, style and sophistication. Dutch art seems objective, mainly representational, an unembellished, documentary description of the outward appearance of the natural world - and it may seem at first glance to be almost free of conventions, artless, neutral, purely describing. Quite the opposite is however true - it is based on an approach which was quite sophisticated artistically, having been evolved thorough decades of workshop training and schooling.[12] Indeed, Dutch artists seemed to have taken a fresh look at the physical reality they observed, and succeeded in transforming this vision into a new painterly language and concept of reality.[13]
In the history of western painting there is no such thing as an artless, immediate ‘photographic’ naturalism - or realism devoid of style. If Dutch seventeenth-century painting seems at first like a lifelike naturalistic mirror, this school of painting has succeeded in producing a mirror-like art-form full of craft and artifice, created on the basis of a highly developed workshop practices. Art historian Lawrence Goedde has successfully pointed out this seeming contradiction:
“The illusion of reality, the appearance of unmediated, natural experience, can only be achieved by the exercise of self-conscious artistry, however unobtrusive”.[14]

Philip L. Hale observed Vermeer’s works with the severely critical eyes of a fine art painter. Writing on the subject of reality in Vermeer he recognizes:
“…that spirit of objectivity which made him a great painter.”[15]

Within Vermeer’s oeuvre of paintings, Hale does not shrink back to create his private pantheon of first rate, intermediate and lesser Vermeer paintings, giving ample arguments for each of his verdicts:
“This Head of a Young Girl at The Hague discloses supremely Vermeer’s mastery of light and shade. Nowhere in it is any effort evident to paint a passage in the direction of the form. In the modelling it is lighter here, darker there, just as the light or shadow made it. No mouth, surely, was ever rendered more beautifully than this, simply and yet subtly. There is no dragging the paint along the rounded forms on the lips; no effort to imitate the texture, as of the minute cracks. Since no mannered handling is visible one cannot see how the colour was floated on. The form is there, adequately expressed, the means and mode of its making concealed.”[16]

Hale is not sparse with praise for Vermeer but he remains quite critical of certain elements such as drapery and of the execution of particular faces and hands [17], whereas he finds that in some paintings hands and faces were executed exquisitely. Some critics feel that Vermeer's depiction of hands are among the most wonderful creations in art history.[18] Hale however feels free to think differently:
"He did not draw structurally at all. While many of the Netherland painters knew their anatomy and constructed their figures understandingly, it is questionable if Vermeer really understood the construction of the arm, the wrist, the hand, the knee, the foot. By sheer keenness of perception he sometimes rendered wonderfully well the general shape and size of a hand; this by indication of the way the slight slid over it. He often drew hands well, as if they were still life. His accessories were delineated about as adequately as by anyone. There is occasionally a little faltering in getting the side of a jog even with the other side, but, practically speaking, Vermeer working always from the appearance of things, delineated still life - chairs, crumpled rugs and his famous lion's heads - quite adequately."[19].

Understandably but erroneously, he judges the View of Delft (Mauritshuis, The Hague) as being painted from nature, as
“…perhaps, the first landscape made in the modern spirit. Its tones are quite frankly as they appeared…”. “The effect is simple and compelling, but the detail is subtle an elaborated. The focus of the composition is at the church [tower] and the trees in front of it. Hither the eye wanders naturally.”[20]
With the eye of a painter Hale saw that The View of Delft was worked on over and over again – a finding that has been corroborated by microscopic analysis in the latter part of the 20th century. Later layers of later paint were seen to have filled the cracks within older layers.[21]

Notes

[1] Peer response to Ramachandran and Hirstein 1999: 64.
[2] Ramachandran and Hirstein 1999: 22.
[3] Ellis 1999: 162, 170.
[4] Ellis 1999:161.
[5] Ellis 1999: 169-170.
[6] ‘Een meeslepende ervaring’
[7] Ramachandran and Hirstein 1999: 24. Peak shift is explained as the experience of a heightened caricature of forms or colours causing a greater impact than the natural situation.
[8] http://www.tamu.edu/mocl/picasso/archives/opparch01-233.html

[9] Van Delft 1999 and Ramachandran, Vilayanur and Hirstein, 1999.
[10] This list of rules has been discussed in Ramachandran, Vilayanur and Hirstein 1999 and Van Delft 1999 but did not get much attention elsewhere.
[11] Ramachandran in the interview with Freeman, page 21
[12] Goedde in Franits 1997: 140.
[13] Goedde in Franits 1997: 142.
[14] Goedde in Franits 1997: 143.
[15] Hale1937: 121.
[16] Hale1937: 173.
[17] Hale 1937 is especially negative about the Braunschweig / Brunswick painting, page 192.
[18] Boone’s article on hands is online on the Jonathan Janson web site www.essentialvermeer.com
[19] Hale 1937: 74.
[20] Hale 1937: 169.
[21] Find source – restoration booklet 1993???

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Written 2002-2003. Published online, July 17, 2011. Updated July 17, 2011.

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