The Theological Poetry of Vermeer’s Milkmaid
While the Rijksmuseum informs us that Johannes Vermeer’s Milkmaid (1658 c.) painting is dedicated to lesbians,1 writing for the Metropolitan Museum of Art and following H. Rodney Nivitt’s cue,2 Walter Liedtke proposes to read our painting as using an erotically charged figure to attract men.3 The reading that follows integrates both erotic dimensions in the context of a vision of human life and nature as a whole.
Though reasonable, Liedke’s suggestion that the woman represented in the painting is a kitchen maid preparing a bread porridge by adding milk to stale bread deserves to be read in a broader, non-anecdotal context, as we tie Vermeer’s loose strings together into a single, all-embracing message.
Nivitt invites us to explore Vermeer’s painting beginning from the allusive Delft tiles. The one closest to the maiden represents a cupid brandishing his bow. Two adjacent tiles are concealed by a foot heater having sexual connotations, while a fourth title depicts a staff-bearing man walking ahead of cupid and in his own direction. Finally, a fifth tile includes an image not easily decipherable.
While Nivitt and Liedke settle for assuming that Vermeer intentionally left the fifth tile’s markings unintelligible, a close comparison between the first cupid tile and the last shows significant affinities, inviting the thought that the fifth tile, as well, represents a cupid, albeit a sitting one. In this case, it would seem that the walking man is set between two cupids. But then a further detail concerning the man would mark a link to the forefront of the painting insofar as the man appears to be carrying a stack of ears of wheat on his back. The man would then be bringing wheat to the woman. Yet, here we encounter an unresolved problem, for the bread on the table marks a sharp distinction between unity and multiplicity, not merely relative to the apparently trivial consideration that the unity of the bread’s maker stands at odds with the multiplicity of grains, but with respect to the tension between art and nature. For the former’s attempt to gather the latter’s multiplicity into a single, purposeful unity remains incomplete.4
While in the forefront of the painting an integral round loaf sits on a table in a basket over blue cloth, behind it several presumably dried pieces of bread lie scattered. The blue cloth mirrors the one the maid wears over her red skirt, as it mirrors less conspicuously the sealed and precious blue vase (made of ceramic or metal) standing behind the loaf. Now, before we consider other elements behind the loaf, we should note that a second loaf sits in the dark inside the aforementioned basket; not a round loaf, but a square-like one overshadowed by the round loaf and topped by two pointed strands of dough (keeping in mind the traditional theological-geometrical or cosmological context wherein the square signals “the earthly” and the circle “the heavenly”). The precise juxtaposition is not simply between a single whole loaf and multiple scattered pieces, but between 1. the whole bright loaf with an incision on the top and partially concealing a dark rectilinear loaf, and 2. the scattered pieces. The dark loaf stands partially between the round loaf in the light and the scattered pieces of the same seed-covered type.
Behind the scattered pieces of bread we find the painting’s “action”: milk being poured from one clay pot into another. Is the milk-pouring a clue to understanding the passage from the whole loaf to scattered pieces? Is the passage from the one to the many to be understood in terms of a fall? If so, the fall would be related to cupid. By the same token, the bread loaf would be related to the grains carried by the staff-bearing man represented in a background tile.
A further consideration ties together the loose strings addressed heretofore: the skirt that for the maid remains partially concealed by a blue cloth wrapped over it finds its chromatic counterpart in clay jugs that are altogether exposed and thereby charged with sexual connotations. On the table, the vulgar or earthly is exposed outside of and aside from what is sealed and precious, namely the sacred. The cloth compressed by the loaf’s basket confirms the nature of problem at hand. The passage from the one to the many involves a trampling of the sacred and so the overturning of a natural hierarchy of things: whereas the sacred stands originally above the vulgar, the proper order of things is now visibly inverted, as we are reminded further by a large covered whicker basket hanging above a lidless metal pot hanging on the wall near the window.
The closed window itself, with its single broken pane, stands as further clue to our human condition—a clue that bespeaks the notion of a felix culpa (theological blessing in disguise) in the respect that fresh air and direct sunlight reach the maid precisely through the broken glass pane.
If the painting itself is illuminated through a “fault” in the window, then what is most important now is not for us to retrace corruption to an original fault, or to establish that our corruption stems from an external cause, but to see our corruption in the light shining through the fault. The fault itself stands as sign reminding us of the capacity of light to shine through darkness, as upon the multiple nails in the wall painted by Vermeer.
Just as milk is poured through the maid, so does the Fall of mankind and so the “division” of unity into multiplicity come about through biblical Eve. And yet, in the painting’s context, the “fallen” milk will be integrated with broken, stale bread, to produce porridge—the painting itself.
What the painter achieves is not the re-establishment of the sacred order of things, but the establishment of a platform for reflexion upon the nature of our fallen condition, which involves both the heritage of Cain and the light shining through it and reaching out all the way to us thanks to Vermeerian painters.
The farmer bringing grains needed to make bread is lost in the past and our maid may long for him in her erotic dreams. Of the man, we ourselves perceive but a faint effigy. No sign is given to the effect that we would be able to make bread anew. The challenge addressed now is rather that of Vermeerian handmaiden helping us digest otherwise no longer digestible bread.
The theme in question is a staple of Vermeer’s Renaissance Platonism and finds its paragon in Dante, a poet presenting himself as allowing the common man to partake in the feast of angelic intellects by sweetening breadcrumbs fallen from their “theological” table, with his poetry.5 The poet, then, fits the profile of an ancilla theologia, “handmaid of theology”. But such is Vermeer’s own role, as the painter discloses a crossroads where the sacred and the vulgar meet while retaining their respective distinctive features.
Today we realize that the integral loaf is out of reach, as is true theology for the common man. When we try to account for the sacred, we see only its vulgar or plebeian genesis. Admittedly, the “sacred bread” we inherited is the fruit of man’s own work, as we see in Vermeer’s earlier work, Christ in the House of Martha and Mary (1654-55). But is man’s strength to work not derived directly from God?6 This ultimate derivation is a problem for us, a problem that Vermeer sets out to help us explore and understand at the heart of the hiatus between the one and the many; between the sacred and the profane; between a mind hidden in speech and bodies exposed by speech.
1See https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/nl/stories/een-roze-geschiedenis/story/pride-melkmeisje?fbclid=IwAR1rwEZDojEVEL92YK5Ikdx5p4KjJoVoEN0vdjtRyNsJ1oBOi0sfUEjaF_k.
2See H. Rodney Nevitt, Jr., “Vermeer’s Milkmaid in the Discourse of Love,” in Ut pictura poesis: The Reflexive Imagery of Love in Artistic Theory and Practice 1400-1700. Ed. Walter Melion, Joanna Woodall, and Michael Zell. Boston and Leiden: Brill, 2017.
4On the theological-political dimension of Vermeer’s work, see my “Vermeer’s ‘Woman Holding a Balance’: Allegory of Judgment,” at https://voegelinview.com/vermeers-woman-holding-a-balance-allegory-of-judgment/.
5See my “Poetic Soteriology: Dante’s Heroic Defence of Classical Heroism,” Journal of Italian Philosophy, Vol. 6 (2023): 1-13.
6The “humanity” of the “sacred bread” should not distract us from the inherence of the divine in the human. See my “Vermeer’s ‘Woman Holding a Balance’: Allegory of Judgment,” at https://voegelinview.com/vermeers-woman-holding-a-balance-allegory-of-judgment/.
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