(compare with pubs/vergio, a version of this text which got saved to a different name; another version of this is in the Pub Projects file)
22,371 words (other version in Pub Project folder has 22,492 words. Compare. This may be best, edited down.)
This version has new editing for Richmond but still needs to be compared)
Money, Music, Art: Vermeer and Burgher Identity in the Early Modern Netherlands
Robert Baldwin
Associate Professor of Art History
ConnecticutCollege
New London, CT06320
This is a draft of the second half of an unfinished book project on the social history of music in Northern Renaissance and Baroque Art. It was written in 1994-6 and presented in 1996 as a paper at a conference on Dutch art at HofstraUniversity: “Musical Ideology and Patrician Identity in the Art of Vermeer”.
Book: Music and Burgher Identity in the Early Modern Netherlands
Not to be reproduced or circulated without permission from the author. (This is a rough draft of a short book.)
Culture as Representation, Social Exchange and Identity Formation
The ambiguity and reticence of Vermeer's art has long foiled attempts at reading individual paintings. In part, the problem lies in the application of a clumsy and in many ways inappropriate methodology - traditional iconography - to an art whose meaning lies primarily in a subtle and highly self-conscious aestheticism. While a knowledge of iconographic traditions is important for any early modern artist, the analysis of Vermeer's art yields more if we examine the unified vision governing both formal and thematic choices and the social mentality imbedded in that vision. By moving beyond the divisions of traditional iconographic and stylistic analysis to the more unified, socially-imbedded concept of representation, one can unite theme and form, artist and audience, refined vision and luxurious decorative object, painting and patrician leisure, culture and economic shifts, high art and ideology. The result is a more historical reading of Vermeer's elusive aesthetic qualities within the new, cultivated patrician leisure he helped shape in later seventeenth-century Dutch society and art.
As many writers have noted, Dutch patrician culture in the 1660s and 1670s favored pastoral, villa, garden and hunting landscapes, equestrian portraits, game and luxury still life, and drawing room interiors devoted to fine manners, luxurious furnishings, beautiful clothing, poetry, courtly love, and amateur chamber music. [1] Though each of these subjects marked important changes in Dutch social, economic, and cultural values, no practice revealed more about the new patrician leisure and the place of art within it than courtly music. In sixteenth and early seventeenth-century Dutch art, most musical imagery signaled either sober family harmony, as in Frans Floris on the left and Molenaer on the right, or courtly luxuria as in these two works. In contrast, much musical imagery after 1650 extolled the high-minded nobility of pastoral and garden concerts, music lessons, music composition, and drawing rooms with amateur musical ensembles as seen in these works. [2] (TerBorch, Metsu, Pastoral?)
Though Vermeer's musical interiors were iconographically typical of Dutch patrician genre painting, they developed an unusually self-conscious and complex discussion of musical culture which sheds light on Vermeer’s “musical" artistry and the musical qualities of Dutch patrician culture. No work was more revealing in this regard than Vermeer's Concert Trio, stolen from the GardinerMuseum (Fig. 1). By contrasting Dirk Baburen's Musical Brothel hanging on the wall (Fig. 3) with a musical concert staged by beautiful, young amateurs in an elegant drawing room decorated with two pastoral landscapes, Vermeer's Concert Trio set up a complex discussion of class, money, music, and art which lay at the heart of the new Dutch patrician identity. By unpacking the elements of this painting, we can see how patrician culture blended a traditional, Dutch burgher domestic morality and decorum with the self-consciously refined leisure and retreat-like privacy of an equally traditional aristocratic culture and villa life. The result was a Dutch patrician culture distinct to the late seventeenth-century which fashioned an aristocratic domesticity and a burgher courtliness.
The new patrician culture emerged in the second half of the century out of a growing social stratification and economic stagnation which generated considerable anxieties about unearned wealth, a declining work ethic, a neglect of traditional family responsibilities and communal obligations, and a debilitating, "effeminizing" luxuria. STEEN-LUXURY Like all new mentalities, Dutch patrician culture legitimized itself by deflecting criticism and reducing internal problems and contradictions. Aware of these problems, Vermeer's art performed a delicate balancing act. On the one hand, his musical paintings openly celebrated hierarchical social orders and a courtly domestic life devoted to refined cultural pursuits and manners rather than the traditional Dutch burgher-Stoic-Protestant virtues of work, family, moderation, household economy, "republican" civic virtue, and sober faith. [3][De Hooch Linen] On the other hand, Vermeer’s paintings also legitimized the new, privileged leisure they depicted by reinterpreting court culture and integrating it within remnants of a traditional, burgher, domestic morality and household economy. In this process of cultural exchange across fluid social boundaries, Vermeer transformed aristocratic and burgher culture and forged and a new patrician mentality. Seen within a cultural studies perspective, Vermeer's art becomes a creative site of ongoing discussions, interactions, and mutual exchanges across social boundaries. As an active agency within an ongoing process of social transformation, Vermeer's art simultaneously acquires a heightened creativity and a social imbeddedness within contemporary mentalities and practices.
By "describing" and legitimizing a new retreat into private aestheticism, musical virtuosity, courtly poetry, and exquisite sensibility, Vermeer's art operated in a zone where art and social practice overlapped, where amateur cultural performance and connoisseurship were themselves important activities and where the subtlest aesthetic consciousness was the bonding agency for a new, more exclusive and narrow sense of Dutch community. At the same time, Vermeer's art preserved a burgher decorum and distance from the courtly art patronized in The Hague and Utrecht. {JORDAENS] In some important ways, Vermeer's art was almost anti-courtly in its quiet seriousness, its lack of heroic rhetoric, its modest size, and its restrained sensuality. Here we see more clearly how Vermeer's art forged a patrician mentality combining aristocratic and burgher elements into a distinctive hybrid identity tied to a particular moment in Dutch history
Three Discourses
In Vermeer's work, and especially in the Concert Trio and the Woman at the Virginal (Fig. 2), the new patrician mentality interwove three well-established cultural discourses tied to money, class, and music. One discourse played on broad polarities between the lofty pursuits of "noble" mind and the base, "carnal" pursuit of commerce and economic gain. A second, related discourse used prostitution to exemplify the baseness of all commercial activity. A third discourse offered a flexible ideology of musical culture where music represented a transcendent, ruling mind embodied in a harmonious, divinely beautiful cosmos and in a microcosmic, human nature. At the same time, this musical discourse could also define a distinctly burgher, "natural" virtue, reason, and moderation free from all courtly luxuria, base passion, and unbridled desires. By interweaving these three discourses in his Concerto Trio, Vermeerdefined a new patrician mentality distinct from both traditional aristocratic identity and from earlier Dutch burgher norms.
At the same time, the Concert Trio helped mystify the social position of the Dutch patriciate with a new ideology of cultivated privacy and escapist leisure geared to the virtuoso display of refinement. Lost amidst the delicious spectacle of its own exquisite musical-artistic sensibilities, the Dutch patriciate forged a more isolated and self-satisfied private sphere geared less to traditional civic and familial values than to performing its own virtues, nobility, high intellect, and aesthetic cultivation. In this imaginary, private world, courtly music, painting, poetry, and manners helped Dutch elites turn away in villa-like retreat from all sordid urban realities. Among those unattractive matters were growing income disparities, falling real wages, and economic decline, even impoverishment, for those in the lower orders. In concealing this larger social world, patrician culture made it easier for Dutch elites to enjoy, without embarrassment, their new leisure, fine things, exquisite sensibilities and innate superiority.
Base Avarice vs. Noble Mind *
In classical antiquity and medieval court culture, the metaphoric use of avarice (and commerce) as the base antithesis of noble mind was fundamental to all definitions of nobility and to distinctions between liberal and mechanical arts. [4] After 1500, Northern burgher elites appropriated these contrasts to assume courtly airs and fashion an ideologically useful critique of burgher commerce. Conspicuous patronage of lofty intellect, refinement, and virtue remote from sordid trafficking and greed allowed burgher elites to acquire an inward, "true" or "natural" nobility of education, character, and liberal arts. The Dutch merchant or banker turned philosophical and patronizing the Stoic-humanist liberal arts was freed both from any base, lower, economic nature and from a suspect courtly luxuria. This was one of the core themes in Dutch humanism and rederijker culture from the early sixteenth century onward [5] and it continued in numerous seventeenth-century Dutch texts and images including vanitas paintings and allegorically pretentious still-life, intellectualizing portraits and self-portraits, depictions of art collections [6] and history paintings such as Rembrandt's Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer. [7]
As with discussions of intellectual pursuits such as math, philosophy, and poetry, ancient, medieval and renaissance writers commonly linked musical composition and understanding to a noble, god-like mind far from base economic desires, necessities, and pursuits. [8] With the rise of new, polysymphonic musical forms in the later fourteenth and fifteenth-centuries, music took on an unprecedented complexity and refinement which allowed its prestige and intellectual nobility to reach new heights. At the same time, the rise of professional musicians and city-sponsored music threatened the aristocracy's traditional monopoly on musical culture in the fifteenth century. Courtly musical discussion responded with attacks on the ignorance, immorality, vulgarity, and whorish greed of professional minstrels and musicians who worked for money. The true musician was the composer, music theorist, or amateur performer who worked in a nobler intellectual sphere free from base economic motives as seen in this illumination from the French courtly treatise, the Chess of Love, contrasting the noble musical lady to the base, swarthy, professional musicians in the distance.. [9]
Though medieval writers never described painting as a liberal art or attached it to court culture, Renaissance writers and artists quickly borrowed the money-mind dichotomy from cultural and social writing and redefined painting as a noble, intellectual activity remote from sordid passions and economic desires. [10] As a burgher humanism and a mercantile economy expanded rapidly in Northern European cities after 1490, the trope of base commerce or greed vs. "noble" mind became ever more important within burgher culture to deflect external criticism and internal anxieties. The more wealth accumulated by urban burghers, the more anxiously they invested disposable income into the moral "profit" of cultural outlets while adopting traditional dichotomies between money and mind. [11] The great, mid-sixteenth-century, Antwerp art collector, Nicolaes Jonghelinck, commissioned a poem hailing himself and his luxurious new villa in exactly these terms.
"Let Italy send her pupils to visit the house which you ... possessed of wealth but an ardent lover of all the arts, also a hater of sordid avarice and its sworn enemy, raised to the stars near proud Antwerp at unusual expense..." [12]
By 1600, such dichotomies were fundamental to Northern European burgher writing on the new, humanist liberal arts including the traditional arts of rhetoric, philosophy, music, and poetry and the newly ennobled, visual arts of architecture, painting, and sculpture. [13]
Prostitution as Base Commerce *
Vermeer's Concert Trio also drew on a second, related discourse using prostitution to exemplify base commerce at its worst. Once again, the metaphoric ties between prostitution and commerce went back to antiquity. On the most literal level, prostitution was the form of trade most known for moral and spiritual corruption. After 1500, it was also tied to the outward degeneration of venereal disease. Thus it was the perfect metaphor for all corrupt commerce and for the soul's self-abasement to the lowest desires. And as a form of commerce infamous for the multiple deceptions of false love and a cosmetic beauty concealing inner ugliness, prostitution was also the perfect metaphor for the deception and corruption routinely projected onto all commercial activities, especially the petty, low-class, proverbially dishonest world of retail trade. [14]
Other rhetorical streams enriched the metaphoric nexus of prostitution, commerce, and greed. The fact that avarice and mercantile economic passion were frequently described as unbridled "carnal appetites" in late antique, medieval, and early modern moral writing encouraged a rhetoric attacking the "greed" of all lust and the "lust" of all greed. [15] The Dutch humanist and Protestant critique of the Roman church as a mercantile, prostituting, greedy institution only expanded the lust-greed nexus. [16] By the mid-sixteenth-century, this imagery was well established in Dutch artistic culture as seen in Bruegel's Avaritia where a monk-like monster greedily hoarding money symbolically displayed his genitals. [17] The lust-greed analogy was most prominent in the many sixteenth and seventeenth-century Dutch pictures of unequal love, venal love, and prostitution. [18] And it was central to the complex allegorical engraving of 1637 satirizing the tulip mania as a foolish "Triumph of Flora," at once the goddess of prostitution, the seductive personification of greedy tulip speculation, and the embodiment of all commercial and financial folly (Fig. 4). [19]
The lust-greed nexus offered yet another tie between whoring and trading, namely the use of prostitution as a general metaphor for all urban life and especially the devotion of city life to "whorish" commerce and material extravagance. The most infamous examples in discussions of "whorish" cities were Babylon and Rome, cities which the Apostle Paul had intertwined in using Babylon to describe a corrupt Rome. [20] The coincidental rise in sixteenth century Northern Europe of long-distance trade, credit-finance, Stoic or Christian humanism, and Protestant morality made Babylon and Rome all the more appealing as metaphors for modern Dutch cities given over to the "prostitution," lasciviousness, and luxuria of unbridled trade. The fact that real prostitution flourished with a disturbing new visibility in these Northern seaports only confirmed the truth of the metaphor and extended its wide circulation.
If commercial centers were attacked as "lascivious,", cities of ill repute such as Sodom and Gomorrah were newly inscribed with modern anxieties over unbridled commerce. [21]In early modern humanist histories modeled on later Greek and Roman texts, great commercial success led invariably to a variety of destructive appetites, luxuria, and political-moral decline. These appetites included the gluttony discussed in Dutch vanitas banquet and pronk still lives, the unbridled sexual passion explored in Dutch paintings of taverns, brothels, and dissolute interiors, the dissolution of family ties explored in the satirical genre painting of Steen and others, [22] and countless pictorial warnings against economic ambition. [23] The broad metaphoric tradition linking prostitution, commerce, and greed also continued in seventeenth-century Dutch comic literature satirizing the modern city as a Babylonian emporium of unbridled appetite, economic corruption, false love, cosmetic beauty, and disorderly (unbridled) social ambition. [24] The prostituting city was the very title of the anonymous book, Amsterdamsch Hoerdom(1681) and a central motif in the book's dream narrative: the imaginary trip of a lascivious businessman to Amsterdam's brothels. As noted recently, the novel's false goods and inflated prices made "a mockery of sound Dutch economic practices". [25]
To sum up this sketch, prostitution and unbridled sexual appetite were central metaphors for commerce and urban life in early modern Western culture and especially in the major commercial centers of Northern Europe where Stoic humanism and or Protestant morality were ruling mentalities. Among its many functions, this metaphoric tradition helped an early modern Dutch patriciate distance itself not just from its own intimate ties to a deeply problematic commerce but also from all coarse, uneducated persons and social groups governed by "carnal" impulses and desires.