'The nearest approach to this,' I said, 'would be a Vermeer.'

Yes, a Vermeer. For that mysterious artist was trebly gifted - with the vision that perceives the Dharma-Body as the hedge at the bottom of the garden, with the talent to render as much of that vision as the limitations of human capacity admit, and with the prudence to confine himself in his paintings to the more manageable aspects of reality.

Aldous Huxley's suggestion, in The Doors of Perception, that to take mescalin is to see the world as Vermeer saw it is typical of the painter's canonisation in the 20th century. Pater's Romantic flight of fancy established da Vinci as an artistic visionary for late 19th-century aesthetes: the modern Impressionist turns to Vermeer. In Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873), Pater remarks of 'Lady Lisa' that she is 'older than the rocks among which she sits'; Ciaran Carson (Fishing for Amber, 1999) feels that the 17th-century Dutch walls in Vermeer's paintings are 'as old as Egypt'.

LRB 9 August 2001 | PDF Download