The Astronomer
Johannes Vermeer (1632-1675) · 1668
A scholar in a loose blue-grey robe leans across his table and reaches out to turn a celestial globe, one hand still resting on an open book. Light from a leaded window falls across his face and the tablecloth, catching an astrolabe, a set of dividers and the brass meridian ring of the globe. Everything identifies the instruments precisely: the globe is the model published by Jodocus Hondius in 1600, showing the constellations of the northern sky, and the book lies open at the third part of Adriaan Metius's manual of astronomy, the section urging the astronomer to seek inspiration from God.
Vermeer signed and dated the work on the cupboard behind the scholar, and the painting on the wall there is a Finding of Moses, a subject about divine providence guiding a chosen life. The colour is deliberately narrow, blues and warm browns balanced against the grey wall, and the handling of the window light on the robe is worth a long look for the way it dissolves the fabric into soft blocks of tone. Its pendant, The Geographer, now in Frankfurt, shows the same model with terrestrial instruments, and the two are the only Vermeers whose figures are unmistakably engaged in intellectual work.
The model has often been proposed as Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, the Delft microscopist who was born in the same year as Vermeer and later administered his estate, though the identification remains speculative. The picture belonged to the Rothschild family from the nineteenth century, was seized for Hitler's planned museum at Linz in 1940 and stamped with a swastika on the back of the canvas, was recovered after the war, and entered the Louvre in 1983 in settlement of inheritance duties.
Did You Know? The reverse of the canvas still bears a small black swastika, stamped on it when the Nazis confiscated the picture from the Rothschilds in 1940.
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