Describing Reality or Disclosing Worldhood: Vermeer and Heidegger

Seventeenth century Dutch painting is generally approached through two complementary angles: first, through the culture and mores of its time. According to Simon Schama (1987), Dutch painting was the mirror in which the dominant customs and values of a then fully expanding society of artisans, navigators and merchants were reflected. The recurrence of certain themes (such as depictions of water and polders, scenes of banqueting or in inns) had the function of expressing and exorcising great terrors (flooding, hunger); correlatively, the representation of domestic scenes is explained in reference to the gradual establishment of an ethics centred on the family, simplicity, honesty and labour – the famous Protestant ethics analysed by Weber. In the same vein, Clifford Geertz’s culturalist view insists on the impossibility of interpreting Dutch painting independently of the context which it is held to translate into symbolic terms (1976: 1475, n. 91). The most representative sample of this line of work is probably the symbolist reading of E. de Jongh (1971: 143-94),1 for whom the objects, actions and scenes of private life shown almost invariably have a verbal equivalent in Jacob Cats’ then highly fashionable books of Emblems.