In this chapter

• Allegory of transitoriness Hendrick Gerritz. Pot
• Anna Grave(?): allegory of transitoriness Jan van Bijlert
• Interior with a woman playing the clavecin Emanuel de Witte
• The eavesdropper Nicolaes Maes

The invisible world

In the preceding chapters, we have traced the connections between Dutch artists and their fellow countrymen in all areas of society, from burgomasters and cloth merchants ordering decorations for splendid new buildings, to a banker having a proud professional memory immortalized, to farmers buying landscape paintings when they could not invest in land. The emphasis has been on the material values that artists shared with their public, on art as an integral feature of social, business and political life.

To some degree, this emphasis is intended as a corrective to the prevailing view of art as a primarily spiritual activity. In our day, artists are still widely regarded as visionaries who see further than the burgher, as prophetic creatures responsible only to their own creative genius. The painters of Holland in most of the period covered by the exhibition enjoyed no such special status. The highest praise a painter could expect in this regard is that he was intelligent enough to understand someone else's text or idea, and skilled enough to depict it accurately in paint.

If Dutch painting was not expected by its original audience to be filled with profundity, neither was it dismissed as superficial. In the older tradition of sacred art from which modern painting developed, the painter was the bearer of a deep message – not a personal one, but that of God and the church. With the rejection by Calvinism of art as a tool of worship, Dutch painters found themselves in the position of the atheist being buried in a tuxedo: all dressed up and no place to go.

It took a few decades, but eventually they did find a place to go. Without offending Calvinist sensibilities, some Dutch painters yet found a way to give expression to the religious values which had in the past brought so much honour to their profession. The solution was cast in metaphorical terms by the merchant-poet Roemer Visscher, in a book of emblems he brought out in 1614. The first emblem – a motto with an illustration and a caption – shows 'a hand pushing an empty flask or glass bottle into the water, with the mouth turned down; nonetheless, the flask does not fill with water, because it is full of compressed air. Which is intended to signify that, although it may not be apparent, God fills everything.'

That insight took shape in Dutch art in a characteristic way. Traditional devotional imagery gave way to pictures of everyday objects and scenes which, 'although it may not be apparent,' were filled with spiritual messages. They were also filled with closely observed details of the natural and social worlds, depicted with artistry and loving care. One of the most exciting developments in Dutch art history in our time is the rediscovery and interpretation of those messages. Many of the still-life and genre paintings which for centuries were regarded as straightforward registrations of reality have been shown to contain moral meanings.

The technique of doing this, and the idea behind it, were not invented in the seventeenth century. Since the middle ages, artists had been investing the objects and figures in sacred art with deeper meanings. However, those objects and figures were formerly details in paintings of standard religious subjects. The main significance of the scene – and God's presence in it – was immediately apparent. With the elimination of a recognizably religious subject, the viewer had to know beforehand what the artist intended to convey before he could understand it. And even then... One of Roemer Visscher's other emblems in the same book shows the sun and the wind exerting themselves to penetrate the glass window of a 'church or house.' The sun succeeds and the wind fails. 'This requires no further explanation,' says Visscher. 'Everyone can use it anyway it suits him.' A good image, in other words, is not to be scorned, even if it doesn't mean anything in particular. A viewer who likes it will come up with a meaning easily enough.

The paintings in this section of the exhibition contain images of that kind. Images pregnant with a content that threatens to escape us, but which will not let us go. We would like to interpret them according to their makers' intention, but we have the unhappy suspicion that if the makers were alive to be interrogated, they would tell us to interpret them any way we like. I have called them images of the invisible world, for they deal with things unseen, like thoughts, feelings and sounds.

The two examples from the first half of the seventeenth century, by Hendrick Pot and Jan van Bijlert, are the most traditional. They evoke the biblical but nearly anti-religious saying of Solomon's, 'Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.' The young woman reading a letter we know is a love letter (cat.nr.94), turning her jewel-cases and hatboxes inside out to dress for what we know is a tryst, a tryst which, we thrill to think with her, might end in the curtained bed, has a death's-head held up to her by the crone who attends on her. She is not impressed. The grinding mills of the gods, which kill us all anyway sooner or later, cannot keep up with her pulse.

The beautiful young woman with the kerchief tucked loosely between her breasts holds up her own reminder of death, a ticking watch. She looks into the mirror, where she can also see the reflection of the angelic child holding a biown-out candle. Has time already run out on her? Jan van Bijlert, we recall, was on the board of a hospital for syphilitics. Can the message of his painting be as cruel as that? Or is it just a warning? If so, it is at least as cruel, to cast tempatation in such irresistible guise.

The tension between the sensual and the moral aspects of Dutch painting, which reaches its peak in paintings such as this, is one of the secrets of its appeal. It is also the occasion for periodical disputes in the scholarly world such as the one we are currently enjoying, between Eddy de Jongh of Utrecht University, the pioneer explorer of emblematic and moral meanings of Dutch painting, and Svetlana Alpers of the University of California at Berkeley, who named her provocative book on Dutch seventeenth-century painting The art of describing.

In a way, the issue that divides them is inherent in serious art of all kinds. It is not easy to put an earnest message into aesthetically appealing form without compromise. Constantijn Huygens, writing about the poet's attempt to compose uplifting yet palatable poetry, rhymed:

He aims to edify and make it seem a treat.
One reader sniffs the gravy while another chews the meat.
He's satisfied them both, but each with half a serving.

Nonetheless, it seems to me that de Jongh has digested his half-portion better than Alpers hers. He demonstrates beyond doubt that careful thought was devoted to the imagery in many Dutch paintings of everyday life, and he often succeeds, in his all too inimitable style, in approximating the chain of thought behind a particular picture. Alpers seeks to interpret more diffuse aspects of painting (two of her chapters are devoted to 'the nature of picturing in the north' and 'the mapping impulse'), aspects which were not the subject of conscious consideration in the seventeenth century, and certainly were not on the minds of working artists. Predictably, she ends up with diffuse conclusions, and seldom pins down precise meanings, whether of individual paintings or of elements of the Dutch 'visual culture' she set out to study. In writing this catalogue, I nonetheless profited from her work in the field, through several excellent dissertations she inspired and supervised, a contribution I hold in high regard.

The two evocations of the invisible world from the latter half of the seventeenth century (cat.nrs.96, 97) are more complex in construction and more subtle in conception than the earlier examples. Their sexual vibration does not throb, it resonates quietly. The keyboard music we cannot hear is also being listened to by a man we can barely see, the officer in what we presume is the lady's bed. The most beguiling message of all is that being expressed to us by Nicolaes Maes's lady on the stairs. She looks at us and holds her finger to her lips, as if to say: 'If only you would be quiet, you would be able to hear what is going on in this painting.'