'Waiting' with Hendrick Corneliz. van Vliet (1611-75)

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I don't know how you envisioned any one or all of the buildings I asked you to imagine in your mind's eye: the White House, the Capitol building, your home? The painting before you represents the New Church at Delft, another monument of extraordinary public significance, comparable in 17 th -century Holland to the White House or the Capitol building. Unlike the conceptualized, objectified exterior mental images of public buildings we normally automatically conjure up (as you may well have?), this painting offers us a seemingly counterintuitive image of a public building from the inside. Think “Cathedral” and the tension of interior/exterior at work in this painting may become clearer to you. Or, recall how you “saw” your home; from the exterior or interior? The artist of this painting may well have deliberately constructed, by means of an unanticipated reversal of expectations, an envelope of “interiority” which, as we will discover in a minute, is informed by an apparent exterior reality. Before long we will come to see how interior and exterior merge in this “art” as discontinuous, contradictory realities or distinct “frames of reference,” if you prefer, that are nonetheless suspended along with your ordinary subjective and objective perceptions in your contemplative experience of this painting. “Beholding” this painting will be another new experience in Thoreau's unfamiliar “woods.” Of course, our true goal is for the unfamiliar to become increasingly familiar to you, so that realities you may never have considered or dismissed because they were “contradictory” might take compelling shape in your life and education.

Dutch art generally, and this painting in particular, engages this intersection of explicitly contradictory realities, realizing in paint a visual and spatial “coincidence of opposites,” including not only this willful interiorization of an exterior reality—the objective “New Church at Delft”—but, as we will soon discover, public/private and perceptual/conceptual realities, as well as analytical knowledge ( ratio ) and intuitive knowing ( intellectus ). In two words, Dutch art, if you wait long enough to “Behold,” embodies the elusive intersection of our “erôs” and “insight.” The pre-eminent theme of Dutch art from this “Beholding” perspective is not reducible to the familiar categories of “still-life,” “landscape” and “portraiture” common to art history. It is, instead, simply and in one word: love. Were you to think about Dutch art long and carefully enough, you could confirm or reject this observation. In either case, it is this “love,” this intersection or coincidence of contradictory possibilities of knowing—perhaps even of being conscious—that a contemplative “Beholding” will reveal to us. And, further, it is this felt intersection that will become the connecting bridge, the intimation of wholeness (“grace”) from an acknowledged condition of fragmentation (“gravity”) that is the “art” of “Beholding” and finally, the welcomed result of the “Waiting” we might now begin to share with Hendrick van Vliet, here, now; despite the more than 300 years that separate us.

Whole painting without frame; on easel

Step three: Look quietly at this painting, removed from its frame and placed on an easel as though it were still in the artist's studio. Its full title can now be given to you: Interior of the New Church at Delft. It was painted by Hendrick van Vliet in 1667, at the height of Jan Vermeer's career in Delft and two years before Rembrandt van Rijn died in Amsterdam. The painting is signed and dated at the base of the nearest column. The apparent content of this painting is the New Church, the Nieuw Kerk that succeeded the Oude Kerk or Old Church of Delft. Both churches are late medieval structures dating from the 13 th to the 15 th centuries. Both the “old” and the “new” churches still exist. You can visit them in Delft. They appear to the left and right in the middle ground of Jan Vermeer's famous View of Delft in the Mauritshuis in The Hague from about the same date as our painting. The New Church is the site of the most important monumental tomb in Holland—the tomb of William of Nassau (the Silent), Father of the Dutch Republic—made by Hendrick de Keyes in 1614. The church and tomb together comprise very much a public site; a place of collective meaning and purpose like the White House and the Capitol Building. Or think of the National archives Building with the U.S. Constitution on display. Hendrick van Vliet and several other painters (Gerard Houckgeest) painted this site and tomb many times. Hendrick van Vliet, himself, did roughly two hundred Interiors of the New Church at Delft . The painting before you is among the best in the world.

So, the ostensible subject of this painting, that is, its objective, discursive content, is the New Church at Delft, Holland and the tomb of William of Nassau. But, because of our little thought experiment, may I imagine something quite different? Is it possible that you actually sensed something when you first saw this painting; something other than an objective recognition of a celebrated public site, vividly recorded? As a result of a counterintuitive or perhaps just unexpected contrast between your imagined vision of a “public” building's exterior and this interior space, you might have experienced both mentally and physically (in your mind and body) a more or less conscious distinction. Without yet knowing it, you might have responded to your first view of this painting by experiencing through directly perceived contrast that “interiority” I mentioned a minute ago. In the very contradiction of a subliminally anticipated exterior—the White House or the Capitol from the outside—you might have actually felt an inner sense and perhaps a still inchoate, but real, intimated shift from habitual, virtually unconscious, neutral and objective awareness of the world around you (in this case the painting) to a palpably subjective new awareness, not only of the painting as an subject before you, but of yourself and your own presence in space. Is it possible already that your own inner solitude in relation to this painting, to the study gallery in the Mead Art Museum imagine a public building, assuming that most of you really would see the White House from the outside, was to position you within the contradictory possibilities of exterior and interior so that their very opposition might summon up and measure pre-verbally and hence purely visually, perhaps corporeally, your own experience of intersecting subjective and objective, private and public, perceptual and conceptual realities. In a phrase: to encourage your self-conscious psychological “separation” combined with contradictory psychological “involvement” or “attachment” as the essential preparation for “Beholding.”

Although this may all sound too complicated to follow, just look ... slowly ... quietly. Allow yourself to be present within the potential contradictoriness embodied in your response to this image. Try to sense its “interiority” in relation to its implied or remembered “exteriority.” Be aware of your own “presence” and apparent literal “absence” in this pictorial space and moment. Feel the contrasting, contradictory realities of your own private and public being.

This particular painting, called Interior of the New Church at Delft , represents an actual building, and as such it measures its artistic presence in relation to other Netherlands paintings that represented imaginary religious interiors (e.g., Jan van Eyck's Berlin Madonna ). That is, this painting, like the alert “Beholder” perhaps, is itself self-conscious. Indeed, Interior of the New Church at Delft is an especially vivid example of a large catalogue of “images” that realize Dutch self-awareness. This painting of a real church interior, like countless other “still-life,” “portrait” and “landscape” paintings, discloses the collective subjective reality we call Holland.

We could end our encounter with this remarkable work of art here. We now possess a rather considerable amount of knowledge about its artistic and historical context. We have engaged this painting as an object of art historical “ ratio ” perhaps. But, if we did, as you know, we would have betrayed Nicolas of Cusa's wonderful “ intellectus” or a “knowing” beyond finite measurement. We would have missed entirely its “art” and have neglected the most intense and elusive reality of our first perception of the image: that deeply felt sense of “interiority,” “presence” and the tension of our self-awareness. Habitually, at this point, we turn our attention to other art-history concerns ( e.g. , patronage, technical information, thematic and stylistic comparisons, iconographic speculation, etc.) that might amplify our “objective” grip on this painting, but doing so, would distract us from the “contemplative knowing,” the “ intellectus ” this work of art offers us. Or, more commonly, we would simply move on to another painting in the museum, another museum or city on our tourist itinerary, all the while losing the opportunity of extraordinary understanding directly in front of us. Instead, let's stay with the painting to see where it might lead us. Close you eyes gently ... wait quietly ... Now open your eyes again. Rediscover the painting and its still elusive image ... Move to the second part of our experiment in “Beholding.”

Continued >>