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

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II. Meditation

Step one - Form: Look slowly for the constituent parts that comprise this painting physically and visually. Let each of them, as they emerge for you, occupy your attention. Allow their contradictoriness to exist. Sense, feel, embrace this contradictoriness.

1. Medium: Transparent and opaque oil paint on canvas. The painting called Interior of the New Church at Delft consists of ground up materials suspended in a solution of oil and turpentine that has been precisely spread out across a surface of canvas, prepared with a layer of white chalk (gesso). However powerful this “image” may have become for you, remember that, in addition to being a very complex representation of a particular building, this painting is first and always a finite, physical and constructed object. Hold this irreconcilable contradiction: a relatively fixed material painting and an elusive, dynamic shifting image. Together they compose the work of art.

2. Format: Short vertical rectangle. Allow this particular format to take shape in your perception of this painting. Measure, as you look, the relative “shortness” of the overall rectangle of the painting against the contrasting remarkably “tall” vertical form of the repeated columns within the illusory space that soars beyond the border of the painting into the inaccessible, invisible vaults. Let this “measuring” be a step toward your “Beholding.”

3. Edges: Observe the four sides of the physical painting. Unlike many “images” that deliberately separate pictorial and actual space implicitly or explicitly, as though the picture's frame were like a window between “outside” and “inside,” this painting is not like a window. The spatial illusion of this “image” on the left, right and upper borders of the painting retreats from the picture plane of the painting (the virtual or transparent “surface” of the painting), denying the coincidence on three sides between the actual and pictorial edges of the painting. Consequently, although the painting is literally framed, its “image” is distinctly “unframed” where no foreground pictorial object coincides with the outer edges of the painting as a window frame would. Since the illusory space of this painting remains “open” or unidentified everywhere except at the bottom edge of the painting which coincides with the floor of the church, we may sense that we are surrounded by the illusory space of the painting ... as though we were actually standing within the represented interior space. This particular compositional use of the inherent contradiction between the actual and illusory reality of the edges that comprise this painting places us, as it were, in the church ... enveloped by its space ... subjectively engaged.

4 . Perspective: A two- and three-point linear perspective defines the illusory space of this “image.” Although it is extremely complicated in its construction, the visual and spatial perspective of Interior of the New Church at Delft may be simply described as non-frontal, non-orthogonal or oblique perspective; as though you were seeing the subject of this painting and its illusory space at roughly a 45-degree angle, out of the corner of your eye, perhaps; or as though your were casually passing through it (as compared to observing it, objectively at a distance), experiencing the fullest three dimensionality of its breadth, depth and height. Imagine a a face turning to look at you compared to a profile, or even full face encounter with someone who looks past you. Neither you nor this space is static. Because of this precisely constructed perspective, you and this “image” of an interior space move together. Within this perspective, let your eyes give way to other senses of sensory and kinetic awareness: sound, texture, smell, weight, etc. Be present “in” rather than “before” this painting. Collapse the “distance” between it and its contradictory “image.” Enter this contradiction.

5. Color: Given the value and neutral color charts that you completed, your own direct experience has prepared you to “Behold” color in this painting. There are, as you can all see, a few scattered fragments of full-chroma color (mostly red and yellow) surrounded by an overall pictorial choreography of warm and cool neutral color (so-called greys). This neutral palette not only records the objective local color of the church interior, but also emphasizes, independent of color, a wide and subtle range of value variation (light to dark) that builds in a luminous crescendo toward the “lightest light” in the painting, which occurs just to the left of the central axis of the picture plane. Observe these variations as though they were, indeed, distinct and presumably deliberately placed value “notes,” especially those that compose the base of the foremost column (the one with the artist's signature and the date of the painting!) and their slightly off-center culmination. The delicate asymmetry of this lightest of the illusory lights in this “image,” relative to the symmetry of the physical painting will be crucial to our “Beholding” in a minute. For now, just observe the apparent pictorial contradiction. Feel it ... Measure it ...

Step two - Iconography (content, symbolism, allegory): The New Church is now and was in the 17 th century a Protestant church. In Holland, that meant it was not Catholic . An image of a non-Catholic church interior in Europe in the 17 th century was sufficiently unusual to be a pictorial equivalent of Dutch “self-awareness.” In historical fact, this setting is as much a civic and social location as it is an ecclesiastical one. There are no images of Christ or the Christian narrative, common to all churches from fourth century C.E. on. There are no altars; no altarpieces to serve the Holy Mass. There are no explicitly Christian figures (e.g., saints, church fathers, etc.). There are no crucifixes. In their stead, there are several diamond-shaped, brightly painted objects known as coats-of-arms, representing family genealogy. Rather than see this iconography negatively or neutrally as an objective record of Protestant iconoclasm, imagine that these heraldic devices are emblems of a newfound civic and social standing, amounting to public rather than liturgical reverence.

Recalling the “interiority” of the image, allow for your own immediate subjective presence within this public collective. You may identify with the informal, randomly placed and explicitly nonliturgical figures scattered through the space. You certainly would have had you been Dutch. There are, self-consciously, no priests, no religious figures of any kind. There is no Mass. There are only casual, ordinary people: sitting, working, walking, talking; people, we may imagine, like us. Self-awareness informs this painting. Everything here is self-consciously, purposefully non-hierarchical (including the picture/pictorial edges, the perspective, the color and the iconography). Notice the grave digger; a common reality in Dutch churches and paintings like this one. May we begin to imagine or enter into a random, passing moment carefully constructed to exclude any organized ritual in order to evoke the contradictory intersection of private randomness and public order. Can you sense (?), feel (?) this psychological “measurement” in the painting and in yourself?

To summarize: Formally and iconographically we have before us an utterly self-aware image of the “New,” rather than the “Old,” a “Protestant,” rather than a “Catholic,” church in “Delft,” rather than “Europe” or even “Holland.” Your equally self-conscious view is oblique, seen casually as you engage the space that opens up before you. As an object, this painting becomes, as you look, a place and an occasion of quiet, personal anonymity and humility as distinct from one of Christological hierarchy and authority. It is a place of Dutch human individuality, perhaps; or subjectiveness encountered. With this self-conscious recognition, what must we make then of the singularly important public monument in the New Church, the tomb of William of Nassau? It is, in this painting, obscured behind the pictorially centralized, dominant column that organizes the picture plane, the illusory space and, as we have seen, the light. Although this famous and venerated tomb is clearly, iconographically, the pre-eminent object in the painting, the artist has placed it off-center and asymmetrical to your own centered position before the painting. Like the represented space of the church itself, you see it only “out of the corner of your eye.” It is pictorially peripheral to you. And yet, if we keep moving forward into the thrall of this “image” and allow ourselves to respond to it as an occasion of “Beholding,” we might discover that it is psychologically absolutely central in the event of human longing embodied by this painting.

Continued >>