The Muses,
the daughters of Zeus and the Titaness Mnemosyne, bear
resounding names: Calliope ("fair voice"), Euterpe ("gladness"),
Terpsichore ("joy in the dance"), Erato ("lovely"), Melpomene ("singing"),
Thalia ("abundance" or "aood cheer"), Polymma ("many songs") and Urania
("heavenly"). These sisters were regarded by the ancient Greeks as the
goddesses of the fine arts, music and literature. As ancient mythology has
it, they lived on Mt Parnassus, a barren limestone spur of the Pindus
Mountains in central Greece. On its southern slopes the Delphic oracle of
Apollo prophesied in riddles. A consensus was never reached as to the
domains over which the individual Muses presided, nevertheless, certain art
forms came to be associated with each of them, although some overlapped:
poetry and flute-playing, song and dance, comedy and tragedy, pantomime
and even the science of astronomy. Yet, painting remained amongst the
fields of art to be ignored entirely.
The Dutch painter
Jan Vermeer van Delft was surely not the first
painter to have felt slighted by his art being thus overlooked. However,
he was one of the few to feel that he ought to do something about this
sorry state of affairs. In short, he took the ninth muse, Clio, as his
personal patron. Clio presided over history. Why did
Vermeer take this
particular Muse as his own and not the poetic allegory proposed by the
Italian writer Cesare Ripa, who was widely read in
Vermeer's day? Like
many of his contemporaries,
Vermeer probably saw history painting with a
mythological background — the representation of biblical and allegorical
scenes — as the major genre in painting. In his Allegory of Painting,
Vermeer portrayed Clio as a young girl holding a history book in one
hand and a trumpet proclaiming fame in the other.
The artist does not seem to have been inspired by his particular Muse
all that often. The man from Delft most likely painted only the thirty-four works that
are known. Was Vermeer, in fact, a painter by profession? He is said to
have inherited the Mechelen Tavern on the north side of the Delft
marketplace from his father in 1652. Later the story goes that he worked
as an art dealer. Even that was obviously not enough to keep him
financially secure. When Vermeer, who today stands beside
Frans Hals and
Rembrandt as the most famous seventeenth-century Dutch painter, died in
1675, he left behind eight young children and a destitute widow. One of
the first things she did was to give the Delft master-baker Hendrick van
Buyten two paintings by her late husband to discharge debts amounting to
617 guilders and 6 stivers.
