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yet thoroughly bourgeois. The Nieuwe Kerk steeple is sculpted in startlingly heavy impasto. A tiny clock on the Schiedam Gate reads a few minutes past seven. There are fifteen (tiny) human figures in the painting, I’ve read, but it looks almost empty to me.
    The nearer parts of the town are shadowed by the storm clouds directly above, but there’s a clearing behind the darkness where a ray of sun breaks through. I can’t see this ray itself, only its effect on the sunlit interior of the painting. The Nieuwe Kerk steeple is fully, perhaps symbolically lit—it’s the brightest spot—probably because William of Orange is buried there. This great national hero, who led the Dutch revolt against the occupying Spanish, was assassinated in 1584. Vermeer’s spotlighting of the Nieuwe Kerk, then, was a patriotic homage, which wouldn’t be missed by any Dutch eye. Most striking to me, however, is the simple fact, the feeling, of the sunlit center. I sense the stir of human activity (the Nieuwe Kerk is on the market square), the day about to begin, the blessing of light. The town is neither idealized nor abstracted, neither larger nor smaller than it needs to be, and one cannot know what God thinks about it.
    The waters of the Schie were widened, in 1614, into a triangular harbor called the Kolk. Some experts think the standpoint for View of Delft was the upper floor of a house, long gone, that stood on the bank. There, at his leisure, Vermeer would have set up his camera obscura, which would cast its image either onto a wall or into a darkened box. This image could then be directly transcribed, and worked into a painting later.
    These optical details fascinate us now; originality and “authenticity” are special concerns of our age. Would we look differently on the Mona Lisa if we learned that she hadn’t been painted from nature, but traced from a projected image? Perhaps. In any case, David Hockney and Philip Steadman have argued that Vermeer used a camera as a matter of course, that he probably learned about optics from his peer Antony van Leeuwenhoek, the self-taught Delft scientist and inventor of the microscope. Steadman’s main purpose, in his book Vermeer’s Camera , is to show that some of Vermeer’s compositions must have been created by optical means. There’s really no other plausible explanation for the accuracy of detail, he argues, for the way such infinitesimally complex tile patterns, for instance, continue uninterruptedly on either side of a table or chair.
    And View of Delft, with its luminous clarity, does imply the use of a camera, or some such setup in the house across the Kolk. The townscape is abruptly “cropped” on the sides, an effect that would have been quite shocking then. This cropping would make sense if, and perhaps only if, Vermeer’s compositions had been framed by a lens.
    And then there’s the effect often called “circles of confusion,” or pointillés: spherical daubs of luminous paint. These highlights resemble the optical effects produced by a lens, especially by the imperfect, hand-ground lenses of the day. For example, on the right-hand side of the canvas, across the Schie, there are two herring boats moored for repairs. In an otherwise meticulously realistic scene, the pointillés are pure poetic embellishment—scattered flakes of gold that follow the shadowy contours of the hulls, the seams of the planking, the gunwales. They are strewn lavishly through shadows and luminous areas alike, and the eye simply accepts their presence. Vermeer’s most penetrating critic, Lawrence Gowing, describes this phenomenon as a glittering “commentary of light.”
    Another peculiar decision that Vermeer makes in his signature landscape involves perspective. He places the largest possible body of water between himself and his subject. He chooses distance; he makes what is most familiar to him unfamiliar. He