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their masts. Why would he make a choice like that? Would a painter choose to paint two sailboats without their masts if he were not painting from life?
    But I had read, I say, that Vermeer had altered the profile of the town for dramatic effect. That maybe the painting isn’t a literal representation. Kaldenbach nods: “It’s a photoshop .” Certain details are exaggerated. The Nieuwe Kerk steeple, for example, is much taller, more prominent in the painting than it ought to be. What is true about the view, however, is uncannily true. So true, in fact, that Kaldenbach has recently dated the composition of this painting to 1660–61 based on the boat traffic depicted and also on the absence of bells in the Nieuwe Kerk, which were removed then and later replaced by the famous Hemony brothers, whose cast bells were installed in churches throughout Europe.
    I ask if Vermeer used the camera obscura. Kaldenbach believes he did, but that Steadman “goes too far.” He says, “I think Vermeer used it to capture ideas,” but he didn’t slavishly copy what he saw.
    We talk about the many ways in which Vermeer violates what might be thought of as the literal “reality” of a scene. For instance, in The Art of Painting, he points out how the size difference between the two figures, the male painter and female model, is not nearly as great as it ought to be in perspective, with the model at the back of the room, the painter in the middle.
    At heart, according to Kaldenbach, Vermeer’s process is typical for Dutch painters. He explains how the vanishing point of many of Vermeer’s interiors is marked with a tiny pinhole, which you can see in many of the canvases, if you look closely. Kaldenbach points out where it is, exactly, in The Milkmaid, just above the maid’s right hand, which holds the pitcher. Vermeer, like other Dutch painters (whom the Italians, with their refined laws of perspective, considered crude), used a simple chalk line, a pin with a chalked string attached, to check his perspectives. Plucking the string—I imagine the pop, I smell the tiny cloud of chalk-dust—he could trace the vanishing lines directly onto the canvas.
    Kaldenbach tells me how Vermeer experimented with the act, as he puts it, of “looking/encoding into paint/seeing what happens when decoding.” He says, “Vermeer is not interested in what he knows, but in what he sees.” He says that Vermeer finds “new pathways” in the process of encoding/decoding—his move toward abstraction is one of the great examples. It begins about the time of View of Delft, shortly after The Little Street.
    The Little Street, especially, is breathtakingly representational— Anthony Bailey, for instance, lauds its “wonderful plausibility.” Its brushwork manages to lend individual bricks and individual leaves a graceful presence and weight. But a great change has occurred by View of Delft, which involves not only optical effects like the pointillés, but what Kaldenbach calls Vermeer’s “mosaic of abstractions.” The roofs are undifferentiated shapes; flat, tonal values that we read intuitively as things . The painting lifts off, lifts away. The site where the decoding takes place seems to be redefined (as it would be again by the Impressionists). His work grows calm; the paint is thinner, the brushwork less descriptive, more calligraphic. This trend culminates triumphantly in the abstract, Matisse-like style shown in the Vermeers in our National Gallery, coming up soon in my itinerary.
    The interview takes maybe an hour. By then I have run out of questions. What I realize is that I haven’t come looking for answers. I’m trying to enter Vermeer’s world, so I’m here to meet the inhabitants. I find Kaldenbach easy and pleasant to sit with.
    Then I turn to the View again. It has been called a “hymn” to civic pride and the like, but it