The Vermeer Killers. Episode Three: Frau Marthe’s Broken Pitcher
This is a guest post by Cornelis Gijsbrechts
(Continued from last week)
The above painting by Frans Francken II (1581-1642) is an imagined scene in Brussels of the abdication of the Holy Roman Emperor, King Charles V. In 1555 and 1556 Charles V divided the empire between his son Philip II and his brother Ferdinand. The Spanish and Netherlandish possessions went to Philip, while Germany passed to Ferdinand.
A similar motif is depicted on the broken pitcher which dominates Kleist’s comedy, Der zerbrochene KrugFirst performed in Weimar in 1808, the play is a reworking of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, Homer’s The Iliad and the biblical fall of humanity into original sin; trusty steeds all three, and Kleist rides them for all he’s worth.
All that remains of the ceremony are shards: only the legs of King Charles remain visible; King Philip has fallen into the pot and has received a kick in the behind for good measure; his two aunts weep over this calamity; Bishop Arras has been taken by the Devil leaving behind his shadow; and a curious observer looking out of a house-window in Brussels does not know what he is looking at. According to Frau Marthe’s account.
In Vermeer’s ‘The Art of Painting,’ the wall-map shows the seventeen united provinces before the Dutch revolt and subsequent war with Spain. Yet there is a heavy crease running down the centre of the map’s fabric which indicates the eventual border between Holland and Spain. And it is as if the black shape of the artist’s hat, lower down and to the right, let us call it a black sun, is exerting a gravitational force on all the objects, symbols, allegories in the painting, collecting and dispersing them in an interminably pulsating beacon of savage melancholy, a pars pro toto for eighty years of war. In other words, it is acting like a transmitter, and, Gijsbrechts, susceptible soul that he is, would be tempted to hide the painting in a cupboard.
Another narrator, Marlow, at anchor on the Thames on the cruising yawl, The Nellie, explains how it is:
“Marlow ceased, and sat apart, indistinct and silent, in the pose of a meditating Buddha. Nobody moved for a time. “We have lost the first of the ebb,” said the Director, suddenly. I raised my head. The offing was barred by a black bank of clouds, and the tranquil waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed somber under an overcast sky seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness.”
O, Herr Vermeer is there a hole in your picture? Even though it is the Merry Season, and notwithstanding pantomime calls of ‘It’s behind you,’ your redoubtable correspondent, Gijsbrechts, is on the case.
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