Harry’s Place Arts

This is a guest post by Cornelis Gijsbrechts

Sir Walter Raleigh: frontispiece to The History of the World, 1614

“There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact.”

Sherlock Holmes, The Boscombe Valley Mystery.

“The funny obviousness of this figure, its banality, its depth concealed in plain view, ought not to cause us not to see what it is.” Stanley Cavell on the letter in Poe’s The Purloined Letter.

Abduction: retroduction, presumption, originary argument, hypothetic inference.

The detective or scientist assumes nothing, lets the object dictate the inquiry, and, keeping the whole in mind, proves that apparent impossibilities are possible (if, indeed, they are so). In other words, what is surprising or unexpected in the observed phenomena is rendered necessary by the hypothesis.

“[T]he more unusual the mating of consequent and antecedent, or the more distant their semantic fields are from one another, the more pregnant the abduction will be.” Bonfantini and Proni, ‘To Guess or Not To Guess?’ in Eco and Sebeok, The Sign of Three.

The process of abduction is triggered by the discovery of a good middle term (observed fact) between a general rule and a conclusion. As Poe observed - the necessary knowledge is that of what to observe. Having made his or her observations, it is the impudence of the detective to bet on the final result without waiting for intermediate tests.

I will now use Peirce’s bean bag model in examining Vermeer’s Schilderconst (Vienna painting).

Rule: Beans from the bag are white.

Result: These beans are white.

Case: These beans are from this bag.

Schilderconst painting:

Step One -

Rule: Nails in the picture are symbolic.

Result: These nails are symbolic.

Case: These nails are from this picture.

Step Two -

Rule: Symbols in the allegory are Christian.

Result: These symbols are Christian.

Case: These symbols are in this allegory.

 Joseph Moxon: Map of the world insert for bibles published by Moxon, mid-seventeenth century

The abduction or hypothetic inference to be made from this pas de deux is that the four nails in Vermeer’s painting, Schilderconst, represent the four nails of the Passion, and that the painting as a whole is a representation of the entire scheme of Christian salvation and its three pivotal events: original sin in Eden, sacrifice of Christ on Golgotha, and his Second Coming at the end of time.

If this is indeed the case, then Vermeer’s painting represents a fusion or a fused instant of the beginning and end of Christian time, where that fusion is held in suspension (in this case oil paint) as an earthly paradise in which the righteous await the Last Judgement.

Now I have not found any criticism or discussion of Schilderconst which acknowledges the Christian component of this painting. This is perhaps unsurprising given the predominance of the mythological allegory used to interpret it, where the woman holding trumpet and book is seen as a personification of Clio. If my hypothesis is correct she would instead represent a tripartite figure: Eve, the Virgin mother, and the angel of the Last Judgement. Clio may still be retained perhaps, but only to show how a mythological figure has been superceded or absorbed by Christian time or eschatology.

I admit that this hypothesis may appear unlikely or impossible, and it is for this reason that I have used Peirce’s abduction method to develop a ratiocination to explain the presence of the four nails - the unlikely middle term in this scenario, and the surprising fact which set this particular train of thought in motion.

On the four nails:

The 1940 Phaidon Press edition, author,Thomas Bodkin, contains a photogravure of ‘The Art of Painting’ supplied by Ludwig Goldscheider (obtained from the Medici society), which shows four nails holding up the wall map, instead of the two nails depicted in reproductions before and after 1940. The question is when was this photogravure made?

Lawrence Gowing made the interesting point in his still-consulted work on Vermeer that criticism of painting should be printed in parallel columns. As a corollary to the Christian-vision hypothesis I would propose another hypothesis for interpreting Schilderconst, one that is perhaps even more audacious or impudent, where the middle term, acquired from Svetlana Alpers’ recent work, The Vexations of Art, would be the theme of art in the studio during the seventeenth century, and its subsequent dominance of Western painting for four hundred years; and the hypothesis — does Schilderconst represent a fused instant or ontological emergence where there is a failure of part-whole reductionism?

A further creative abduction would be to posit a link between these two hypotheses (ontological emergence/mythic vision) perhaps.

And the conclusion? A hypothesis that might express an undecidability, questioning any religious, political, or artistic solutions to human problems, which do not include an element of autopoiesis?

 

Niklaus Manuel, St Luke painting the Madonna, 1515