The Vermeer paintings have nothing, of course, to say directly about war or justice or the law or how you fix your society; they tell no news and propagandize no cause. In Diana and Her Nymphs, a kneeling woman washes another’s feet while two others look on, and one turns her back, a plebeian moment among divinities. Weschler notes that Vermeer worked in a turbulent, war-plagued time, and that “the pressure of all that violence (remembered, imagined, foreseen) is what those paintings are all about” but that they are about it by being its opposite, about the peace we crave in times of war, the
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The Vermeer paintings have nothing, of course, to say directly about war or justice or the law or how you fix your society; they tell no news and propagandize no cause. In Diana and Her Nymphs, a kneeling woman washes another’s feet while two others look on, and one turns her back, a plebeian moment among divinities. Weschler notes that Vermeer worked in a turbulent, war-plagued time, and that “the pressure of all that violence (remembered, imagined, foreseen) is what those paintings are all about” but that they are about it by being its opposite, about the peace we crave in times of war, the stillness in uproar, about the persistence of the everyday and its beauty.
