If an Orlando-like epic romp through the scholarly and institutional afterlife of the painting reproduced on the cover of Ivan Gaskell’s Vermeer’s Wager: Speculations on Art History, Theory, and Art Museums is suggested by the book’s title, then this book cannot readily be judged by its cover. The cover stands a chance only once we find out what the author means by “Vermeer’s wager”:

The first thesis is the book’s driving concern; the second remains more of a live philosophical assumption that needs not be true for the book’s speculations to make good on the wager (though the first part of it only).

There are background conditions on the first thesis (from now on, the wager) holding true; for not all visual art can be said to “embody” the sorts of complex ideas that the author has in mind. In the case of Vermeer’s body of work, it is no small help to Gaskell, a scholar of seventeenth-century Dutch art, that the oeuvre has a virtually unchallenged completeness. Indeed, it is a body of work of modest quantity (thirty-six paintings in all), high quality, and consistent theme: the middle-class domestic Dutch interior. Together with the popularization of Vermeer through photographic reproduction as early as the nineteenth century and the scarcity of written records of the artist’s life, which has forced scholars to consult the paintings themselves or their reproductions, these factors have lent the oeuvre a “Vermeerness” that is instantly recognizable, even by nonexperts such as this reviewer and especially when viewed next to formidable works by talented painters of Vermeer’s own period and place (seventeenth-century Delft), for example, Carel Fabritius and Pieter de Hooch. Indeed, having tested Gaskell’s claim about the quality of “Vermeerness” at both renditions of Vermeer and the Delft School—an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the National Gallery in London, respectively, that opened in 2001 shortly after the publication of Gaskell’s book—this reviewer can confirm that the claim holds, more or less.

The availability of such a “test” was very fortunate, which is to say, ideally supplemental to this book. If our emotions are affected by the abstractions we see in paintings, then what we look at is surely mediated by much else that we see peripherally in a gallery, whether language comes into the picture or not. As Gaskell is quick to point out, the art of the curator trades upon this widely overlooked aspect of perception (86). Gaskell’s case in point is the juxtaposition of Vermeer’s Young Woman Standing at a Virginal with Young Woman Seated at a Virginal, both of which are normally displayed in Gallery 16 at the National Gallery. If juxtaposition matters within the frame of a gallery setting, then it matters, too, within the frame of a single painting. What does it mean for the young, similarly dressed women in these paintings to be juxtaposed with background paintings-within-paintings, and then with one another? Gaskell shows that making them face one another in a gallery carries the force of moral allegory (87). He gathers evidence that the background painting in Woman Seated depicts a brothel scene (87) while, in Woman Standing, a painting of a mediating cupid, signaling the lover’s gaze, dominates the background alongside two paintings of ascetic landscapes that might be linked iconographically, Gaskell argues, with the proverbial “path of long suffering” (51–56, 85–87, 204). Gaskell takes the contrast of profane and sacred love that seems to arise allegorically from the opposition to be already “embodied” systematically in each painting, despite Vermeer’s rejection of classical allegorizing: “The perception of beauty and origin of love can now be seen to be central to Vermeer’s Woman Standing At a Virginal, conveyed in part by a precisely controlled classical allusion managed in such a way as to enhance a specifically modern articulation of the subject” (61).

If each work does “embody” its part of the sacred/profane binary, and the opposition owes nothing to latter-day curatorial magic, company is added to the part of Vermeer’s oeuvre that is considered wholly or partly allegorical, in contrast with the portion of his work in which Vermeer mocks heavy-handed classical allegorism (45), as he does explicitly in The Art of Painting. Gaskell examines the evidence that Vermeer intended the two paintings as a “pendant pair” and draws what conclusions are possible (87–88). To his credit, he considers the embodiment of ideas in The Concert, which is similar to Woman Seated but was never juxtaposed with Woman Standing (48).

The fact that the juxtaposition is made more than three centuries after the paintings were executed raises further questions, some of which the artist Nicky Coutts explored in an exhibition at Hat on Wall studio in London in September 2001, which ran concurrently with Vermeer and the Delft School at the National Gallery. In her work, she digitally manipulates photographs of Vermeer paintings, including Woman Standing, effectively raising the question of just what ideas the works do embody, and of what their contemporary relevance might be. If the original paintings are understood not as an allegory of faithful love, but as a representation of a tranquil modern domestic interior, then her black-and-white photographs question the interior’s contemporary plausibility; for Coutts has digitally removed the woman, in each case, from the scene (quite skillfully so). While the photographs have lost none of the sunlit tranquility of their colored, paint-textured, and inhabited counterparts, they have disavowed the implication of a woman’s place in the crossfire of the cupid’s and presumed male viewer’s complicit gazes. For although the scene is but a fragment of a world that existed centuries ago and might still exist, one no longer projects a woman into the scene as a matter of reflex, Coutts seems to imply—at least, her works juxtaposed with the Vermeers in the National Gallery understood Gaskell’s way occasion such a questioning of how virtues and vices should be ascribed to persons.

If images of the relevant complexity—which ought to include those in paintings, etchings, and photographs alike—have the deep, direct, and, indeed, saving impact on us that Gaskell claims they do, then the public depends very much upon their continuing “good use” by museum professionals. This is a claim at the very heart of Gaskell’s book, one which makes it of interest not only to art historians and aestheticians, but also to artists, curators, and museum scholars. Gaskell’s example of a “poor use,” in contrast with the National Gallery’s “good use” of Woman Seated and Woman Standing, is that of university galleries’ concessions to the pressure of a donor to arrange things the donor’s way, which happens to make the galleries in question into mere “passive containers of the objects” (188–89). Dim views of the occasional donor notwithstanding, Gaskell adopts a stance toward art’s commercial value that is more consistent than pragmatic; for, he points out, laudable though it may be to divorce scholarship from commercial interests, commercial enterprises such as exhibitions and photographic reproduction are at the root of the system that brings artworks before the public eye, thus making scholarship (including the book under consideration) culturally relevant (169–71).

The insightful chapters on commodities and donors are followed up forcefully by a chapter on museum therapeutics. Art can save us from ourselves from time to time, particularly in times of public crisis, and museums can provide an ongoing occasion for “wisdom, solace, reflection” and higher nourishment; but artworks and museums must in turn be saved, after all, from certain dangers imposed on their operation by commercial forces. Put another way, Gaskell’s urgent message is that museum professionals are in a unique position to reconnect the public with alternative modes of world-construction, and once educated to their task, which has a strong applied ethical component, they ought to be invested with the freedom to accomplish their work, more on the model of hospitals than of department stores—or universities (199). However, the author views the difference between the modes of commercial openness in question as a distinction “not in kind, but of degree” (171)—mirroring the difference between aestheticism and what he calls “interventionist commentary”—inasmuch as they are products of the same system.

For all of the sensibleness of Gaskell’s position on museological socioeconomics, it must be said that when it comes to illustrating his argument about “good use,” Gaskell’s choice of a Vermeer painting raises some questions; for the “Vermeerness” of Vermeer curiously undermines what is typically the curator’s share in an artwork’s reception. Both of the 2001 Vermeer exhibitions (organized principally by Walter Liedke in New York and in London by Axel Rüger and Christopher Brown) illustrate what Gaskell, in a review of the show in the July 2001 issue of Burlington Magazine, has called the “sheer wallpower” of Vermeer: “Huge crowds criss-cross the galleries, headsets susurrant, seeking out the Vermeers and congregating about them like so many awestruck pilgrims.”

Vermeer has at least won his wager, then, or Gaskell has won a part of his. For no amount of curatorial marshalling and contextual emphasis or “good use” can, it seems, override people’s determination to treat Vermeers as self-enclosed meditations on the nature of painting, perception, beauty, love, virtue and vice, sex and citizenship, ideal modern human existence, and so on. Yet the magnetism that pictures exert over their respective interpretations could not have escaped Vermeer, considering that he chose his paintings-within-paintings with much care, as Gaskell demonstrates. Herein lies the seeming paradox in ascribing to Vermeer a wager that invites an evasion of language and possibly of visual association. The paradox, however, is easily dispelled. Gaskell’s charge, which he describes as “curatorially driven,” is to illustrate the importance of history not only as a body of information about a work’s various interpretations, but also as a means of meeting the artist halfway in reclaiming the same sense of life he or she invested in the work’s creation (12). When we ignore the museological background and become absorbed in the sense of life of an individual work, as in the case of Woman Standing, we are gazing not at one but at four paintings, three of which have complex iconographical pasts. But this must also imply something about what constitutes the painting’s good use.

A steady stream of museum scholarship began to appear in the 1990s—Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), Museum Culture: Histories, Discourses, Spectacles (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (New York: Routledge, 1995), The Rhetoric of the Frame: Essays on the Boundaries of the Artwork (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), to name a few—and 2000 saw a spate of it, including Gaskell’s book. Vermeer’s Wager has to its credit an author who is a curator (Gaskell is Margaret S. Winthrop Curator at the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University) capable of tempering his wide-ranging discussions with system. Gaskell’s series of speculations, taken together, demonstrate the limits, as well as appeal, of the seemingly boundless enterprise of adducing an artist’s charge and brief (to use Michael Baxandall’s terms), interrogating the afterlives of his or her works and tracking their influences—for instance, the uses of original paintings in collections, the reproductions and alterations of them in photographs and etchings, and the waves of scholarship devoted to them and the reception of it. Gaskell neglects none of these aspects.

That said, there is a criticism to be added. Once the onion is peeled, it never becomes clear how the speculations are to be connected to the mode of art appreciation that Gaskell wants to champion. Is it ever possible, even in Vermeer’s case, to bypass speculative fads and obsessions and to appreciate by viewing with a “love proper to art”? Submitting to the “tyranny of uniqueness” by going to see a work in a museum helps much, if only to make us realize our inadequacy before a single work. Perhaps a book’s ill-suitedness to such a thing as Gaskell proposes to demonstrate (the second part of his wager) explains why he is a curator. Indeed, he recently organized an exhibition (Calming the Tempest with Peter Paul Rubens, Fogg Art Museum, December 22, 2001–March 17, 2002) that did for the second part of the wager what his book could not. So, for academics who would rather read a book and its review than get out to an art exhibition, or who have tired of seeing and in other ways sensing art, it is difficult to say whether Gaskell’s book is more likely to seem an incomplete demonstration or a vigorous and very readable challenge.