Transactions with Vermeer
After “Young Woman Seated at a Virginal”
The artist looks toward the room’s dark corner
while his subject turns from her music
and gazes out as if waiting for
the proper moment to begin to play.
Her fingertips just touch the keyboard
as her arms catch sunlight from a source
outside the picture’s frame.
Vermeer has put his legendary window
in the background, but it is closed and shuttered.
We look into the room through an imaginary pane,
past a swag of drapery, across a cello in the foreground
like a huge, sun-brightened leaf.
We follow light. Vermeer aims at shadow.
Our gazes intersect in the irregular space
between the oval of the young girl’s head
and billowing under-sleeve. Then we slip away
across her neck and shoulders on a string of pearls
as if to thwart the confrontation,
take refuge in a background less intense
defining the curve of back and shoulder.
Behind her, an imposing picture on the wall:
Dirck van Baburen’s “The Procuress,”
a scene where money changes hands.
Our gazes register its gilt-wrought frame,
foil to our young girl’s placid brow. The loops
and swags of blue festooning from her slender waist
and mounding behind her on the chair take us toward
a row of background tiles: Delft miniatures
we may suppose depict quotidian transactions:
wives churning butter or turning spitted pigs,
men haggling in the market, riding with the hunt
(the indistinct designs allow our minds free play),
archers shooting arrows,
peddlers sharpening knives . . .
But let us not forget our subject.
Any moment now, she may turn and face the score,
resume the movement of her fingers on the
virginal, thinking she plays her subjectivity
into this room, her world, not knowing
that already it’s been bartered.
–lucia galloway