Vermeer’s hidden Catholic faith
Way of Beauty
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by Fr. Anthony Giambrone, OP
Dutch genre and landscape painting is a wonderful, placid gift to the world. The humble serenity that perfumes these images of simple people and daily chores, of pleasant homes and peaceful homelands, breathes a humanity rich with the tranquil comfort of the familiar. It is not the wild adventures or exotic sights abroad of the great seafaring nation that charm in these tableaux, but rather the calm return and immersion in habitual quiet.
An appreciation of the unique and magnificent tradition of painting in the Netherlands requires a keen sense for the history of that land, for these secular images served like dikes holding back the raging seas. This is especially true in regards to religious art. Already in the humanistic Renaissance a great workshop of gorgeous, pious painting, perhaps no region of Europe was so savagely caught in the violent riptides of the post-Reformation Wars of Religion. T