Meditating with Johannes Vermeer (1632-1675)

Imagine the emotion. In May 1945, in the cold corridors of a salt mine near Salzburg (Austria), American soldiers contemplate the long line of wooden boxes, of all shapes, stored there. On one of them, the mark “H13” underlines the importance of its content, since the “H” evokes the sinister name of Hitler who committed suicide a few days earlier in his Berlin bunker.

Opening the crate, the art experts from the “Monuments Men” – a company dedicated to saving works dispersed by the Nazis during the war – came across the masterful painting by the Dutchman Johannes Vermeer, looted in Paris five years earlier. The astronomer thus found the light after these times of darkness.

The work shines: seated in front of a cluttered table, a man seen in profile and with long hair, wearing a blue Japanese silk dressing gown, consults the third chapter of the work Institutiones astronomicæ & geographicæ, by the mathematician Adriaan Metius (1571-1635). There we read a beautiful invitation to use scientific tools to measure the world while allowing ourselves to be seized by the divine inspiration which is revealed in the cosmos.

A compass and an astrolabe, placed on the table, respond to the invitation, as does the painting fixed on the back wall, representing Moses saved from the waters. Because survival ultimately doesn’t depend on much, when death seems to take over: a little providential chance, a lot of courage and also the benevolence of grace which spreads. Like the light flowing from the window into this silent interior.