Vermeer's Hat

Vermeer’s Hat is a thought-provoking narrative by art historian Timothy Brook. The full title of the book, Vermeer’s Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global World, indicates Brook's comprehensive outlook and refers to Johannes Vermeer, a Dutch painter from Delft known for his use of light and clever clues. Brook uses five of Vermeer’s paintings plus artwork from Vermeer's contemporaries to illustrate the globalization of the 17th century. Brook argues for how interconnected the 17th-century world was and highlights how the interconnection can be glimpsed in Vermeer’s paintings if one looks closely enough.

Summary

Brook begins his study in Delft, the place of Vermeer’s birth, life, and death. Though none of Vermeer’s paintings are on display there, Brook uses Delft as the starting point for his investigation of the 17th-century world displayed in Vermeer’s paintings. From clues in each painting, he traces intersections of trade, commerce, industry, and nation-building. The paintings include: Officer and Laughing Girl, View of Delft, Young Woman Reading a Letter at an Open Window, The Geographer, and Woman Holding a Balance. Brook also uses The Game of Cards by Hendrik Van der Burch, and other works, to explore the development of globalization.

Brook addresses the movement of people from one place to another, whether by force or self-volition. As people were brought together through trade and knowledge-seeking, the needs for understanding and improvisation outshone conflict and discovery. In seeking to understand other parts of itself, the world became more willing to accept divergent parts of itself.

This contact ended in new knowledge and new trade routes for Europeans, enslavement and dispossession for Native peoples and Africans, and pushback and fear for Asian nations, most notably the Chinese. Brook highlights different approaches to trade taken by Europeans and how these approaches differed from those of their Chinese counterparts. Globalization in the 17th century reached everywhere and affected most everyone, yet some people resisted the interdependency as much as possible.

Brook also discusses the themes of sovereignty and transculturation, meaning the movement of people and cultural artifacts. For example, Columbus first witnessed Indigenous people in North America smoking tobacco for religious and secular purposes. When smoking made its way into Europe and then to China, aspects of the host cultures were transplanted, though the religious origins of smoking often were not. Complex questions of sovereignty arose in dealing with the open seas, trade routes, and the will of the people versus the dictates of monarchs.

Brook uses important markers of the 17th century, including the rise of silver, tobacco, and slave labor, to highlight the good and bad implications of globalization. Brook relates these phenomena to details in the paintings, showing how viewing painters as active participants allows for a better understanding of the world in which the paintings were created and the world they foreshadowed: a connected world with shared humanity and history.