Liberal Education Initiative

The Currency of the Liberal Arts and Sciences: Rethinking Liberal Education in Wisconsin

Portion of "The Allegory of Painting" by Vermeer (1666-1667), Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum

Why the Painting?

For us, this painting epitomizes the ways of seeing and the ways of thinking that are inspired by study of the liberal arts and sciences, and the outcomes that flow from a liberal education.

Called "The Allegory of Painting," the Dutch painter Jan Vermeer made this painting towards the end of his life. We might rename it as "the allegory of liberal education," such is its power to evoke a host of different realms of knowledge, arts and sciences, and such is its power to make us think critically and reflect deeply on the multiple meanings and worlds represented within it. The artist is painting a model costumed, art historians agree, as Clio, the muse of history, equipped with a laurel wreath crown, a book, and a trumpet. The painter's canvas-and hence the act of painting-are represented in the picture. The muse casts her eyes down. Demurely? Coquettishly? History is always figured as a woman, but as one apprehended through time predominantly by the men who made art and science, wrote literature and history. The woman may be the object but she is not the agent of allegory.

The burgeoning science of cartography is also represented, evoked in the map of the Netherlands on the wall, and, by implication, the Dutch mastery of space and geography as master colonizers in the 17th century. If the science of cartography was taking off at that time, it was because there was a whole new world to discover, conquer and colonize, as well as new print technologies that would allow for larger scale reproduction. The New World had to be contained (graphically as well as politically) in order to make it "real" for those who were not the travelers, and owned for those who were.

Clio stands beneath a window, not seen but clearly the source of the artist's light. The world beyond the painter's studio is implied-its light enters the room-but it is not represented in this painting. There is outside space (implied) and there is indoor space, that might have been hidden but for the heavy tapestry folded back on the left side of the canvas so that we, privileged viewers, are allowed access after all into the privacy of the painter's studio and his contemplation of history, art, and beauty.

Vermeer is known for his bold use of color (and one wonders about the chemistry of paint mixing in the 17th century that allowed him to make colors his predecessors could not), and he is known for studying optics, something he pursued through the use of the camera obscura, a very early precursor to the camera that allowed objects to be reflected through a kind of box, and consequently more acutely drawn. Hence the vividness of Clio's blue robe, the painter's red stockings, the colors that emerge from the tapestry, and the interplay between light and shadow that result in such intense symmetry (the horizontal lines of the ceiling beams, the wall, the map, the canvas, the chair, on down to the floor) and patterns (the tiled floor).

There's a lot in this painting: art, music, geography, issues of representation and power, light/enlightenment, beauty, gender, visible vs. invisible realms, patterns of knowledge making, application, theory, practice, history, time, space, light. It's all there: the whole world of knowledge, meaning-making and possibility opened up by liberal education if we would but teach and learn how to apprehend it.