Tyler Cowen: preference

Transcript context

…Yes. Vermeer’s patrons, it emerges, and Vermeer himself, were part of a Protestant sect in Holland called the Remonstrants. They had a more extreme manifestation called the Collegiants, and they were unique among all Christian denominations of that time in being utterly opposed to division, hostility, enmity. The only thing they wanted was to bring all Christians, indeed all people—they included Jewish people and Muslim people—they wanted to bring everyone together within a faith that only really cleaved to the essentials of what Jesus Christ said, particularly in the Sermon on the Mount. They said, “If you actually follow Jesus properly, you can never make war. You can never persecute someone who differs from your opinion. You can never pick on somebody because they believe something different.” They were very, very tolerationist. They formed the first pacifist movement in European history. They lived in a time of appalling warfare, the Thirty Years’ War, probably the worst war in the history of the modern West. Fifteen million out of 20 million German people died in the course of 30 years, and the 5 million who were left, all the women had been violated, and all the men only have one arm or one leg. It was truly atrocious. They’re responding to real traumatic historical events. They’re responding to what is going on around the corner from where they live. They come up with this very, very beautiful approach to life, full of optimism, full of idealism. For about 20 years, the Dutch Republic actually lives by these codes of belief to a great extent. It’s the only tolerant country in Europe. The Art of Painting (c. 1666–1668) — the map made Tyler think Catholic; the context says otherwise. If I look at The Art of Painting, a painting by Vermeer in Vienna, one of my favorites, I used to think of that as a Catholic painting, in part because of the map in the back of the scene. Are you revising that view? Yes. Vermeer marries a Catholic, which has led to a common mistake that he must have converted to Catholicism. It’s very clear from the documentary evidence that I present in my book that all of his friends are from this Remonstrant, Collegiant axis. Of course, that’s exactly what a Remonstrant would do, is marry a Catholic.…

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