Andrew Graham-Dixon: belief

Transcript context

…What’s the correct way to think about that painting? In my book, it’s all about toleration, so I cannot possibly lay down to you what I think you should believe. The key, as always, is the context. I’ve discovered the context of the picture, which has not really been written about. If you look at the Met’s text that it puts forward to promote a particular idea about that picture, they don’t mention at all the owner of the painting, who was a very interesting man indeed, called Hermann von Schwoll, who was the head of the Hamburg post office and a very, very rich man, free-thinking, dissident. He supported a young man who lived in his house, didn’t have any money, and he was one of the first popular journalists, a liberal journalist. He wrote in favor of the Collegiant movement. He wrote proto-feminist tracks. That was another aspect of these people. He was most definitely not a militant Catholic. He liked allegories. The Allegory of the Catholic Faith, in my opinion, is an allegory of how hard it is to get to God if you are a Catholic. The woman in the picture is surrounded by emblems of the complex doctrines of the Catholic faith, which Remonstrants and Collegiants said, “That’s what’s holding you back. You’re far too doctrinally complicated, you Catholics. You’d kill us over whether we believe or not that the wafer is actually the real flesh of Jesus.” Or, “Let’s just forget all these doctrines and we’ll get together and we’ll just unite and read the New Testament together and we’ll get straight to God. We’ll get straight to heaven without all of this clutter.” That painting is full of clutter. Everywhere you look, there are trip hazards. She’s almost about to fall over this globe, which symbolizes, in theory, the Catholic Church’s dominion over all of this world, which was a doctrine which Vermeer and his friends found not to their taste. What do you make, though, of the 15 children being baptized Catholic? Yes, there were 15, as you know, which is remarkable. Only one wife, right?…

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