Johannes Vermeer: life of the week
Listen to the original audio · Transcribed with NVIDIA Parakeet · Timestamps stay in sync with the live audio
Johannes Vermeer is now regarded as one of the leading lights of the Dutch Golden Age, and indeed one of the greatest artists of all time. But in his own lifetime he was hardly known outside his own circle, and made so little money that he could barely afford to feed his large family. In this episode of the History Extra podcast, Andrew Graham Dixon, author of a new biography of Vermeer, chronicles the artist's life and argues that to fully understand the man and his work, we need to explore the religious milieu of the Dutch Republic in the seventeenth century. He was joined in conversation by Rob Atter. In your book, you write that Vermeer has been nicknamed the Sphinx of Delft.
Why has it been so hard for people to get a handle on him? Because of the strange uniqueness of his life, and it's just been terribly, terribly difficult to get to the heart of it. And having, I believe, got to the heart of it, I think I've also found the explanation for why he was so mysterious, because it turns out that he was Essentially working all his life for one family, he produced very few paintings altogether and almost no paintings for anyone else. So if during the time when he was alive you didn't happen to know Maria de Knaut or Peter Clauson van Rauven, his
his main patrons. If you weren't friends of that family, you could never know anything about him or see any of his pictures. And this is reflected in the immediate aftermath of his death when he more or less disappears entirely from view. By 1730 he's completely unknown. In fact the man who rediscovered him, it was, it was he, Theophile Gautier in the 19th century, who through a miraculous
We already have this episode, so unlocking it is cheap and permanent: the full transcript (39 minutes, 7,165 words), segment and word-level timestamps, and .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like, forever.
No account needed, we create one from your checkout email. With credits it is 1 credit; packs start at 5 episodes for $3.49, and monthly plans are cheaper still.