Tables of Knowledge: Descartes in Vermeer’s Studio (review)

The title of this book immediately intrigues: in what way might Descartes (1596–1650) conceivably enter the studio of Vermeer (1632–75)? The author, aware of what chronology and cultural conditions preclude, does not imagine a scenario altogether warranting the title. In effect, she compares works by these major thinkers for purposes of investigation. It is to her credit that she recognizes “the visual mind.” A scholar of comparative literature and Romance languages, with a focus on French, Stone is known for her interest in the nature of knowledge and representation in the classical period. The heritage of Foucault explicitly underlies this book, but when Stone invokes a painter with cult status she does so in a historically more informed way. Naming five scholars who have gone before her in making connections between Descartes and Vermeer, she distinguishes her project from theirs as assessing the “kinds of thoughts the mind proves capable of producing,” and specifically the kinds of thinking that Descartes and Dutch artists structured (16). Besides Vermeer, three Dutch still-life painters are each presented through one example. Stone examines Descartes almost solely through his Discourse on the Method.

In her very substantial preface and introduction Stone usefully defines many of her key terms: representation, method, science, taxonomy, table of knowledge, identity of things, unicity, truth, fable, framing, mise en abyme. Usage that deviates from these definitions, however, tends to be confusing. Her writing then comes closer to literature with its wordplays and inherent ambiguities. On this score, in the introduction the author covers herself by explaining that her book is also a representation, one whose rules are those of artistic engagement in particular. The explanation includes a personal note that bears quoting: “Considering Descartes together with Vermeer has the particular virtue, for scholars formed in the French tradition, of freeing us from the confines of the French monarchy and the knowledge it governed through its exclusive control of intellectual property by means of commissions, privileges, academies, and other forms of patronage” (20).

Stone warms to Dutch art, and for the most part demonstrates an admirably firm grasp of the material. The interdisciplinary connections she makes, however, turn out to be the usual. “Both science and art classify experience and [in so doing] develop forms of representation that produce knowledge through a combined reliance on logical systems and inventions” (131). Logical systems: art and science shared “an emphasis on structure, a well-ordered design” (xxiii). Most critical for this epistemology was “the mind as it engaged with nature and made it signify” (xxii). Still, a long, unnecessary argument with Svetlana Alpers’s polemical Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (1983) only adds irritation; rebuttals should have been put to rest long ago. Chapter 2, on pictures-within-pictures, while again familiar, should prove stimulating for the non-initiate. Already in the introduction Stone discusses the device of inset pictures in Vermeer’s “scientists,” The Geographer and The Astronomer. There she makes a thoughtful comparison: “[T]he framed paintings within the painting suggest the act of conceiving and fleshing out paradigms that is also key to Descartes’s work” (7). For the name Descartes, nonetheless, many others could be substituted. And Chapter 2 contains yet another dispiriting, scattershot comparison of Velázquez’s Las Meninas and Vermeer’s Art of Painting.

While Stone devotes numerous passages in the book to Descartes’s radical accomplishments, she makes the point repeatedly and with great variety that this Frenchman undermines his search for unified knowledge by inserting narratives. In the author’s analyses these narratives turn out to be so interesting that her persistence in taking the scientist to task becomes almost painful. The man’s failure? To greatly simplify, he is blind to the ways narrative disrupts the certainties of rigorous logic, thus breaking his own impossible rules.

Stone elaborates upon the intersections between science and art over the course of...