Classic Debate: Rembrandt vs Vermeer - The Titans of Dutch Painting
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Welcome to Intelligence Squared, where great minds meet. I'm producer Leila Ismail. Today's episode is a classic debate from 2015, Rembrandt versus Vermeer, the titans of Dutch painting. Making the case for Rembrandt van Rijn was historian, author and broadcaster Simon Sharma.

Arguing in favour of Johannes Vermeer was author Tracy Chevalier, whose best-selling novel Girl with a Pearl Earring took inspiration from Vermeer's painting of the same name. Now let's join art historian, writer and museum director Tim Marlowe, who chaired the debate.

OK, first up, Simon Sharma, professor of history and art history at Columbia University, author of 17 books, I think, to date and counting, everything from slavery to the history of Britain to the history of the Jews, but also Rembrandt's Eyes, which has just been republished by Penguin. Tonight, he's Rembrandt's voice. Let him start 23 minutes on Rembrandt, starting now. Thank you, Tim. Now we...

No, we don't have time for that. We so don't have time for clapping. We barely have time for breathing, actually. To begin with, what do we want from art? How do we think of the very greatest art? It could even be abstract art. Do we want art essentially to be an edited version of our own experienced human reality and all its kind of sweat and dirt and flesh and blood and craziness and passion as well as its quiet, tender moments? Do we want that cleaned out?

Do we want a vision? Is art supposed to give us a vision of edited life, then crystallized in a beautiful cube of light? If that's what we want from art, then Vermeer is our boy. We do both need art vision.

both needs. I don't know about Tracy, but I've never done this in an Intelligence Squared debate, but I will not go into mourning if Mr Vermeer of Delft wins rather than, sorry, my one. He's saying, what a fine advocate you are with friends like you, you know, etc.,

Because art needs earth and it needs light. But if you think in the style of Shakespeare, for example, that actually art should embrace the magnitude of humanity, all of it, and create, as William Hazlitt said...

the genius of Rembrandt was to create something out of nothing, to actually change our minds about what is ugly and what is beautiful, how art can transfigure the plain and the decrepit and the ruined and the mottled and the palsied and the poor, as well as the rich and gorgeous and beautiful, then...

My big boy is your guy. They're both, in their way, very religious. Vermeer, of course, famously devoutly Catholic. And when he turned to faith, when he turned to sempiternal matters, God, could we have less light? Goethe, what was Goethe's last words, class?

Can I have less Licht, actually? Or maybe we can't do it. Can we not do it, Hannah? Maybe not. Okay. Won't waste time on it. But actually, maybe it's better because, you know, slides are slides. Go to the National Gallery and everywhere. But when Vermeer turned to embody his faith in a late work, so he knew what he was doing, he worked essentially in allegory. What Vermeer did very beautifully, I think, actually, is to present you with something that was closed off.

in which you were given this exquisite, crystalline penumbra of shimmering light, the light of the gospel in this particular case. You had to decode it in this atypical painting. It's quite true. So the globe stands for something and the snake,

stands for something else, heresy, being crushed under the heel and so on. But when Rembrandt turned to faith in this little picture, and remember, Holland has been cleansed essentially of icons in the name of the Calvinist purity of churches. This is what he did. It's in the church in France. He

Here we have, and of course it's, you know, he has in mind always Christ. Before him, particularly Rubens, it was a variation on a much grander painting of Rubens with whom Rembrandt had a kind of love-hate relationship. Both wanted to emulate and stamp on Rubens' head in some ways as well. What we got is a...

a little body broken in pain, and Christ literally howling with misery and betrayal. Lama, lama, why, why, God, have you forsaken me? If Rembrandt sometimes does, as Tracy's going to say, feature Rembrandt, although the self-portraits are actually a very tiny part of his earth. He produced 350 paintings, after all, but they're very, very famous. But if Rembrandt does actually feature himself...

And it's thought that maybe an etching actually was a model for the screaming, the howling, pain-tortured face of Christ. It's not because he's an egomaniac. It's because Christian doctrine wished true believers to identify body and soul with that broken body of Christ. It's what happened at communion.

So in some sense, Rembrandt wants to be, as all the great artists, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dante, and someone wants to be every man. He's not one thing. If you want one thing brought to a pitch of sublime consummation, you'll go for Vermeer. If you want somebody who can actually not present himself, but become part of other people's experience, including the experience of the crucified Christ, you'll go to Rembrandt.

Rembrandt also, we think quite rightly of Vermeer as someone who is no better painter ever. But of course what Vermeer does is use his brush as a lens.

We know he used the camera obscura. The inverted reflection was cast on the wall, and from that came the shimmering images, which were transcribed. It's why David Hockney and everybody else tries, unsuccessfully, I have to say, to imitate Vermeer. No one even has the remote temerity to try and imitate something like this. Now, look at that, the little oil sketch of Hendrickia bathing, sexy, tender, done probably just for the two of them, and tell me Rembrandt is not in every sense...

as stunning a brush handler as Vermeer. But he uses paints expressively, candidly, earthily. For example, if you look at her right hand on the left as you see it, it's almost a kind of blur and I'll come on to it. How am I doing, boss? You're doing well, six minutes. Okay. Rembrandt is astonishingly

candid about the fact that he's interested in using the brush not as a lens, not as a kind of transcription of a scientific vision, but as something which can actually generate substance with the loaded brush, with pigment. He is a kind of an extraordinary explorer of what the loaded brush can do. And in his art are many, many different kinds of handling. As, you know, it was a famous

test, actually, to be able to do water. That was, you know, in all the academic textbooks in Dutch and everything else as well, water was thought to be one of the great challenges because when you do water, you've got to have actually a sort of translucent skin of the meniscus on the surface, but it needs to be, it needs also to be purely transparent inside. So Rembrandt says, with these tiny little perfectly visible strokes of white, I can

which indicate exactly the ripple that Hendrickia's legs are making as she's feeling her way along this street. I can do that. I can do reality in that way. Then there are figures. Have you noticed in Vermeer not many old people around, actually? Not many old people, not many ugly people, not many scarred people, not many kind of palsy people, not many different kinds of people. Even the kitchen maids are starlets, basically. LAUGHTER

With curvy figures. Vermeer wouldn't have remotely occurred, Vermeer, to make Margaretha de Gere beautiful. Her husband is dead. Her face, the skin on her face is so tight, I'm sure it really was, that it reveals the praying skull below. And she knows she's not long for this world before she actually dies.

actually joins her husband. For this is Rembrandt's meat and drink. He truly embodies the saying of Terence that nothing human is alien to me, and nothing in that style was alien to the making of beautiful art. What Vermeer gives you, it seems to me, is dreams, the visions we have in dreams of impossibly perfect, exquisitely glorious, perfectly coloured art.

of a kind. It's sort of basically a cross between deep dream that one's having in the middle, a beautiful dream, and, I don't know about you, a drug trip, essentially. As in that. Of course, one of the most glorious paintings ever, ever achieved. It's Delft, isn't it? But this is what Delft really looked like.

Delft had actually just undergone a gigantic explosion in 1654. Had it been completely rebuilt? We know from internal chronicle evidence it most certainly hadn't.

But what is Vermeer? He's a good Catholic in perfectly... So, of course, this is one of his many images of resurrection. He repairs, and why not? We want to believe in Delft as heaven. Rebuilt the way it was before the fall, before the explosion, which killed Harold Fabritius. This is one image of a city.

Rembrandt, it's not all he does, but Rembrandt knows he has a short life. We all do. And he wants to do important things. He wants not just to say, what is beautiful? You know, this exquisite stillness of a jug of milk. He wants to say, what is our community? He's living, they all are living in a tiny country, which is a target of relentless military hatred by the French, by the Spanish.

So it's very important to understand what binds you together and to give it pictorial as well as boring textual expression.

Rembrandt will not steer clear of that, and it costs him dearly. It did not cost him dearly in the case of The Night Watch, but it might have done. It took risks. He's an incredible risk-taker. He will do things. He will fill up his years, not just be satisfied with 30 paintings, however exquisite, during a career. So this is Vermeer's idea. We have a little gathering of basically Madame Tussauds' waxwork figures at the front, standing there. Halfway through.

Halfway to madness. And this is Rembrandt's idea of a city. Yes. You know, I have to... Shall we all go through Amsterdam tomorrow, everyone? Irrespective of how it all turns out tonight, I will persuade you, all of you, and there are thousands of people who think this is the most overrated painting, do you think, actually ever to be declared a masterpiece? First of all, you're seeing a bit of the painting. It's much, much bigger. But the point I want to make is...

is all these people gussied up in their fancy dress, plentiful militia, are free citizens. We are not like the regiments of the ridiculous, vile Catholic despots in France and Spain. We are free citizens, and should the duty call, we will shoot our muskets and we will march forth

embodying both our freedom and our determination to die for our country and our Commonwealth and our city of Amsterdam. So it's chaotic.

It's chaotic, and that is the point. It's the centrifugal, exploding chaos of liberty. And what's happening to you, everybody, is that the company of Franz Banning-Koch is marching out of the picture frame. It's a 3D painting, right? The axis in most paintings, which is like a freeze...

parallel to the picture plane, is from back to front. And these figures are marching straight over anyone so inert, lazy, cynical, or apathetic not to answer the call of their country in arms. So...

What happens to the painting, and we really don't have time today, is that it has to represent this extraordinarily risk-taking energy of formal compositional freedom, and at the same time be tightly disciplined, not fall apart entirely. And there's a way by using this great orthogonal St. Andrew's cross design in which Rembrandt pins the composition down. Hey, freedom and order, liberty and discipline, that's how the Dutch will survive, maybe, if we're very, very lucky.

So, the crystalline cube, the camera obscura, I think we'll leave him, but I just want you to notice from the great Kenwood, it's fantastic to see. How did that happen, Tim? The ivy bequests, which won't let anyone loan anything. Who was blackmailing who? It's now in a national gallery. But go back, you can see it's just in the hamster teeth. This was the first Rembrandt painting I saw in the flesh.

And look at it, 1661, he's bankrupt. He's three years out of losing everything he had, not just his house, not just the death of his wife, but also his entire huge art collection, his collection of paraphernalia, the stuffed armadillos, the antique casts. He has to carry all this around in his enormous head.

It was his friend Jeremias Decker, of whom he did a gorgeous portrait, which ought to have been, don't want to be churlish, ought to have been in the National Gallery, from St. Petersburg, who said, Oh, Rembrandt, I am merely a master of words, Decker being a poet, but if I tried to praise thee...

I would praise thy mighty nimble mind. Rembrandt is not just full of sentimental gush, everybody. He's not just about passions and emotions. He is a formidable, mighty motor of thinking. But the thinking never feels like a seminar. It's said of late Rembrandt that he couldn't draw. He was indifferent to drawing. He was sort of apathetic, really. He didn't care about the loose iron. So the two circles there...

that's taken at least 10 seconds, and who knows what it is, the

The two circles refer back in Rembrandt's kind of professorial, swotty way to a story told by Vasari about Giotto. Giotto is brought before the Pope and the Pope says, you think you're good, draw me something right away. Giotto does this freehand circle. Rembrandt knows that. Everybody knew Vasari because it had been translated into Dutch by Carol von Mander. So he says, can I draw, mateys? Look at the way I've done my hair, my nose, and so on, you know.

Here's an exercise in doing it. He needed to reassert his authority that it's not, again, egomania. But look, everybody, here's what makes Rembrandt special, different. He's an experimentalist. If your eye in this horrible slide can travel down to the instruments of materially making the art, the brushes, the palette...

The mild stick, and that's a cute thing, the mild stick is what you lean against the surface in order to do refined detail. The mild stick, and look at his hands. His hands are this phenomenal whir of motion. You won't see hands like that again, really, until we get to impressionism, I think, actually. They make a decision about finish. Now, another reason I want you to vote for Big Boy behind me is that...

Far from being self-centered and closed off, everything Rembrandt did, particularly in these late years, was about engaging you, us.

We do the finishing in our own mind. He is an old bastard in many ways. He's horrible to many people. But he's the most comradely of artists in his sketches, in his drawings. It's profoundly moving that he believes in the chamber of our imagination, which will supply the finish. You do a painting roughly...

And then the viewer gets to decide how smoothed out the details might possibly be. And there's one painting, I don't know, I think I might finish with this one actually. How am I doing? You're doing fine. Okay. This is a painting, Alas. Have you seen this in the flesh?

He won't let anyone see it now. This is a painting of a man called Jan VI. The painting is now owned by someone called Jan VI, the baron Jan VI von Hillichom. And it used to be the case that you could get a little ticket at Rijksmuseum and go down the road and see it. And you can't do that anymore. But here's what I want to show you. I think it was on, okay, look at that. Is that Manet or whatever? What is that? That's a 17th century painter. That's not Vermeer.

This is someone who's actually showing you what brushwork can do, allowing you, and there's a reason for this. He's not just doing it to show why. Okay. Jan Six is a friend, slightly fair-weather friends, it turned out. Rembrandt was not great in repaying loans. Jan had an IOU. And, yeah. And so, but he comes from a family of dyers, right?

of cloth merchants who were dyers. And what Rembrandt was wonderful at, no painter in the history of this period of art had a gift for empathy.

Not a gift for egotism, but a gift for empathy, understanding what the patrons wanted. He sometimes ran ahead of the patrons and got into terrible trouble, as with the great Claudius Sybilis with the town hall. But every effort he could make was to do this, and just as he pays us the compliment of finishing the work in our own head and our own eyes, he paid his patrons the compliment of saying,

I have a sense of how you want to be. And the pictures will say, goodness, you are so right. That's exactly how I wanted to be. So this is the second generation of a rich dyer. Hence this cape, which when you go and see it, if you go and see it, but even if you look at it in my book, is the most unrivaled

eye-piercing vermilion scarlet you will ever see. It's not that wretched color on all reproductions. So he's wearing his inventory. He's wearing his family history. But Jan VI is also a poet, as is Rembrandt in his way.

And Janszik wrote a play called Medea, where Embrat was hired to do a frontispiece, an etched frontispiece for it. And so Janszik said, I'm not all about money. The Dutch all say it. We're not about money. We're about reflection. We're about inwardness.

And the glorious thing about Rembrandt at this moment, when his fortunes are very difficult, is he turns from an exuberant street life, you know, the great playboy, if I answer that, really, the show-off, the man who thinks, he's Titian and Rubens and Raphael and all the rest of it, into inward thoughtfulness. But it's the thoughtfulness that is in flesh and blood. So the shadow falling over, again, it's a very deep shadow, much deeper than that, is the sort of sign of poetic reflection. But Jan VI is carrying this complicated baggage around.

He's posed by Rembrandt exactly between the street and the house. Hence, he's putting on, or possibly taking off, a glove. Look at the glove. The glove, again, is painted with sensational dairy. That glove is in motion. Everything in Vermeer appears to rest. Everything. Vermeer is about crystallization.

Rembrandt was about animation, human animation. So that glove is a whirl of undetermined paint. And most of all, the frogging, the greatest frogging. It's probably not a big frogging competition in the history of art, but that would win it. Just a brush loaded, a whole bristle brush loaded so much with that yellow pigment, the bristles separate completely.

And it is, of course, a revered demonstration of painting. There's the detail of the glove, and there's the detail of what Rembrandt does with it. But you see it, and this extraordinaryness isn't seen as a revolutionary moment in the entire history of Western painting, which is exactly what it is. I've got, like, one minute left? Okay. I think that's going to finish well. Okay.

Here's a hand on a breast. It's Vermeer. Here's a hand on a breast. It's Rembrandt. You choose. I want to do one final image. That one. Talk of revelations. This... Oh! Did you catch it? I'm so sorry. Did you catch it? Thank you. Rembrandt is the only person to whom it occurs. There is a complicated psychology, everybody, when a man looks at a woman.

There's a fantastically funny moment in the actually not terrible Alexander Korda film biopic with Charles Lawton. And Charles Lawton looks at Hendricka Stoffel's play Bail to Lancaster. And he brings her in and, you know, and then he puts her on a chair and she's very self-conscious. And he goes, you don't have to worry, my dear. It's all about art. No. No.

And in fact, of course, the nude is an entitlement for the male gaze. Remember, it sees. Remember, no feminist at all. Sees there is a subtle complication there. He's done freedom. He does human animation. He does relationship between sexes. So in a series of etchings, which are all laid out beautifully in the exhibition, we see a model between takes. We see a real woman who is not a nude.

who is recovered in Rembrandt's image as a woman entire, a woman who is cold, who is warming herself by the stove. Art ultimately, reality ultimately crashes into art. The mighty marriage between art and human truth is one that Rembrandt and only Rembrandt made.

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So that's crystallisation against animation, Rembrandt's Strip Bear. Isn't it brilliant that a man who accuses the other artists of taking drugs actually started by saying that Rembrandt speaks to him? Still, that's one of those great things that we might draw on later. Now, Vermeer. Tracy Chevalier doesn't really need an introduction, but she's the author of seven novels whose subjects artistically range from medieval tapestries to William Blake novels.

and of course, Vermeer, The Girl with the Pearl Earring. It was her second novel, published in 1999. It sold four million copies worldwide and still counting. It's also the subject of a best-selling film with Scarlett Johansson and Colin Firth. So here to make the case for Vermeer, Tracy Chevalier. Simon, it's like listening to you is like looking at a Rembrandt painting. LAUGHTER

Now, thank you so much for giving us your insight and your passion about Rembrandt. I feel like you're riding a giant Rembrandt wave that's crashing onto London this week. And we've chosen today, which happens to be the day that the late Rembrandt show opens in the National Gallery. So there's this huge sloshing of Rembrandt all over the place. And...

I don't want to get knocked down by it, but I think I'm starting here a little Vermeer undertow. So that's what's happening. But with all of your knowledge, I thought you might be able to help me out. I've been thinking this week, so you can think about this while I'm talking. I've been thinking this week about where in the world you can actually see, stand in a room and see a Rembrandt and a Vermeer at the same time.

Now, I can only think of one place, and that's London Kenwood House, which is probably where you saw the late Rembrandt first when you were young. And I can't think of any place else, so maybe you can have a little think, and if we can come up with something at the end, we can. There aren't many... Ah, in the same room. In the same room. Most places have a Vermeer and a Rembrandt, but they're in different rooms. So Kenwood House is a good place for me to start because of this possibility

possibly unique proximity of a Rembrandt and a Vermeer in the same room, but also because I live near it. I'm very familiar with Kenwood House. I go there all the time. I pop in. I have a look at the Vermeer. I have a look at the Rembrandt, too. And then I go. And in fact, when I was writing Girl with a Pearl Earring back in 1998, I used to get stuck, and then I'd walk across the heath to clear my head

Inevitably, I'd end up at Kenwood House. I'd go in and see the Vermeer, and that would unblock me somehow. And then I'd go back and write some more. So I have a real fond spot, place in my heart for that particular room in Kenwood House. Now, when you go into that room, if you turn right, and then you turn right, you see...

Well, actually, you don't see this at the moment because of the National Gallery at this exhibition. But if you go back next May, you'll see it again in its place. It is a late... I thought it was very late. I thought that he had finished painting it in 69. They're giving poor information in various places. I won't say where, though. But it's a late Rembrandt. And the thing about it is I stand in front of it and I look...

at the beautiful, beautiful brushwork that's so loose you can see it's almost like a painting in progress. And the brown of his robe and the white of his cap, the cream, I love that.

So I stand, and most of all, of course, we all look at his face because his face is just, has his whole life in it. He doesn't hide anything. It's warts and all. He has been through love and so much loss. He has been incredibly popular. He's going into debt. He's got it all there.

It's a very Rembrandt face, if you know what I mean, apart from it being him. It really shows a person in all of his naked rawness, especially his eyes. I see those eyes all the time of dark, really just...

getting you, they're getting you, they're pinning you. And there's so much sadness in those eyes. I'm going to come back to those eyes. So I look at the painting and then I walk catty-corner across the room to this painting. This is Vermeer's Guitar Player from 1672, so several years after, or 10 years, 11 years after the Rembrandt.

This is a very quintessential Vermeer, and it's not even his best, but it has all of the elements that you associate with Vermeer. It's got a lot of yellow and blue in it. He loved those colors. He used them a lot. It's a woman on her own.

doing something in a room with light coming from one side. Usually the light is coming from the left. In this case, it's coming from the right. I love looking at this painting for her left hand. That is amazing painting work right there. Those fingers, I just think they're divine. The cloth here, all around her knee, he just renders those folds of the satin beautifully.

And I find when I'm in that room

then I spend a lot longer in front of this painting than I do the Rembrandt. Now, yeah, okay, it could be because I know more about Vermeer and I like Vermeer better, but I think it's something else. Why is it that I'm so attached to looking at him? Why do I spend longer in front of a Vermeer than a Rembrandt? Well, I think there are three reasons that are all sort of overlapping that I'm going to go into. The first one, let's go back to Rembrandt.

This painting is one of many, I think, 40 self-portraits. Now Vermeer painted 36 paintings, so we're already, Rembrandt has painted more self-portraits than Vermeer has painted paintings. And that's not even all. There is a whole category of paintings that are of Rembrandt who has put himself in paintings that are of something else. So he used himself as a model a lot.

And I don't even know if we should bother to make that distinction because, frankly, when you look at a Rembrandt that has people in it, they're all Rembrandt. They all look exactly like Rembrandt. You see those sad, straight eyes staring out at you. All of his people, even when they're named portraits, to me look like a member of the Rembrandt family. And when Rembrandt paints...

He's painting himself over and over and over again. And it feels like he's there, he's exposing himself in all of his painterly glory, and he's saying, this is me, and you're not invited. Now, Vermeer had a very different idea about what a painter is and what a painter should be to the viewer, right?

We only can think of really two times when Vermeer painted himself. If that, we're not sure. There's so little known about him that it's almost impossible to tell. The first is this. I love this image. He's got his back to us. He's wearing red stockings. In fact, I'll show you the whole painting. This is called The Art of Painting. It's from 1666-67. It's mid-career.

Vermeer has created this tableau of here's what painting is like. And what he does is he goes to his dress-up box and he gets out some clothes and said, I'm going to dress up as an artist today. He's wearing a black beret, see? He's wearing a black doublet with slit sleeves and back.

No artist wore that when he was actually painting. This is the idealized vision of an artist. He's placed himself with his back to us. He's wearing red stockings. I think that's what is the real piss take here is that he just isn't serious about the vision he has of himself or he doesn't want us to take it too seriously. He doesn't want to be in our way.

What he's doing is he's stepping aside, literally stepping back into the painting so that we can step forward and engage with it more fully. With Rembrandt, with a self-portrait, it is me and you are out there. Here, Rembrandt is beckoning, come in. Now, to be completely fair, he did paint another portrait, possibly of himself, an earlier one where he is facing forward.

There he is in an early painting called the Procurus. Ah, the breast painting. Yes, hand on breast. We're coming back to that. This is an early Vermeer from 1656. He was 24 years old. He was still trying to figure out what his style was going to be and what his subject was going to be.

And this is a portrait, it's a Dutch genre painting. The young woman in yellow is being courted by, well, courted, in quotes, by the man in red, probably a soldier. He's got a coin, he's got his hand on her breast, we know what's going to happen next. This has all been brought about by the old woman in the back, the procuress, she's basically pimping the young woman.

In Dutch genre painting of the time, the tradition was if you have somebody on the side looking out when everybody else isn't looking out, that's often a self-portrait of the painter. And here he again is in his dress-up costume as an artist.

raising his glass, looking very merry. And this is an early Vermeer that, frankly, if I didn't tell you it was a Vermeer, you probably wouldn't know it was. It's not what we think of as the Vermeer the master. This is a young painter still finding his feet.

still trying to figure out what he's going to do. But his vision of the painter is not to the fore. It's not to the front. It's almost as a jokey character to the side. Again, we're invited to come a little closer. This is 1656. Something happened to Vermeer right after that. I want you to keep your eyes on the woman in yellow and watch. Now, it might be the same model. It might not be.

This woman in yellow is completely, completely different from the procuress.

And the vision, the way Vermeer painted changed. Now, we don't know why. It's possibly because some art historians suggest it's because he used a camera obscura starting around this time, either to view painting, to set up, or even to paint by. If you've seen the film Tim's Vermeer, that takes it to an extreme. But certainly something happened, and a camera obscura changed

It focuses light and it focuses color. So the colors become more intense and some of the focus, what you see through a lens, some things are more in focus, some out of focus. But even more importantly, and this brings me to the second reason why I think I prefer Vermeer to Rembrandt. First, Vermeer has stepped aside and let me to get up close to the painting. Now he's inviting me into the painting.

This is what I call the transcendence of the everyday. He's found his subject matter, and the subject matter is what goes on in our daily lives. It's not about Greek mythology, which he painted. It's not biblical scenes, which he painted early in his career. It's not genre scenes, which are trying to push some moral agenda. This is the transcendence of the everyday. It's making something we do, pouring milk...

Beautiful. It's making it sexy. I hope I look like that when I'm pouring milk in the morning. Other paintings we think of Vermeer making his...

His quintessential paintings are usually of women on their own in a corner, the light coming in from the left, doing something from the everyday. So they're either putting on a necklace, playing a lute, weighing gold, like did that back in, or reading a letter or pouring milk. All of those things that we can step in and say,

Yeah, I know what that's like. I pour milk every day. I read letters all the time. We feel like we're being invited in. Not only that, Vermeer puts a lot of effort into the detail, into the everyday detail of the paintings. You don't notice it. You don't see the brushwork in the way Rembrandt shows off with brushwork. But here you see the little dots of white paint along the handle of the

and on the bread itself, it makes it look like a table full of jewels. So beautiful. In another painting of a similar time from 1657, just before the milkmaid, but also probably using a camera obscura, this is called a young woman at an open window reading a letter.

And again, it's exquisite and it's privileging the everyday. When I look at it, I think, yes, maybe my life, my banal, quotidian life is actually more beautiful and interesting than I thought. This gives me that permission.

What Vermeer also does here is he puts things in the foreground. So he's put a curtain in the foreground, which he sort of pulled back. It makes it look almost theatrical, that there's this intimate moment that we're spying on. He's pulled back that curtain, but he's placed...

a table in the front so it holds us back so that she's in the background of the painting and we are drawn into the foreground by the subject matter so we're inside the painting but we're not quite with her

Now, the third reason. We've had Vermeer step aside out of the painting, out of the subject. He's allowed us to step into the painting and become part of the everyday life. The third reason is his universality. Now, you didn't think I was going to go on and on without talking about Girl with a Pearl Earring, of course. This is a painting from 1665 to 1666.

mid-career and

It is an amazingly universal painting. It's not just that we've seen the image all over the place. It's not just that. It's more that Vermeer has taken something that looks very specific and made it universal. This is not actually a portrait. It's not meant to be somebody who you recognize, who you can identify. It's what they call in Dutch a tronie. A tronie means in Dutch face. It's like a type. He's painted...

a type of person. So tronies can be something like the drinker or the gambler or the artist or here, the beautiful young girl.

The way he's done it is by taking all of the things that we think would make us know a person and strip them away. So if you look at the girl, you can't tell what color her eyes are. Sometimes they look green, sometimes they look brown or gray. I know I've studied them a lot. And I even asked the woman who restored the painting for the 1995 exhibition,

in the hague what color her eyes were and she said, "I don't know. It's impossible to tell." You can't tell what color her hair is. It's all hidden away. You can't really tell what the shape of her face is because she's turned it to the side.

You can't even tell what the shape of her nose is because that line blends right into the cheek. So you can't tell, is it a thin nose? Is it a bulbous nose? Who knows? All of those cues that we normally get to be able to scan a face, to put an identity to it, have been stripped away.

As a result, everybody thinks they know somebody who looks like her. I have had hundreds of emails from people writing to me saying, I love this painting because my aunt looks like this painting.

I love this painting because my daughter looks like this painting, and here's a photo of her. See, doesn't she look like the girl with the pearl earring? And I go, well, she doesn't, but I know what you mean. And a reader even once said to me, Tracy, I think you wrote that book because you look like girl with the pearl earring. I thought, flattery will get you everywhere. How many books do you want me to sign? That was fabulous. But...

It's because all of the specifics have been stripped away, so it feels universal. So not only has Vermeer stepped out of the canvas, not only has he invited us in, he's actually invited us inside the painting so that we can turn around and actually become Girl with a Pearl Earring. If you go on the internet...

There are hundreds of photos of women and a few men who have dressed themselves up as Girl of the Pearl Eerie. Beautiful, beautiful. And why not? What other painting? I'm sorry, but you don't go on.

on the internet and find people dressed up as Rembrandt. It just doesn't happen. I'm really sorry. Sorry, Simon. And they don't dress up as Rembrandt paintings either. Not only are we invited to step in because it's so universal, we think we know her and that we are her. We step in, we turn around, and then we decide we're going to make it

something, we're going to make it our own painting. So if we want a zombie girl with a pearl earring, we've got one. Now, this is a great painting and it's great in so many ways, but one of them is that it's a, it's a

Vermeer has managed somehow to make this specific, to make something feel familiar and yet utterly mysterious. There's so many questions I have about this woman. What's her name? Who is she? How old is she? Is she happy or sad? What is she thinking? I've written a whole book about her and I still don't know.

Now, I would never dream of saying that Vermeer is a better painter than Rembrandt. It would be foolhardy to do it, especially with Simon here. And it would be like comparing apples and pears. So I'm not going to do that. But I will say that I think that looking at a Vermeer painting is more satisfying experience than looking at a Rembrandt.

Rembrandt is painting for Rembrandt. Vermeer is painting for us. Thank you. Serene, really, and there's a kind of method, isn't there, in the way that both of our speakers are approaching their subject matter. Before we start the debate, I've got the results of the intro poll, as it were, as you came in. So 31% of you voted for Rembrandt. 30% of you voted for Vermeer. LAUGHTER

And 39% of you don't know. Close. Right. Simon, do you want to respond to this question?

this idea that Rembrandt is all about the self and that Vermeer is the generous spirit who invites us in and resonates universally. Yeah, that's the main point. I was really kind of baffled by that. I mean, maybe my eyesight's worse than I thought, but I couldn't see any resemblance between Rembrandt and Jan VI whatsoever, or 95% of all his sitters. So, you know...

the reason, and I was going to show the great Nicholas Rutz from the Frick, where he also is invested in inhabiting this fur merchant, really. So he almost looks like one of the little foxy little sables that he does. So what is often said about Rembrandt, and I agree, is it had an extraordinary capacity to actually make him, you know, to find himself in the psychology of, of the sitters. But,

You know, the group portraits as well, which are about very important things. The Anatomialism of Dr. Tulp is about the relationship between dexterity of one kind, the dexterity of the anatomist dissecting a body, and the dexterity of the painter, both of them God-given. So, but...

When you look at that extraordinary electrifying painting, it's really Rembrandt dissolving his personality inside the ethos of the group. If you go even to the Syndics, the Stalmasters, the beautiful painting that's hanging in the exhibition at National Gallery, he has to do a really difficult thing. These are quality control inspectors.

sitting at a table posing for their portrait, you know, not a boardroom meeting, not a thrilling subject. But he makes the effort. He makes the effort, essentially, to think about the relationship between what they do. In other words, is this

is this cloth good enough to be proudly represent the best that Holland could do? And he gives this extraordinary sense of dynamism, actually, in the group. So far from him... You know, he painted, right, 40 paintings. There are 400 paintings. That's 10% of the output. But you'd honestly, Tracy, what I don't get is the notion that when he looks at himself, it's in any sense vain or self-absorbed. It's...

brutally self-scrutinizing it's sort of lacerating in its ruthless candor yes um so you know he may indeed why did he paint himself so much it seems to me like 10 of your output is a lot of of painting yourself and also more than that there's so many times when he puts himself in the painting no no that's well that's strictly factually wrong tell me more than two

Pardon? Tell me more than two. Where he puts himself inside the painting. There's the raising of the cross. There's one eye in the night watch. Why not one eye in the night watch? I said more than two. It's not putting himself, it's that he uses his own face in various paintings. It's simply not true. No, he's interested in the great...

You know, human comedy, the theatre. No one paints more different kinds of human beings than Rembrandt. With all his dazzling brilliance and beauty, the cast of characters in Vermeer is...

tiny soap opera of domesticity. Yes, it's a focus. Even the prostitute really looks like someone who can't stop. I mean, she's a gorgeous piece of cosmetically designed allure. Remember how you smell the street.

Yes, but that gets a little exhausting after a while. He doesn't do it all the time. He does it a lot. Look at the Hendrickia bathing picture. That's not just about dirt and rawness and it's not, you know, it is his lover. And a more tender picture of a lover you can never imagine. What about age? I mean, Vermeer, we think, was about 43 when he died. That's roughly the estimate. We know Rembrandt was 63. 20 years extra, that shouldn't... I mean, obviously, that's...

tough really in terms of the debate. He had 20 years extra, that may play out with our audience.

Do you think that, I mean, Simon seems to be arguing that age actually is where Rembrandt becomes at his most profound. You seem to be arguing by implication that actually it's the freshness, the vitality, the universality. But do you see it as a significant disadvantage? I mean, it's something you need to deal with, the fact that he painted so few and he died young. I think the fact that he painted so few is actually in his favor. Because there's so few, you appreciate them more.

I agree with that. You go, you can't, I've seen all the Vermeers there are to see. Have you seen every Rembrandt? It's just impossible. There's so many of them and it gets exhausting after a while. And the thing about Rembrandt is that he didn't get a chance to self-select in a way because he painted so much. Well, no, I'll argue your case. He's greedy and unstoppable. And he has terrible off days. Rembrandt has terrible off days. And Vermeer almost in his prime never has an off day.

I'll be honest. Vermeer does have off days. He doesn't paint hands very well, except for the guitar player. He does some awful gaps, but we all do. But the fact that there were so many fewer, and I think that he painted slower, more slowly. He took a lot more time on canvases. You can see that. His brush strokes are very carefully done. And if he did use a camera obscura, it slowed it down even more. So there is this feeling of less is more.

And that's what I love about him is that concentrated focus, that he doesn't do these broad, except for the view of Delft, which is really the only place where he widens out. It's always in that focused corner of his studio that you see the same wall and the same hangings and the same women over and over again, and yet each one feels like a jewel and slightly different. It's the taking the focus like that where you actually allow yourself to expand what is there.

See, Rembrandt, although that's true, you're absolutely right about that. Rembrandt, what I think is sort of... Can I record that? It is. What is bizarre is to represent Rembrandt as someone who's not interested in the people, who's kind of closed off. I don't get

that invitational thing as well, countless Rembrandts in which, you know, the whole direction of the way he's organized space is designed. And more importantly, it's not just Rembrandt, but other people who Rembrandt beautifully conveys who do indeed are not kind of shifty and masked in shadow and in profile. Some of them are always in profile.

Rembrandt is interested in what happens when your eyes out there meet my eyes he's interested in that weird sometimes sexy sometimes disturbing sometimes irritable transaction what I actually wanted to say to him was that it's incredibly important Rembrandt's a printer

Rembrandt, as you'll see, in a way, the National Gallery show is kind of funny, but I really beg you, even though it's very hard, and this is not to do with the debate or winning points, it's to enjoy this stunning exhibition at the National Gallery. You know how difficult it is when there's a crowd in there and there's people, everybody's craning. Please, please take the effort to do so, because there are some extraordinary etchings in that. And the etching, not all of them, but the etching is a way of producing multiples to reach a

Rembrandt is theatrical, terrible theatrical ham. He's injured, he wants to be loved, he makes it very difficult to be loved. He's above all interested in the diffusion of his art to a public. He's also interested in... He's an extraordinary draftsman, as you know. The drawings talk about less is more, the winter landscape in the fog, which I'm sure you know is like three lines and somehow is a universe of a snow-covered village.

So he can't stop. He does suffer from a kind of St. Vitus dance of multitasking in every conceivable medium he possibly can. And he will make mistakes. What I love, it is an opposite temperament. It is an opposite temperament.

for Vermeer who felt if there were mistakes in Vermeer we'll never know about them and that's a kind of lovely thing there are no drawings there's not no he's just a crazed perfectionist we know so little about him I sometimes feel like Rembrandt's biography

swamps him. Whereas Vermeer, we know nothing about. Well, we only have seven letters by Rembrandt. I feel like that allows me to, into the paintings more easily because I don't have to, I don't have a name on the, on the, the, it's not a portrait of somebody. It's, it's a type. And so it allows me in there's, there's space there to breathe and to be a little calmer. Whereas Rembrandt, it's just, well,

look at all this paint, look at it all. Whereas Vermeer just smooths it out. You very rarely see it. Every now and then you see a little detail where he's let himself go a bit. And because everything else isn't let go. I mean, do you know the red hat, the girl in the red hat at the National Gallery in Washington? Possibly a Rembrandt. Possibly a Vermeer. Yep.

But it may not be over there. Amazing red paint and the lace maker in the Louvre, this tiny jewel of a painting where the lace coming out of this little box, the bits of embroidery thread are just done in this wonderful snarl of kind of almost impressionist style painting. And you go, wow.

And yet the rest of the painting is so controlled that it makes that little bit when he lets go, you just go, yes. And it's, it just, whereas Rembrandt, I just feel like he lets go too much. It's just like, it's like diarrhea almost. You could almost say... You're really going to wish you had said that. Let's not go down that road. I know he, a lot of his paintings are brown, but that's, you know...

It's not the same. It's funny, the American painter Chuck Close always winds me up by saying he thinks Rembrandt's an exquisite Escherine drawer, but he says the painting's a gravy, but never diarrhea, I have to say. It is sort of stomach-churning. I mean, I think one of the problems and one of the liberating factors of a debate like this for you all is, I'm not giving you the parameters of how you're going to make your decision. It may be the sum total of achievement,

is going to favour one artist who lived longer and produced a lot more work, or it may be that your decision has to be made on hitting the heights, and that one painting can actually win a debate, because that's what all artists in the end are working for, from one work to the next, to the next, or even if they're making a series, it's always this quest for some kind of unattainable perfection. That's up to you. I'm going to throw it out to you in about two minutes. But I just wanted to bring...

Bring it all down. Bring religion, or bring it up, into the debate again. Because you both cite religion very strongly. And I know, Simon, that one of your things about Rembrandt is bearing witness. He's the quintessential Protestant painter.

Vermeer's interesting, isn't it? Because you say he's a devout Catholic, but he becomes a Catholic. I think he's born a Protestant, but he becomes a Catholic in order to marry his wife. So let's just have a few... I mean, you know, we know that the Rubens-Rembrandt debate is always won in this country by Rembrandt because fundamentally we're not a Catholic country or a counter-reformatory country. But

Just some observations about religion in this debate and how it pans out. Is Rembrandt always at an advantage in Britain because he's a Protestant? Yeah, probably. I mean, I'm not sure Rembrandt is. We'll find out tonight. But I'm actually not sure Rembrandt is at an advantage over Vermeer in Britain at all. I think Vermeer plays exquisitely to the kind of mania for understatement, which is our national condition, which always makes me astounded.

that I've had any kind of career at all. I will say about, and you're obviously right, Tim, we've wonderfully kind of impersonated the temper of our heroes. What I want to say about Rembrandt, this is why I showed that not very well-known beautiful cross in a French church, is that what Rembrandt took very seriously, not as an Orthodox Calvinist, which he really wasn't, his mother actually was a Catholic,

But he joins a group called the collegians, who are kind of sort of like Dutch Quakers, not exactly. And the collegians are all no Hebrew, and they're quite close to Jews, another reason. It's very hard to imagine Vermeer hanging out with Jews, I have to say. He's so white. But...

Rembrandt is very interested in religion embodied inside us, walking the streets with us. When you go to the National Gallery, and we are going to check up on you to make sure that you do, you will see a famous St Bartholomew in the Getty, which everybody can't believe that. And he looks like a kind of middle-level bank manager, doesn't he? He's got a short hair and a moustache, looks like a 19th century...

That's tough on St. Bartholomew. And the reason is that for Rembrandt, of course, who lives in a Jewish neighborhood, but who hangs out with all sorts of nobly-faced people in Amsterdam, we all carry the possibility of biblical transfiguration around with us.

And that is extraordinarily moving. The very last painting he did, almost certainly, there were two that vie for it, and I was going to show The Prodigal Son in the Hermitage. That is an incredible painting where... I was going to say, the other contender, I'll say very quickly, is in the show, again, National Gallery. It's of Simeon with the Christ Child, and it is this old blind man who, remember, it's kind of made blind. Remember, it's his father who was blind. And the light is coming out from baby Jesus,

in a kind of great explosion, a kind of spray. He's almost, it's somehow like he's got a spray, very, very powdery and granular paint. It is the most extraordinarily moving thing. And these are commonplace faces. The baby is a fat,

Chubby street baby from Amsterdam. And the other contender is the prodigal son. And you don't... There's one time where, again, he's not doing faces, actually, Tracy, in 1669, the last year. The father, again, prodigal son, is made to be blind. You'll all know this. He's leaning on his son. And you do not see the face of the prodigal son in this case. Now, completely...

except to at his point it's kind of rarity to actually do the strategy of the hidden in this case it's hidden the prodigal son kneels before his father his head is shorn very badly his clothes are falling off him and what you see at the center of the painting are upturned shredded lacerated soles of his feet that was rembrandt's religion

Vermeer was born Protestant. We think he became Catholic in order to marry his Catholic wife. And

The three paintings I can think of that have religious content, two were early. One was St. Barbara and the other was Mary and Martha. And then the late painting that Simon showed at the beginning, which is actually a really hideous painting. And the two early biblical scenes, I don't think much of either. It was before Vermeer came into his own.

And I think that he was blessed with being able to not having, not being expected to paint biblical scenes because he much preferred domesticity. And in fact, the Dutch feeling of the time, the Dutch middle class that was growing at that time in the 17th century during the Golden Age, wanted to see themselves reflected domestically.

in paintings rather than biblical scenes. And so he was able to indulge that. And I think what he does is, as I said before, he takes the everyday and he makes it more transcendent, more special. And there is something quite religious in that feeling. There's a Madonna-like feeling about a lot of the women. But I think that's the extent. It's a very personal religious feeling rather than a public one.

I remember Tom Paulin saying that he thought the woman pouring milk, this was on Newsnight Review, he thought this was about the Eucharist and transubstantiation. But that maybe says more about Tom than it does about Vermeer, but it's interesting in the everyday. The result. So, there's been an 8% swing to Vermeer from before the database. Up to 38% of you think he's won. 6% of you don't know. 56% of you voted for Rembrandt. So the winner...

You've been listening to Intelligence Squared. Thanks for joining us.

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