Allegory of Faith

Painted late in Vermeer’s career, the Allegory of Faith is one of only two surviving pictures in which he turned from the quiet domestic interiors he is known for to an openly allegorical subject. A woman in white and blue satin sits in a tiled room, one hand pressed to her breast and one bare foot resting on a terrestrial globe, gazing up at a glass sphere that hangs from the ceiling on a blue ribbon. She is a personification of the Catholic Faith, and the room around her is staged as a hidden Catholic church of the kind tolerated, but not permitted in public, in the Protestant Dutch Republic.

An iconographic program

For the picture’s symbolism Vermeer drew on Cesare Ripa’s Iconologia, the handbook of allegory whose Dutch translation appeared in 1644, taking elements from its figures of Faith without following any single one exactly. The globe beneath the woman’s foot answers Ripa’s description of Faith with the world under her feet; it is the same globe, made by Jodocus Hondius in 1618, that appears in Vermeer’s Geographer. The glass sphere overhead, likely borrowed from a Jesuit emblem book, stands for the mind’s capacity to hold the infinity of God, while her white and blue dress signifies purity and heaven.

Eucharist and original sin

On the table at the left a crucifix, a chalice, and a missal lie against a gilt-leather wall covering, together giving the scene its Eucharistic character. In the foreground a bitten apple recalls original sin, and a serpent, standing for Satan and death, lies crushed and bleeding beneath a cornerstone, the stone on which Christ told Peter to build His Church. Behind the woman hangs a large Crucifixion after Jacob Jordaens, and her seated pose echoes the Mary Magdalene at the foot of the cross in that painting, so that she seems to take on the role of the penitent saint.

Reception

Critics have long found the Allegory of Faith harder and more contrived than Vermeer’s genre scenes, with some judging the woman too worldly to carry a spiritual meaning. It was probably commissioned by a learned Catholic patron, and Walter Liedtke proposed the Delft collector Michiel van der Dussen, a supporter of the city’s community of Catholic lay-women. The painting had been lost to scholarship until 1899, when Abraham Bredius recognized it as a Vermeer; it later passed through the Mauritshuis and Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen on loan before entering the Metropolitan Museum of Art with the Friedsam Collection in 1931.