Antoni van Leeuwenhoek and Johannes Vermeer--Neighbors

choi

Jonathan Lopez, Through a Glass, Brightly. Wall Street Journal, Mar 28, 2015
www.wsj.com/articles/book-review ... j-snyder-1427487412
(book review on Laura J Snyder, Eye of the Beholder; Johannes Vermeer, Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, and the reinvention of seeing. Norton, 2015)

Excerpts in the windows of print:

Antoni van Leeuwenhoek and Johannes Vermeer were neighbors in Delft. Still, no one knows if they ever met.

Scientists long revered Van Leeuwenhoek while among artists Vermeer was almost forgotten.

Note:
(a) The title is a wordplay from “Through a Glass, Darkly”--a Biblical phrase from 1 Corinthians 13:12 (King James version). On several occasions, I researched into this famous phrase, but could not discern its meaning (there seems to be no deep meaning).
(b) In quotation 2, I do not know why the “v” in Van in capitalized. Is it because the first name was absent?

(c) “In the 17th century, two men of genius resided within a stone’s throw of each other in the picturesque Dutch town of Delft. Antoni van Leeuwenhoek (1632-1723), a microscopist, initiated the discipline we now call microbiology when he discovered hitherto unseen organisms—protozoa and paramecia—in a sample of ordinary drinking water. His neighbor, the painter Johannes Vermeer (1632-75) created some of the most highly praised works in the history of art, including the 'Girl With a Pearl Earring' (ca 1665).
(i) Regarding Antoni van Leeuwenhoek. In the Web his given name may also be spelled Anton, Antonie, Antonj and Antony.
(ii) The Dutch surname Vermeer is reduced from another Dutch surname Vandermeer (the actual spelling in Dutch is Van der Meer). The latter denotes “someone who lived by a lake, Middle Dutch mere.”
Dictionary of American Family Names, by Oxford University Press.

(d) “No prior microscopist, not even the great Robert Hooke, had ever thought simply to look at a droplet of water lighted from behind."
(i) Robert Hooke (28 July 1635 – 3 March 1703). Arizona State University, undated
askabiologist.asu.edu/content/robert-hooke
(photo legend: "The cover of Robert Hooke's Micrographia, published in 1665. In addition to illustrations of insects, snowflakes, and his famous slice of cork, he also described how to make a microscope like the one he used")

was an Englishman.
(ii) Van Leeuwenhoek first corresponded with Royal Society in 1673.

(e) "Never failing to interject apologies for his inadequate technical training and pedigree, Van Leeuwenhoek was the shambling, sighing, self-deprecating Columbo of 17th-century science, and his audience ate out of the palm of his hand."
(i) shamble (vi)
www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/shamble

Compare
shambles (n): “slaughterhouse”
www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/shambles
(ii) Columbo is the main character in the detective television show.
(iii) eat out of someone's hand: "Be manipulated or dominated by another, be submissive, as in He had the press eating out of his hand. This metaphoric expression alludes to a tame animal eating out of one's hand. [Early 1900s ]" {brackets original)
The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary, by Houghton Mifflin Company.
dictionary.reference.com/browse/eat+out+of+someone%27s+hand

(f) "Vermeer was a quiet soul who stayed home with his family and fiddled with the camera obscura, a precursor to photographic cameras but without the light-sensitive film. 'The box-type camera obscura is a light-tight wooden chamber with a hole or lens on one side,' Ms Snyder explains. 'It projects an inverted or reversed image of the scene either upon a glass plate or oilpaper on the top of the device or onto a nearby wall or canvas (by the use of a mirror the image can be made upright).'  Vermeer did not simply copy what he saw in the camera obscura. Rather, he used the device to understand how we come by visual knowledge."

camera obscura
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camera_obscura

(g) “Art can imitate life; it can also play games of make-believe. The black-and-white stone floors that figure in Vermeer’s paintings and those of other Dutch Golden Age artists were seldom present in actual Dutch homes of that era. (No extant Dutch 17th-century domestic interior contains such a floor, although some august public buildings of the period do.) They developed into a stock motif for Dutch artists largely because of the popular prints of Hans Vredeman de Vries (1527–ca 1607), an ingenious draftsman whose architectural capriccios portrayed unlikely and often amusing combinations of fountains, piazzas and statues, rendered plausible by the artist’s absolute mastery of perspective. Checkerboard floors and pavements—favorite motifs of Vredeman de Vries—became the default convention by which Dutch artists established recession into depth, a trick of the trade that was second nature to Vermeer."
(i) Anna Hoffman, Quick History: Checkerboard Floors; Retrospect. apartment therapy, Jan 6, 2011.
www.apartmenttherapy.com/quick-history-checkerboard-flo-136019
(ii)
(A) Hans Vredeman de Vries
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Vredeman_de_Vries
(Dutch)
(B) File:Hans Vredeman de Vries (Nachfolge) Ideale Palastarchitektur.jpg
commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hans_Vredeman_de_Vries_(Nachfolge)_Ideale_Palastarchitektur.jpg