In a world wracked by war and mayhem, Vermeer retreated into a single light-filled room and, for all intents and purposes, invented a notion of peace grounded in the autonomous free agency of his fellow human beings. The terror, though, is conspicuously being held at bay–in fact, argues New Yorker writer Lawrence Weschler (author of the recently released Vermeer in Bosnia), that is what those paintings are all about. Much as we’d like to believe so, however, artists have not always, like Vermeer, been on the side of the angelsÌ¢‰â”and Weschler will also invoke obverse instances.

Lawrence Weschler, the director of the New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU, was for twenty years a staff writer for the New Yorker. His dozen books include Mr Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder and now Vermeer in Bosnia.