A Brill Calendar: October 31

The Miracle of a Delft Church Ledger

Few pages in ledgers documenting events as they routinely happen, day in day out, evoke the artistic and scientific splendour of Holland’s ‘Golden Century’.

An exception is the one in a hefty tome in which the Reformed Church in the city of Delft listed the names of infants as they received the Sacrament of Baptism. When the book opens on October 31, 1632, it may be read that young Johannes Vermeer became one of God’s children on that day; although it would take a quarter of a millennium, and a French art-critic, to recognize him as one of the almost divine geniuses of painting.

As if this wasn't enough, the church scribe also recorded that the parents of Antonie van Leeuwenhoek saw to it that their newborn child was sent through the same sacred ceremony on the same day, in the same church. Documentary evidence proves that the two boys came to know each other quite well; the nature of their friendship and co-operation is a treasure-trove for cultural historians. Van Leeuwenhoek (Delft, 1632 – Delft, 1723) survived his friend Vermeer by almost half a century, and was deemed by unanimous consent to be the Adam of microbiology. He never attended University, but dabbled as an industrious and prosperous merchant and entrepreneur with an inquiring open mind for the ‘high-tech’ of his age and environment: microscopes and lenses.

In the surrounds of the adolescent Leyden University, young Van Leeuwenhoek would have found little sustenance for his appetite for extremely small beings; yet the coincidence in this ledger is a rather wonderful example of the creative potential inherent in Holland’s Golden Century.