Allegory of the Catholic Faith

Vermeer painted this around 1670 in a Dutch Republic where Catholic Mass was officially banned and held quietly in private houses dressed up as ordinary rooms. Vermeer himself had converted to Catholicism when he married, and here he tries something unlike his quiet interiors. A woman representing the Church sits with one foot on a globe, a hand at her heart, gazing up at a glass sphere hung from the ceiling. On the floor a heavy cornerstone has crushed a snake, and an apple lies nearby for the fall of man. It is his most loaded picture in symbols, and the least like the letter-readers and milkmaids that made his name.