Woman Holding a Balance

For a long time people assumed the woman in this quiet Delft interior, painted by Vermeer around 1664, was weighing gold or pearls. Close study of the canvas settled it. The little balance in her fingers is empty. Nothing sits in either pan. On the table the pearls and gold chains do spill from an open box, catching the light from the window, but she is not counting them. She waits for the scales to come to rest. Behind her head Vermeer has hung a painting of the Last Judgment, Christ with his arms raised over the saved and the damned, so that the small act of balancing in the front of the room quietly rhymes with the great weighing of souls behind it. The soft curve of her dress has made viewers wonder whether she is pregnant, though that may just be the fashion of the mid-1660s. She stands in the same steady side light Vermeer used again and again, her own reflection just visible in the mirror on the wall.