NEW YORK, NY.- Celebrated painter Johannes Vermeer was at the height of personal and professional risk when he painted Allegory of the Catholic Faith, a harsh, unequivocal challenge to Holland’s state-sanctioned and Calvinist-driven civic and religious repression. Author Neil Thomas Proto looks at Vermeer in a new light and places Allegory alongside Pablo Picasso’s Guernica in its classical spirit of artistic dissent and prophetic warning of his nation’s ethical and moral crisis.

April 1937. In the midst of the Spanish Civil War. The military forces under the direction of General Francisco Franco—in collaboration with the Catholic Church; with the financing of large industrialists, including some in the United States; and, by then, with the support of Nazi Germany and fascist Italy—sought the overthrow of the duly elected Republican government of Spain. The Nationalists, as they were called, relied on Adolph Hitler’s special Luftwaffe unit, which, without notice or warning or related to any military objective, engaged in repeated and brutally effective saturated bombing, at the height of a well-known market day, of the Basque town of Guernica, along Spain’s northern coastline. The deliberately murderous and destructive effect was brought to the world’s attention by American and European reporters.


Guernica. Photo: © Richard Villalon Dreamstime.Com

The painting that Pablo Picasso crafted, Guernica, now globally known, was dissent, a form of advocacy about the horror of war in a place and among people he knew. The artwork itself, the art of painting as he understood it, and his own preeminent stature were his means. The initial response among the academy once the painting was publicly accessible was—not surprisingly—ambivalence. Until, in October 1938, Herbert Read wrote “Picasso’s ‘Guernica.’”

The London Bulletin. October 1938. Read, a poet, teacher, and literary historian, wrote about Picasso’s Guernica: “The great canvas is flooded with pity and terror, but over it all is imposed that nameless grace which arises from their cathartic equilibrium . . . It is the modern Calvary, the agony . . . of human tenderness and faith. It is a religious picture, painted . . . with the same degree of fervour that inspired Grunewald and the Master of the Avignon Pietà, Van Eyck and Bellini . . . . Picasso [, however,] is more universal . . . . For it is only when the widest commonplace is infused with the intensest passion that a great work of art, transcending all schools and categories, is born; and being born, lives immortally.”*


Johannes Vermeer, Allegory of the Catholic Faith / The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

In Johannes Vermeer, Provocateur: Risk and Courage in Dissent, I focus on Jesuit teaching and its Counter-Reformation advocacy in Vermeer’s life, the deeply held imperative of Catholicism’s practice in his mother-in-law’s life, and the Catholic education and beliefs of his children—all, by necessity, done in secret. By law, Catholic-themed paintings, artifacts, and statues of saints could be confiscated and destroyed. Mass was prohibited. Walls of painted biblical moments and designs with devotional meaning were literally whitewashed away—and remain so in the once Catholic, then Calvinist Old and New Churches in Delft, Vermeer’s home. Catholic clergy were at risk daily. Catholics could not run for public office. Vermeer’s civic life—his ability to affect decisions about Dutch conduct abroad and at home for himself and his family’s future—was deliberately repressed by the law, the Calvinist culture, and the corporate power of the Dutch East and West India Companies.

Vermeer’s Allegory of the Catholic Faith was a direct challenge to the laws and power of the Dutch Republic. In that context, the painting shows Vermeer entering the existing, then enduring moment of dissent that an artist sees as permanent, irrefutable, in the public square forever for as long as the paint remains intact. Vermeer didn’t need a model for his challenge to the status quo; models were all around him. Dissent was pervasive in northern Europe—including through art, broadly defined—and readily a force understood by the Jesuit presence and its duty in the Dutch Republic. And by and through his own, Calvinist parents, who witnessed the full measure of their neighbors’ roughly imposed transformation from Catholicism to Calvinism in action and in law. Through his devoted and defiant Catholic mother-in-law, Maria Thins. And by Vermeer’s own early maturation as a Calvinist and later conversion to Catholicism. Erasmus, Thomas More, John Calvin, Martin Luther, Hans Holbein, Peter Paul Rubens: In the 16th and 17th centuries these people showed how challenge emerged and was often fought. With deadly outcomes.

Like Guernica, Vermeer’s painting is “flooded with pity and terror” in the relentless attack of the serpent—Calvinism in its most vehement purpose, slithering, intruding, seeking to stop the quintessential exercise of religious freedom through the mass. The icons—“Calvary,” the crucifix, the Crucifixion painted and those commoners depicted next to it—those sacred items, central to life now and eternally, are shields, maybe weapons, displayed openly and reverentially, and in that moment, in defiance. Allegory depicts the need for a protector to stop the intruder, to kill it, with anguish on her face and in her body’s posture, having exercised the courage to challenge something broader: the failure of the Dutch Republic as government in its conduct and methods of repression. Its inevitable demise. Calvinism would not win, would not withstand the strength of fairness and Vermeer’s imperative for full citizenship. His boldness and his risk are plain. In this way, in this prognostication, Vermeer’s Allegory of the Catholic Faith entered a special realm that—if the academy would stop constraining Vermeer’s work under the cloak of the pretentiously benign “Dutch Golden Age”— “lives immortally.”

There is one difference between Picasso’s Guernica and Vermeer’s Allegory of the Catholic Faith. Picasso was in Paris at the time he painted Guernica, had been for decades, and was out of at least the immediacy of harm’s way. He also was paid for his work, and Guernica had the certainty of a public audience by virtue of Picasso’s stature, his skill at promotion throughout the process of drawing and painting, and the Paris exhibition where Republican Spain, still the official government, had already planned to show it. Vermeer had none of that.

Who, indeed, exercised the greater courage and risk in dissent?

Neil Thomas Proto, a Washington, DC lawyer, who also taught at Yale University and the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University, is the author of Johannes Vermeer, Provocateur, Risk and Courage in Dissent (Friesen Press, 2025). He also is a Fellow in the Royal Geographical Society of London.