Vermeer and woman's work.

THERE are two revelations you take away from the Vermeer exhibition at the National Gallery. First, his crocus-blossom colors: his brilliance as a colorist finally becomes clear. Second, that Vermeer is a religious painter.

His religion is femininity -- not a rare thing in a great artist; what is unusual is Vermeer's insistence on showing women in a distinctively female world. His women do stereotypical "woman's work": the milkmaid and the girl with a water pitcher at their domestic chores, the Lace Maker and the lady of The Little Street at their needlework, the Lady with a Pearl Necklace and the Woman with a Balance fiddling with jewelry as they dream. Many Dutch genre painters show women at their chores, but only Vermeer paints the spiritual substance of this world.

He is certain that women and men live in different universes; the renowned Girl with a Pearl Earring turns only her head when the painter summons her attention, and won't even turn it far enough to look at him directly. Her eyes swivel hard left; she begrudges every degree of movement away from her own world and toward his. Yes, her face is lovely and (as everyone says) inscrutable, but it is exasperated too. The abstracted gaze of the typical Vermeer woman tells us more clearly than any other gesture by any other painter that "there is something here I can't show you," an inner life of surpassing richness we can only guess at; those gazes mark the spot (like Ophelia's floating garland) where knowledge ends.

When men waltz into the picture they destroy its calm. The Girl with the Wineglass has a sappy, silly smile as her suitor leers; in the Frick Museum's Officer and Laughing Girl (which isn't in the show), the heroine smiles pleasantly, but there is tense edginess in her elbows-on-the-table uprightness. When women get together, on the other hand, the calm only deepens. Vermeer admires his models' beauty and likes to play with sexual insinuation. Yet his erotic interest in these women is overwhelmed repeatedly by his awe at their spiritual depth. There is nothing more beautiful in his art than the Woman with a Balance. He paints her hands and exposed forearms with acute sexual interest; a short-skirtless society knows a lot more about the potential beauties of a lady's forearm than we. But when he reaches her lovely face the sacred overwhelms the profane, and he loses himself in the sheer profundity of her expression.

Investigating the relationship between classical masterworks and today's world is part of an art critic's job. So you'd think our critics would be falling all over one another in their zeal to investigate the painful contrast between Vermeer's paintings and the contemporary art world's contemptuous, bitterly ironic view of "woman's work" as a male-built prison. But somehow this story has eluded them. Thus there is Janine Antoni, for example: she is an artist whose work at the moment, according to the New York Times, consists of drenching her hair in dye, getting down on the floor, and mopping it around. "Women's Work (or Is It Art?) Is Never Done," reads the headline.

Two other unfashionable conclusions are unavoidable when you visit the Vermeers. There is an unchanging psychological reality beneath the Sturm und Drang of evolving sex roles; women were the lacemakers in the seventeenth century, still are (to the extent that people still make lace), and will be in 2300 too. And, although there can be no doubt of the distinctness of the male versus female spiritual universes, there can be no doubt either when you look at these paintings that a man can enter sympathetically into the female world and transcribe it with respect and vivid beauty and faithful love.