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Vermeer's painting Woman Holding A Balance, as has been remarked before, is composed of a series of subsets. The subject of the painting is a woman holding a balance by her fingertips, which she is using to weigh gold. This is echoed- or rather balanced- by a painting in the upper right hand side of the picture depicting the Last Judgement, the literal weighing up of souls. The enigma Woman Holding a Balance poses is: how to pass from one set to another, what scale allows us to join these two incommensurable spaces? What is that empty point, the balance between these two scales, that allows us to translate one into the other?
Michel Serres in his essay on this painting, "Ambrosia and Gold", speaks of this as a classical space, one organized by the notion of the machine (the pully, switch or lever). We see a similar space in Velasquez 's Las Meninas, for example: the same mise en abyme or space within a space, the same problem of how to pass from the reduced model (the King and Queen in the mirror at the back of the painting) to the real (the King and Queen posed before the painting).
But in the organisation of this classical, rational space (Descartes, Newton, Leibnitz) there lies an enigma. It is this enigma that is the subject of Serres' essay. It would be that point-both singular and dispersed-that allows us to pass from one space to another, across which forces are distributed and matched: the fulcrum of the scale which the young woman holds in her hand, indi-cated by her little finger. It is a point, paradoxically, that must be at once