Thread by @LauraJSnyder

What a fabulous review by Nina Siegal @nytimes of the major #Vermeer exhibit @Rijcksmuseum!
She shows how Vermeer—aptly called “the Sphinx of Delft,” as there is almost no documentation of his life—has so enthralled us that pop culture has stepped in to fill the breach: 1/

from Tracy Chevalier’s Girl with a Pearl Earring, to emeritus urban studies professor Philip Steadman’s geometrical speculations, to the magicians Penn & Teller’s film about a proudly untrained painter named Tim Jenison trying (in vain) to recreate a Vermeer in a warehouse. 2/

But this exhibition, curated by Gregor Weber, focusses on what we can know: how science & art came together to create the magic of Vermeer’s painting. As I argue in my book Eye of the Beholder, Vermeer & the other Dutch painters of his time were fascinated w/lenses & optical 3/

instruments such as the camera obscura—a device that projects an outside image onto a screen or a viewing surface. Vermeer used this device to inform, but not to trace, his paintings (the way Steadman/Penn&Teller/Jenison/Chevaliar believe. (Two different types of c.o. below) 4/

Vermeer used the camera obscura to teach him about how light/shadow affected color/tone/hue. His used his “visual memory”of these effects to create works distinctive in their ability to bring us into a scene & yet hold us back, as if we were eavesdropping behind a door or curtain

Contrary to the claim that he merely traced what he saw through a camera obscura, Vermeer often altered a scene for the sake of mood or composition, eg adding light effects that would not be seen in one, as when he adds dabs of white “reflections” on rough bread in The Milkmaid 6

The exhibition also shows the other side of the coin, how optical technology is used to understand the artwork itself. Recent discoveries by noninvasive scanning have shown old favorites in a new light: The Girl with a Pearl Earring originally had eyelashes (now invisible to us 7

and she originally stood before a green curtain, whose color has faded due to chemical changes in the paint—a common problem with vegetable-based green pigments until the chemist Carl Wilhelm Scheele invented a green tint that did not fade but killed, being derived from arsenic.8

The Dresden museum used infrared technology to find a “hidden Vermeer” within its own Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window; the original work had a large painting of Cupid above the woman, emphasizing that she is reading a love letter. Before: 9/

Further analysis of the level of dirt between the two versions showed the overpainting had not been done by Vermeer himself, but a 19th century owner—who, perhaps, did not want his daughters to view the naked (very obviously male) baby. After: 10/

All of which is to say that the subtitle of Siegal’s piece (probably not chosen by herself) is a bit misleading. “Yet he remains a mystery….” Yes, we know little of his life, though we can make good inferences about it. (Baptism record: Antoni Leeuwenhoek’s is on same page 11/

But about how he created his luminous paintings, we don’t need novelists & magicians & urban planners to fill in the gaps; optical technology is revealing much about the optical methods of Vermeer’s work. I think that’s not only apt, but the way he would have liked it. /fin

Free link to article: nytimes.com/2023/02/03/art…

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