It was painted with a lighter toned pigment over the dark background but it is so faint that many spectators do not notice it and it is usually not visible in reproductions. Vermeer used light-toned signatures in other paintings as well. The style is also comparable to other signatures by the artist. Although the pigments of the signature cannot be analyzed due to the abraded paint layer, the Mauritshuis, where the painting is permanently housed, has always maintained that it is authentic.
Beatrice Cenci attributed to Guido Reni Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica, Roma. While the thematic and compositional origins of some of Vermeer's works have proven easy to trace, other of his works pose more problems. And it is hardly out of the question that such an uncomplicated motif as the Girl with a Pearl Earring could have been devised independently.
Nonetheless, Vermeer scholars have proposed a wide variety of Dutch and foreign models including, traditionally, the Beatrice Cenci by the Italian painter Guido Reni. Beatrice, the daughter of the rich and powerful Francesco Cenci, suffered from her father's mistreatment. Violent and dissolute, he imprisoned Beatrice and her stepmother in the Castle of Petrella Salto, near Rieti. With the blessing of her stepmother and two brothers, all of whom shared her exasperation at his continued abuse, Beatrice murdered her father in She was apprehended and, after a trial that riveted the attention of the citizens of Rome, condemned to death at the order of Pope Clement VIII, who may have been motivated by the hope of confiscating the assets of the family.
In the presence of an enormous crowd, Beatrice was decapitated in the Ponte Sant'Angelo in September of , instantly becoming a symbol of innocence oppressed. It has been hypothesized that the great Italian painter Caravaggio was present at the decapitation and was inspired to paint his Judith Cutting off the Head of Holofernes.
The precise and realistic rendering of Caravaggio's scene, anatomically and physiologically correct to the minutest details, presupposes the artist's observation of a real decapitation. The influential Vermeer writer Lawrence Gowing proposed the influence of Jan Scorel's female portraits. Bot the Scorel and Reni influences have been largely set aside in favor of somewhat less exotic connections with the Dutch painter Michiel Sweerts. Instead, it could be by a painter in the immediate circle of Reni, possibly Elisabetta Sirani, who is known for rendering the master's models in abbreviated and reduced form.
Grand Ducal Collection, Vaduz, Liechtenstein. As art historian Robert Baldwin pointed out that there existed a "tradition of comparing beautiful women to jewels. In court culture, the beautiful woman took on a jewel-like preciousness and radiance which worked, ultimately, to represent an inner beauty beyond material splendor.
This is how jewels had long worked in Christian representations of the sacred, their richness and luminosity pointing to a celestial beauty. In European court poetry, the lady was either described as jewel-like or said to surpass the beauty of all jewels. However, "Vermeer also went beyond a suspect material beauty by avoiding the extensive use of jewels seen in courtly portraits and representations of artists like Van Dyck and Mignard and by restricting himself to the simpler pearl, avoiding rubies, sapphires, and diamonds.
More importantly, Vermeer painted everything with a cool, silvery palette and layered, translucent oil glazes, dissolving all material reality with a pearl-like luminosity.
Visualized in such a manner, Vermeer's beautiful women, ornamented with pearls, took on the familiar, pearl-like beauty of contemporary love lyrics where outer loveliness dissolved into an inner radiance. Although this portrait by the fijnschilder fine painter Frans van Mieris has been linked with the Girl with a Pearl Earring , few works document so well how fundamentally diverse were the artistic means and goals so divergent from those of his contemporaries.
It is true that Vermeer did share with the fijnschilder mode a common reservoir of motifs but it would be hard to enlist him as a true believer in their exasperated search of detail. Nor had the fijnschilderens ever displayed the detached interest in the activities of light or the intricacies of pictorial design which are hallmarks of Vermeer's art. As detailed as Vermeer's works may appear to the relaxed eye of the 21st-century viewer, the broadness of his painting technique contrasts with the microscopic rendering of detail which was the principal calling card of this school.
His modeling is so generalized that the fabric of the girl's yellow garment has never been satisfactorily identified.
Instead, the individual hairs of the fur trim in Van Mieris' picture have been rendered one by one to ensure recognition. While such rendering induces the viewer to draw as close as possible to admire the work detail by detail, Vermeer's more essential approach suggests the viewer to step back and relate to the image as a whole.
The fijnschilder mode had reached such extremes because pupils were forever trying to outdo their masters in producing the most convincing illusion of surface textures. Curiously, the fijnschilder school evolved in the very years when the Dutch art market had begun to contract due to a downturn in the nation's economic conditions and subsequentially exasperated by the war with France.
The once-bustling art market was not only flooded with low-priced paintings by living artists but with works of previous generations which slowly worked their way back into the market as their original purchasers passed away. Instead of devising new tactics to abbreviate production time and beat competition, the fijnschilder took the opposite approach and invested unprecedented time and energy on each work, which, moreover, were usually very small.
In fact, they targeted the tastes and pockets of the uppermost burgers whose wealth had not been adversely affected by the economic crisis but, on the contrary, had prospered as never before.
Thus, it may not be unreasonable that the essential "simplicity" and sobriety of Vermeer's technique might not have been fully appreciated amidst the dominant fijnschilder tastes of the day.
While it is true that Vermeer's art was recognized among elite connoisseurs, he had gained neither the international reputation nor the prices of his competitors. Given its present iconic status, it may come as a surprise that the Girl with a Pearl Earring was uncovered only in after years of neglect. While it is true that Vermeer's name had been largely forgotten by mainstream art history, some of his flagship works had held their own in important European art collections even if a few had been attributed to other painters to augment their value.
In the 17th century, a work of art was seen through different eyes than today. First of all, the Girl with a Pearl Earring was not seen as a portrait but a tronie , a sort of characteristic bust-length figure whose power to capture the purchaser's eye, rather than the sitter's personal identity, was the artist's main concern. Tronien were made for the open market and sold in great numbers at low prices. As odd as it may seem, a painting's worth was often determined not only by its beauty or by its author's reputation.
The hierarchical importance of subject matter was held in great consideration and a tronie such as the Girl with a Pearl Earring was definitely on the lower rungs of the ladder, not too distant from landscape and the lowest of all categories, still life. This mindset may be reflected in the relatively low price the Girl with a Pearl Earring may have fetched in the Amsterdam auction of 21 Vermeer paintings.
Some scholars conjecture that it corresponds to "a tronie in antique dress, uncommonly artful" sold at 46 guilders, a trifle if compared to the equally sized Milkmaid or the Woman Holding a Balance which earned and guilders respectively. However, is not out of the question that it was another tronie sold in the same auction for only 17 guilders.
In deference to the category, a Rembrandt tronie was sold for a mere 7 guilders in the same sale as the two Vermeer's. The Young Mother Gerrit Dou Mauritshuis, The Hague. How were the prices of paintings determined in Vermeer's time? There exists a number of period documents that testify the price of a painting was directly correlated to labor hours spent.
Gerrit Dou and Frans van Mieris could demand from 5 to 6 guilders per hour for their fine paintings, which are comparable in style and compositional complexity to Vermeer's more elaborate interiors. Dou, who was as scrupulous an accountant as a painter technician, daily noted the exact number of hours he devoted to a painting to calculate its market value. But Dou and Van Mieris were hardly the norm. They represent the absolute high end of the art market in Europe.
Even the successful landscape painter Jan van Goyen is known to have charged from 8 to 10 guilders a day's work. A small painting, which he could easily make in a single day, might go for 10 guilders while a large one for 60 guilders. It would appear that only Rembrandt attempted, and not always successfully, to establish the value of a painting by its artistic merit and his international reputation rather than the hours of labor spent.
Although judged outlandish by a traveling French diplomat who had inquired into the price of a Vermeer painting, the highest sum associated with a Vermeer painting in the artist's lifetime was guilders. Being so large there can be little doubt that the "drop" pearl worn by the young girl is either fake or a product of the artist's imagination. At the time, imitation pearls were being produced so that common women could afford what formerly only kings and queens wore.
Various methods were used. Ancient Romans coated glass beads with silver and then coated them with glass again. Various combinations of natural substances were used to produce the typical iridescent effect of the natural pearl, such as powdered glass and egg whites, or shells and fish scales.
Other times protuberances of mother-of-pearl were cut to shape and buffed. Venetian glassmakers became so successful at creating artificial pearls that by the 16th century Venetian pearl merchants imposed corporal punishments on those caught forging pearls.
A number of recipes describe how to create white pearls in vitro from a paste based on talc or alum. Leonardo da Vinci suggested softening small seed pearls with lemon juice. When this mixture dried to a powder, it was mixed with egg white to form a paste that could be formed as one wished. Once dry, the artificial pearl was placed on a small turning lathe and polished. One particularity successful method was invented by the French rosary maker named M. The story goes that Jaquin had observed a film of silver particles on the water's surface of a tub in which fish, called ablette, or bleak, were soaking.
He skimmed the particles and dehydrating them, producing an iridescent powder that he thought might be used as a pigment. He began experimenting in the manufacture of faux pearls. After a series of initial trials, he discovered that applied to the exteriors of glass beads the wearer's body heat and sweat caused the coating to dissolve.
However, when he injected the mixture into a hollow glass bead and allowed it to drain out of a second hole, it held fast. The bead was then filled with wax to give it the proper weight. This secret was closely guarded until when the famous French naturalist M. Cultured pearls were patented in Robert Hooke's Micrographia , with illustrations of objects viewed through a microscope, appears.
Mathematician Pierre de Fermat dies at Castres January 12 at age 63, having with the late Blaise Pascal founded the probability theory his remains will be reburied in the family vault at Toulouse. General George Monck, first duke of Albemarle, commands the English fleet, Charles II bestows a knighthood on Irish-born pirate Robert Holmes, 42, and promotes him to acting rear admiral, giving him command of the new third rate battleship Defiance, but the Dutch block the entrance to the Thames in October.
University of Kiel founded. The Concert presents a very similar deep spatial recession similar to the earlier The Music Lesson. Newton has returned to his native Woolsthorpe because the plague at Cambridge has closed Trinity College, where he is a fellow; he has observed the fall of an apple in an orchard at Woolsthorpe and calculates that at a distance of one foot the attraction between two objects is times stronger than at 10 feet see Galileo, Calculus is invented by Isaac Newton will prove to be one of the most effective tool for scientific investigation ever produced by mathematics.
The plague decimated London and Isaac Newton moved to the country. Newton formulated his law of universal gravitation. Approximately 13, houses, 90 churches and 50 livery company halls burned down or exploded. Because almost all European paper is made from recycled cloth rags , which are becoming increasingly scarce as more and more books and other materials are printed, the English Parliament bans burial in cotton or linen cloth so as to preserve the cloth for paper manufacture.
Vermeer's name is mentioned in a poem by Arnold Bon. The most significant and direct is reference to Vermeer's art to be found in Dirck van Bleyswijck's Beschryvinge der Stadt Delft Description of the City of Delft published in Borromini designed the Sant' Ivo della Sapienza church in Rome. His keyboard suites will be published in , arranged in the order that will become standard: allemande, courante, sarabande and gigue.
Paradise Lost is written by John Milton, who has been blind since but has dictated to his daughters the volume work on the fall of man "Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven. Pope Alexander VI I dies. Formerly, only knives and spoons had been used. They burn 3 ships and captured the English flagship. Geared towards middle- and upper middle-class families, the book advises a regular and balanced diet, including fresh meat at least once a week, frequent servings of bread and cheese, stew, fresh vegetables and salads.
While simple dishes, such as porridge, pancakes and soup with bread are eaten by all classes, studies reveal that only the affluent have regular access to fresh vegetables during the period; the less wealthy depend on dried peas and beans. Send me an email at: jonathanjanson essentialvermeer. Want to make this the perfect website Vermeer deserves?
Take a poll. Essential Vermeer 3. The Complete Interactive Vermeer Catalogue. Mauritshuis, The Hague inv. Looking for another painting by Vermeer? Track current location of this painting. There are 9 hotspots in the image below. How to use the interactive catalogue The textual material contained in the Essential Vermeer Interactive Catalogue would fill a hefty-sized book, and is enhanced by more than 1, corollary images.
In order to use the catalogue most advantageously: 1. The broadly painted turban. On her head is a turban that she has wound from two pieces of material, one blue and one yellow, and she is adorned with a pearl earring. It is from this oversized jewel in the middle of the composition that the painting derives its title. The face is modelled very softly, not in great detail but with gradual transitions and invisible brushstrokes.
Even so, the artist has clearly indicated differences between materials — for instance between the white collar, painted in impasto, and the drier paint of the turban, for which he used the precious pigment ultramarine.
But the most remarkable detail is the pearl. This consists of little more than two brushstrokes: a bright highlight at upper left and the soft reflection of the white collar on the underside. Seventeenth-century Dutch girls did not wear turbans. With this accessory Vermeer has given the girl an Oriental air. Images like this were known in the seventeenth century as tronies.
Tronies are not portraits: they were not made in order to produce the best possible likeness of an individual. Although there would probably be a sitter, the point of a tronie was mainly to make a study of a head representing a particular character or type. Rembrandt had popularised tronies in Dutch art around He made dozens of them, often using himself as the model, sometimes wearing a remarkable cap or a helmet.
The pearl is too large to be real. Perhaps the girl is wearing a pearl drop made of glass, which has been varnished to give it a matte sheen. This leads to the third and most powerful quality of the painting: its mystery. Indeed, we know very little about Vermeer. He lived his whole life in the Dutch town of Delft. He was in debt several times. We have no idea who these women are, though they are likely to be members of the family household. Is she happy or sad?
Is she pushing us away or yearning to look at us? It made me wonder what Vermeer did to her to make her look like that at him. That curiosity was what led me to write a novel about the painting: I wanted to explore the mystery of her gaze. To me Girl with a Pearl Earring is neither a universal tronie, nor a portrait of a specific person.
It is a portrait of a relationship.
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