Travels in Vermeer Read Online Free PDF

lovely sympathy in her hazel irises, the lush eroticism of her lips, her mouth. She is the clapper, I am the bell, and she rings through my whole body.
    2. The Earring
    I look up, blink. A ray of sunlight has slipped through the shutters, fallen at my feet. Maybe a half-hour, maybe an hour has passed.
    Nothing could’ve prepared me for the painting’s hold on me. I’ve read about the sitter, who was probably Vermeer’s daughter Maria, aged twelve or thirteen at the time, and I know the painting isn’t a portrait, but is purposefully fantastical. I’ve read and reread the brilliant passages on this work by critics Lawrence Gowing and Edward Snow. But I hadn’t expected this deep dream, this first and last love. It’s all I can do to return her gaze.
    The painting is much smaller than I’d expected: only about fifteen inches wide and eighteen inches tall. The badly abraded background—originally a deep, translucent green—is blackish, amorphous nothingness. Over the centuries, a fine eggshell craqueleur has developed across the entire surface and is far more extensive than you’d imagine from the digitized photos. I’m not sure these changes should even be regretted; the essence of the girl projected through the cracked, eroded surface seems undiminished. In fact, she seems all the more moving to me, all the more precious for her ability to transcend the ravages of age. Reproductions are useless, I suddenly think.
    Directly across the room, The Art of Painting casts its own eerily magnetic spell. It is an enormous and deep studio scene depicting a seated painter’s back (often considered a stand-in for Vermeer), as he, the painter, begins a painting of a smiling girl, who is standing in the flow of light, beyond and to the left. The model for the girl was probably the same as for The Girl with a Pearl Earring . She is fresh and pretty, with youthful, wide-set eyes. The painting is among the most allegorical of all Vermeer’s works, which are seldom allegorical. The girl, wearing a laurel crown, represents Clio, goddess of history. The seated painter gazes at his comely model, his right hand sketching a few leaves from her wreath on his canvas. She doesn’t return his attention, but gazes down mysteriously toward a white mask lying face-up on the table before her. The corner of the table points back toward the painter, nearly touches his hip. Looking into the depths of this painting is a little like gazing into a swirling snow globe, a self-sufficient cosmos.
    Hanging on the rear wall in the painting is a large map of Holland, the most detailed of all of Vermeer’s glorious maps, with truly photographic fidelity, complete with a convincing, dramatic crease that roughly corresponds to the North/South political split in the Netherlands. In between the wall and the viewer is indeterminate space. The shimmering, golden chandelier at top appears at first glance to be rendered in marvelously fine detail, but when I actually look at it, it is all highlight and shadow—heavy brush-strokes of cream defining sunlit surfaces—and little else.
    I turn and look again at the earring in the painting of the girl behind me—that most celebrated detail—two spherical daubs of paint. One bright brush mark along the left-hand curve of the pearl reflects direct sunlight; and a fainter stroke (only recently revealed in cleaning) follows the bottom curve, and seems to be radiant light from her white collar. The body of the pearl filled in by desire, by dream—my desire, my dream.
    3. Luminosity
    Vermeer died abruptly in 1675, when he was forty-three and penniless, due to the collapsed art market. Catharina, his widow, described his death as follows: “As a result and owing to the great burden of his children, having no means of his own, he had lapsed into such decay and decadence, which he had so taken to heart that, as if he had fallen into a frenzy, in a day