Another Proof That Vermeer Was a Genius

Look closely at the darkness behind her. It's the most famous face in Dutch art. A girl. A turban. A single shining pearl. And she is floating in pure black. No room. No wall. No world. Just her. And an endless void. For three and a half centuries that emptiness has been part of her spell. We assumed Vermeer wanted it that way. That he set her against nothing so we'd see only her. We were wrong. Because in 2018 a team of scientists slid this painting into a scanner that reads it almost atom by atom. And the black behind her began to speak. There is something hidden in that darkness. Something Vermeer painted and time erased. Look closer. Her name is Girl with a Pearl Earring. Painted around 1665 by Johannes Vermeer in the Dutch city of Delft. Today she's called the Mona Lisa of the North. Vermeer is one of the greatest painters who ever lived. And one of the most mysterious. From his entire career only about 35 paintings survive. And this one isn't really a portrait. In Vermeer's day a painting like this was called a tronie. A study of a face. A type. A mood. Rather than a real named person. So we may never know who she was. But we know exactly how she makes us feel. Start with her eyes. She's turned to look back over her shoulder. Lips just parted. As if you said her name and she turned a half second ago. That turn is the whole painting. It makes you the person she's looking at. Is she about to speak or about to leave? No one agrees. That's the trap Vermeer set. And we've been caught in it for centuries. Now follow the light. It slides across her cheek. Catches the wet corner of her lip. And lands on that single enormous pearl. Look at the pearl up close. It's barely there. Two strokes of paint. One soft grey curve. One bright white dot. Almost nothing. But step back. And it gleams. That's Vermeer's genius. He doesn't paint the thing. He paints the light. Hitting the thing. And lets your eye finish it. Even her turban is a marvel. That blue is ultramarine. Ground from lapis lazuli. A stone hauled thousands of miles from the mountains of Afghanistan. Worth more by weight than gold. So who was the man who made her? Vermeer worked slowly almost in secret. In a single crowded house in Delft. He could paint light better than almost anyone alive. And yet he was never rich. He had 11 surviving children. A pile of debts. And an expensive habit of using the costliest pigments on earth. For paintings he sometimes couldn't sell. When he died suddenly at 43, his widow was left drowning in debt. And then something astonishing happened. The world forgot him. For nearly 200 years Vermeer was a footnote. And the girl on this canvas sat in the dark. While her maker's name faded out of history. She was born into a golden age. 17th century Holland was the richest corner of Europe. A small republic of merchants and sailors and scientists. Sending ships to the ends of the earth. And in those same decades in Vermeer's own city of Delft. A man named Antony van Leeuwenhoek. Aimed a homemade lens at a drop of water. And discovered an entire world of living things no human had ever seen. It was an age obsessed with looking. With lenses. With light. With seeing the world more sharply than anyone before. Vermeer was part of that obsession. He may even have used a lens and mirror device. Such as a camera obscura. To study exactly how light fell across a face. This painting is what happened when a whole culture was learning. For the first time how to truly see. In 2018 that obsession with seeing came full circle. The Moritz Huis museum in The Hague. Placed the girl inside a scanner. And for two weeks examined her in full view of the public. The technique is called macro x-ray fluorescence. It reads the chemical elements buried in every layer of paint. Including the ones our eyes can no longer catch. And in that empty black background. The scan found something. Diagonal lines. Folds. A pattern. Hidden under the flat black. The scanner traced the shape of something Vermeer's own brush had laid down. The void was never a void. Vermeer had painted her standing in front of a green curtain. Heavy folded fabric hanging in the upper corner of the room. But over three and a half centuries the delicate green paint broke down. Darkened and collapsed into black. The room she stood in simply faded away. And then the scan found one more thing. Look at her eyes again. For generations we believed she had no eyelashes. One more sign that she wasn't a real girl. Just an idea. But the scan revealed them. Tiny painted hairs around both eyes. Vermeer gave her lashes all along. She was always real. We just stopped being able to see her. Think about what that means. The painting hanging in that museum today is not quite the one Vermeer made. Time has been quietly editing it for 350 years. Undimming a curtain. Fading a pair of lashes. Until we mistook the damage for the design. And here's the strange beautiful part. The version the whole world fell in love with is the faded one. Science can now show us what she used to be. It can rebuild the curtain. Restore the lashes. Hand us a cleaner, brighter girl than the one on the wall. But it can't tell us which girl is the real one. The one Vermeer painted. Or the one that time made. So here's the question. When a masterpiece keeps changing for centuries. Which version is the true one? The artist's or the one we were handed? Look closer. We'll see you in the next one.