SECRETS OF THE GIRL
MUSEUM TAKES CLOSER LOOK AT VERMEER’S FAMOUS PAINTING
‘How did the Girl With a Pearl Earring come to life? What steps did Vermeer take to make this painting?”
These are some of the fundamental questions we still have about Johannes Vermeer’s beloved 1665 painting of a young woman in a blue and yellow turban, glancing beguilingly over her shoulder, according to Abbie Vandivere, paintings conservator at the Mauritshuis Royal Picture Gallery here.
The answers may lie below the surface of her luminous face, inside her layers of paint, and within the crushed minerals that make up her 350- year- old pigments. That is the motivation for an intensive, twoweek, non- invasive study of the work that will begin Monday at the Mauritshuis, called The Girl in the Spotlight, co-ordinated and overseen by Vandivere.
Using a panoply of new exploratory technologies, some borrowed from medicine — with complicated names such as fibre optic reflectance spectroscopy, macro X-ray powder diffraction and optical coherence tomography — the museum hopes to harvest all kinds of data about the “Girl,” as everyone at the museum simply calls her, to explore her inner life.
It is an exceedingly rare occasion that the Mauritshuis takes the Girl off the wall, but it seemed justified for this enormous team effort, which takes place under the umbrella of the Netherlands Institute for Conservation, Art and Science and includes participants from the National Gallery of Art in Washington; the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam; the Delft University of Technology; and the Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands.
“The expertise and the scientific equipment are coming from the whole world, converging on t his one painting, this one masterpiece,” Vandivere said. “We’ll see how much information we can gain with the technology at our disposal in a very short period of time — two weeks, working 24 hours a day, day and night.”
The Girl is the star attraction of the Mauritshuis, a collection of Dutch 17 thcentury paintings that draws about 400,000 visitors each year. Removing her from public view hurts attendance, so museum officials tried to keep the examination period as short as possible, and to keep her in the public eye as much as possible.
Instead of t aking t he painting to the restoration studio, Emilie Gordenker, the Mauritshuis’ director, decided to put the whole research project on display in the museum’s Golden Room, a regal chamber with 18th- century decor, where the Girl and the research team will be enclosed in glass partitions while video monitors allow visitors to observe what is happening inside. A high- resolution, three- dimensional reproduction of the Girl created by OC, a Netherlands- based Canon company, will sit on an easel outside the glass chamber.
“Getting the Girl out of her frame means that she’s not visible in the way that she normally is for visitors, and that was a big concern for us because people come from far and wide to see this picture,” Gordenker said. “Occasionally she’ll be lying on a bed with all kinds of cameras hanging around her, so you might not be able to see her as usual, or she might be half- covered by a scanner. We wanted to make sure that for people who will come, they get taken along in the process.”
It has been more than two decades since Vermeer’s so- called Mona Lisa of the North has been the subject of an examination, and since then there has been a great deal of advancement in the tools used to examine artworks. In 1994, research- ers employed tools such as X- radiography, UV photography and infrared reflectography, and took tiny paint samples out of the painting.
Today’s imaging tools are non- invasive, which means there is nary a brush or cotton swab in sight, and there will be no removal of particles. The technologies that have been brought together for this examination will “cull a few terabytes of data,” said Joris Dik, one of the lead researchers, from the Delft University of Technology. These can later be used to create high- resolution computer visualizations of the painting not possible before.
“I can imagine at the end we’ ll have something like Google Earth, where you can click on all different layers and zoom in and out of the painting to see different elements within the layers of paint,” he said.
The Girl has been on display in t he Mauritshuis since 1881. The work was not considered a particular highlight of the collection — which also includes Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp and The Goldfinch by Carel Fabritius — until a major exhibition in collaboration with the National Gallery of Art in Washington in 1995, followed by the publication of Tracy Chevalier’s best-selling novel of the same name four years later and the subsequent 2003 film, starring Scarlett Johansson.
Chevalier imagined the fictional subject for Vermeer’s painting as a housemaid who is invited into the inner sanctum of the master’s studio, and allowed to wear his wife’s pearl earring for the portrait, creating a certain frisson between the artist and his model.
Gordenker said that in reality the picture probably was not painted as a portrait of any particular person. Trying to figure out the identity of the real-life Girl — if there even was one — is not a question for research.
“One of the things that makes this painting so spectacularly appealing is that we don’t know,” Gordenker said. That is one mystery that this year’s inquiry will not attempt to solve.