Dutch museum investigating secrets of the ‘Girl with a Pearl Earring’
THE HAGUE, Netherlands — “How did the ‘Girl With a Pearl Earring’ come to life? What steps did Johannes Vermeer take to make this painting?”
These are some of the fundamental questions we still have about 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, two-week, noninvasive study of the work that began Monday at the Mauritshuis, called “The Girl in the Spotlight,” coordinated and overseen by Vandivere.
Using a panoply of new exploratory technologies, some borrowed from medicine — with complicated names such as fiber 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 this 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 17th-century 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 taking the 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 décor, 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, sits 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, researchers 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 noninvasive, 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 the Mauritshuis since 1881. The work was not considered a particular highlight of the collection 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.