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108B Pixel Scan of Johannes Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring
by twalichiewicz
When viewing this I was captivated by the girl's lips. In the full view, the bottom lip looks not just full and moist, but slightly wet. Zooming in, it's a bit of a muddy mess with only a splash of white giving definition to the (anatomical) left of the girl's mouth.
In my current incarnation I'm a fledgling novelist and one of the things I've learned is to trust the audience to 'fill in the gaps'. Although this is probably obvious already to many, the parallel between that and the way that we sort of do that when we look at paintings suddenly hit me.
If you get a chance to see some of the impressionists in person, they’re kind of mind blowing for exactly the same reason - you’re looking at a scene of a ship in a storm and seeing all kinds of nuance, and then you get closer and realize it’s all your brain filling in the blanks.
From a literary angle - two books I’ve read that are absolute master classes in this are Italio Calvino’s “Invisible Cities” and “This Is How You Lose the Time War” by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone - both do an incredible job of putting you in a series of vivid, fantastical places within a paragraph or two of exposition.
Jonathan Sawday’s 2023 book “Blanks, Print, Space, and Void in English Renaissance Literature: An Archaeology of Absence.” [1] explores this phenomenon as well across multiple mediums.
It also won the Modern Language Association's top award — the James Russell Lowell Prize for the most outstanding book published in 2023.
> Italio Calvino’s “Invisible Cities”
So wild seeing this referenced here, it's a pretty obscure book (of poetry nonetheless), and one my absolute favorites. Cheers to having great taste :)
PS: Small nit: it's "Italo," not "Italio."
Hey! We read more than code, and Calvino's not so obscure. ;) Here, enjoy some stuff from my open tabs: https://rustandmoth.com/work/on-the-ducks-who-are-people-and... https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/26063/... https://fleursdumal.org/poem/099 https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/authors/bernstein/books/artifi...
This is gold, thanks for the links! Really good
I remember reading Jonathan Blow saying this book was a big influence on his approach to game design.
Likewise! I love this book
> "This Is How You Lose the Time War"
No other book captured the feelings of being 20-something and flirting like reading this. Reading it felt like being right back there again, with all the excitement and anxiety. Highly recommended to anyone.
Unsure how it connects to the notion of a brain filling in the blanks. I thought it was quite "filled in", but maybe my brain did it, and therefore I'm making your point for you :)
If anyone's in Minneapolis, see this theater production of Invisible Cities: https://www.southerntheater.org/shows/invisible-cities-a-toy... - it's fantastic.
Sold out :(
Who’s that fella what did that TV show where he paints portraits of his famous guests.
“This is How You Lose the Time War” is brilliant. Highly recommend the audio book.
Absolutely. I was at the Virginia Museum of Art where they have several Monets and 3 Van Goghs. They also let you get quite close to them… less than a foot away in some cases. The amount of texture is incredible. (What also struck me in person, though I had read about it previously, is how tiny almost all Van Goghs are. Barely more than postcard size in some cases.
"They also let you get quite close to them… less than a foot away in some cases."
That happened to me some years ago in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, two remarkable pictures particularly come to mind Vermeer's The Milkmaid and a Rembrandt self portrait.
The Milkmaid is comparatively small painting (~18×16" according to Wiki) and I was not only able to view it up incredibly close and in detail but also it was a quiet time for visitors and I had the painting all to myself. I stared at it for minutes in a strange state of amazement brought on by not only how wonderful this Vermeer masterpiece was and that I was looking at it for real and it wasn't a dream but also that I could get so close and do so for so long given the work is worth many, many millions, it's effectively priceless. My experience was even more remarkable given that I was visiting the museum just after Rembrandt's The Night Watch had been repaired, restored and put back on display after a maniac had slashed it with a knife.
The other painting was a Rembrandt self portrait, it was in an alcove all on its own. Again, I had this truly remarkable painting all to myself to view close up. It was an incredible experience, with Rembrandt's eyes staring directly at me it felt as if he was talking to me. It shocked me that a painting that is over 350 years old and painted by someone many generations removed from today could generate such a large emotional response in me.
I consider that particular visit to the Rijksmuseum (I've been there a number of times) as one of the most memorable experiences of my life and I consider it a great privilege that the museum provided me the opportunity to see these remarkable works up close and in depth.
You should probably fact check your statement about the size of Van Gogh paintings. Easily disproved.
Several of the paintings at the VMA are less than 10 inches in their lingerie dimension.
Perhaps postcard sized was slight hyperbole, but not by much. All 3 would have been in the bottom 5 of the museum size wise, and it’s a huge museum.
They're shown on big walls, so I totally get how they can seem small.
I read a lot of sci-fi and because it's come up in recommendations I've tried two or three times to read that book, "This Is How You Lose the Time War".
The popularity of that book along with stuff like N.K. Jemisin winning "Best SciFi book" of the year 3 years in a row prove more than ever that the vast majority of people simply don't have taste in the sense they can not decide if they actually like something or not they can only like what other people like.
That book was objectively bad but it keeps showing up on the top of best sci-fi book lists for some reason and so a lot of people keep (mistakingly) thinking they liked it.
> objectively bad
Well that settles that, then.
Try to learn to be less self-centered. Something isn’t objectively bad because you don’t like it. People aren’t tricked into liking something just because you don’t like it. People’s tastes vary and different people like different writing styles. Try something like “I think the books are very poorly written and I just cannot understand how they continue to be so popular. Seriously, what is the appeal?” Not only are you presenting your viewpoint, not as some arbiter of truth, but you are inviting discussion and an opportunity to learn something you don’t currently know i.e. what people enjoy about those books that makes them popular.
It took a bit but by the end it had grown on me. I agree it's technically not great but maybe I'm just used to that from reading sci-fi, most of which feels technically bad. That said my reaction to the first quarter was mostly "uhh?". Big disagree on N.K. Jemisin though, I enjoyed reading those. Books 2 and 3 of the three body problem series feel like what you're describing to me. Never got why those were popular, the first one had the interesting cultural revolution flashback element but the sequels did almost nothing for me.
Filling-in-the-gaps-books wise, it's hard to do better than Earthsea in my mind. They're quite short books, yet I found myself far more engrossed in the world and the goings-on than some thousand page Sanderson tomb I snoozed through.
> interesting cultural revolution flashback element
Interestingly this section either appeared in the beginning or somewhere in the middle depending on the translation/version (I forget how the distinction was made) due to it being so different from the rest of the book.
It was in the beginning when I read it years ago and I think it took a bit for its context to make sense but I also read many lost interest during it.
I enjoyed all the books. (spoilers incoming) I actually enjoyed the love story elements, how a star given to someone would play such an important role later. How he survived in the end and communicated the three fairy tales, and enjoyed each in turn. I've never seen a story span such a vast amount of time nor remember one that took us literally to the end.
I already felt pretty annoyed with the first Three Body Problem book.
But a big part of the problem is that after looking into space colonisation etc a bit, the aliens in most alien invasion stories feel utterly stupid to me.
I can still live with 'War of the worlds': their aliens only come from Mars not from the stars, and I can suspend my disbelief over eg its theory of how the planets formed: it's just a fantasy world where outer planets formed earlier and are older.
But the Three Body Problem tries to be current-ish with modern technology. And its aliens have enough technology to just build orbitals or terraform Mars or so. Or just kill off all the humans from space with an orbital bombardment or a killer virus. Instead of whatever clunky and ineffective methods they use in the book.
I did like the start though, when things were still kept behind the curtain. Also the Cultural Revolution flashbacks, too.
War of the Worlds never lifts that curtain for sure. Everything stays fairly mysterious, and the narrative only gives us some limited speculation from the narrator who clearly has also only a limited view on things.
If a belief needs to assume most people are stupid compared to you, it's basically guaranteed to be wrong.
Talk to more people, you'll find they can think too.
Are you not confusing 'liking' a work with 'thinking it good'. I'm not sure what criteria go into your evaluation, but perhaps those criteria are different from the ones other people are using?
Time War is NOT hard Sci-Fi. It’s a wartime romance that uses divergent technical evolution to create cultural distance and time travel to engineer social collisions.
The combination is fantastically human.
... or maybe it's not objectively bad, and you're bouncing off it for some reason?
Per the parent comment, it does a lot with very little. And it's heady and literary and beautiful. Not everyone is into that. But a lot of people are.
Guh, NK Jemisin :Q I tried getting through a few chapters of three of her books and haven't felt so... Pushed? Talked at? Bored? Hadn't grimaced internally and externally as much with an author in a while.
They feel juvenile, trying SO hard. Using a different person perspective in one of them to hamfisted effect, as opposed to someone like Tamsyn Muir who integrates that device for good reason and to brilliant effect.
I gave NK a solid try and was appalled at how in the world anyone could think these are engaging.
"Fill the gaps with your mind" is very broad, and applies to lighting, pointillism, etc a divers lot of things that are not obvious to a non-painter.
But Vermeer is next level, especially for the time. A growing contingent of historians believe he used camera obscura to achieve the results
Not sure if anyone here saw the movie Clueless, but a great quote was, "That guy is such a Monet. From a distance he looks great, but up close he's a real mess."
Your brain is analysing the light in the "room" when zoomed out and compared to that it looks moist. When you zoom in there is no reference. I think then the brain switches from "real scene" analysis to "abstract".
It is a bit like those illusions where one grey looks darker than the other, based on surrounding shadows in the image and what the brain assumes... but the RGB values are the same.
A bit like how CRT era video games are horrible when viewed on modern LCDs. Designers and programmers walked around the device limits to get impressions out of it.
Zooming in, it's a bit of a muddy mess
The analog equivalent of pixelation.
More like the analog version of doing a FTT and looking at only the high frequency parts vs the low frequency parts.
It's like touching it with your eye, without the pain. I love the future.
It's like the museum scene from Ferris Bueller's Day Off when Cameron is staring super intently at the painting
I zoomed in and zoomed out instantly as soon as I realized it was breaking the illusion for me. I just love how our brain actually fills in these gaps.
We think that everything is made of things but we forget that everything is mostly made of nothing, and it's the gaps between things that make it all be.
See also: atomic size vs distance between atoms in any structure, on perceptual levels the visual saccadic movement and how much the brain fills in the gaps.
Nothing is quite something after all.
I hate this phrase because how do you even define "made of nothing" or "gaps between" when talking about objects as fuzzy as electrons, and how would you define where something "is" or "isn't " other than interactions? If an electron cloud is interacting with another electron cloud why do we say that space is empty? Because the measured radius of an electron is so much smaller than we observe?
Like you say, it's just a more intuitive classical analogy for people who don't want to waste good years of their life (like me) to understand the mathematical detail of theoretical physics.
The electron doesn't actually have a measured radius (in our current theories). QFT describes it as point-like excitation of an underlying quantum field. The only connection between our quantum theories (that is really just slightly hand wavy math) and reality is that our theories can predict the statistics of observing a particle or interaction in a given state. So maybe a slightly more coherent explanation is that for a given region between atoms in solid matter, the probability of observing an electron (or any particle) is extremely small. Its like a quantum mechanical cat who's territory extends across mountains and forests, you're probably not gonna stumble across it on any given day, unlike a (quantum) house cat that lives in someones apartment. More generally there are no big "lumps" in the wave-functions, it's very thinly spread like too little butter on toast.
Yes from a distance the lips look moist/wet, but the cracks in the paint make them look dry, up close.
You can also see that the hanging yellow part of the headscarf, he just winged it, effective as it might be.
I paint as a sort of weekly ritual, just 2 hours every Wednesday evening, and did an inept copy of this as my first serious try. Months of staring closely at every little detail of it leave you in a sort of communion with the work and the artist.
One thing you quickly learn is that the old masters were "impressionists" too. If you overwork stuff trying to perfect every shape with hundreds of precise brushstrokes, you end up with a naive, infantile looking painting that feels "unpainterly".
Trying and failing to mimic that single quick brushtroke that fools the eye leaves you in awe, fully appreciating the mastery.
Comment was deleted :(
Yep, I noticed the same thing and came to a similar realization.
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I highly recommend the movie "Tim's Vermeer" about the likelihood that Vermeer used something like a lightbox to paint his paintings. Specifically, his ability to reproduce light and color is unmatched while he only had basic training as a painter and never let anyone see him work. A fascinating engineering problem to deduce how he might have accomplished this.
It's an appealing hypothesis, but there's some compelling evidence to the contrary [0]. I'm not an expert, but this could potentially fall under the heading of pop history or pseudohistory.
Watch Tim’s Vermeer. The camera obscura doesn’t work (for similar reasons as mentioned in the article). Don’t want to spoil it, but Tim comes up with a very low tech solution that fits all the evidence.
It sounds like a compelling film. Seeing now that it's produced by Penn & Teller's team, it makes me wonder about this fits into their "juggler vs. magician" dichotomy. The implication of that duo producing the film suggests that they might believe that Vermeer's reputation as an extraordinarily skilled artist ("juggler") might in fact be the result of Vermeer's use of a sophisticated apparatus that tricked patrons and viewers into thinking that he had extraordinary abilities, thus making Vermeer a master faker ("magician"). Or maybe they simply wanted to spur debate.
"Generally, you don't take a fine precision machine tool [a lathe] and saw it in half... but power tools are made to be jury rigged." - Tim
It isn't a bad hypothesis.
Many people speculate that the model for the "The Astronomer" and "The Geographer" was Leeuwenhoek, the creator of the first microscope. He was a close friend of Vermeer.
And the use of devices for helping in drawing was actually quite common in those times. Durer and Da Vinci made drawings showing these kind of devices.
It's a great science documentary though. His obsession, how he works towards it and the emotional effect the whole project has on him. Worth watching regardless of your opinion on the hypothesis.
I highly recommend against watching the movie. The main figure, Tim Jenison, comes off as an arrogant know-it-all, reducing art to a technique, and insulting people along the way. In the movie, multiple times he said "I have never done this before, but how hard could it be?"
I'll note two parts of the movie that support my view. First, if his art is so great, then why is it not displayed all over the place? He has a few alleged experts giving praise without criticism, and in the end, it is on the wall in his bedroom. Surely, if the art were that easy to recreate, galleries would be demanding his piece?
Second, notice how they never actually show the real painting. In fact, at one point they make it out to be a conspiracy, that the painting is being kept in some back room nobody can access. I would loved to have seen the real painting side-by-side with Tim's alleged reproduction. I suspect they didn't push to hard for access, because it would have ruined their narrative.
I agree that Tim definitely comes off as a bit of a jerk. However...
> First, if his art is so great, then why is it not displayed all over the place? He has a few alleged experts giving praise without criticism, and in the end, it is on the wall in his bedroom. Surely, if the art were that easy to recreate, galleries would be demanding his piece?
I could be wrong but I don't think there's much demand for replicas of classic paintings even if they are incredibly high quality. A lot of the value of a Vermeer painting is that it was actually painted by Vermeer in the 17th century -- not necessarily the quality of the piece itself.
Regarding your second point, who knows?
I thought the point of the movie was to claim that Vermeer was nothing special, and Tim's effort to recreate the painting was supposed to prove that. I think the galleries would disagree with that point, otherwise they would not care whether Vermeer actually painted them.
And yes, both of my points are speculation, fueled by an immense dislike for the movie.
If the claims are true then Vermeer is absolutely exceptional, just in a different manner than is usually considered.
All painters must grapple with the technical nature of paint itself and its manipulation. Choice of type of paint, canvas, application, &c. is paramount. Rothko’s work, for instance, is only effective because he found a novel way to apply paint that lends his paintings a remarkable, nigh eerie depth of color. Spending roughly half an hour just staring at the Seagram murals in the “Rothko Room” at the Tate Modern is one of my all-time favorite experiences.
There have been posts about reproducing art and I always thinking maybe I could make a mini-Rothko room in spare room.
that would be cool! sincerely. post it here if you do.
i feel like the above comment might come across as sarcastic but i genuinely find it super cool when a layman can master a new discipline with force of will and publicly available writings. much like vermeer's much speculated-upon clever use of technology ;)
The point of the documentary was to show that Vermeer may have used optics.
That's it.
Thank you! I watched some clips on YouTube and I'm very impressed by Tim's technique's efficacy.
Side-rant: I just watched a clip[0] and I have to say something about the misrepresentation of the Hockney-Falco thesis[1] in it.
And when I say I have to I really mean that: I'm Dutch, tried studying physics, dropped out, switched to studying art, specifically photography (even built my own camera at one point), then in the first year of art school was introduced to the Hockney-Falco thesis, then went to the International Congress of Physics Students one last time to hang out with my friends, decided to give a talk on the topic, and ended up winning best talk of the conference. So I'm kind of obliged to Have Some Opinions on this topic.
The clip mentions the HF thesis as if Hockney introduced the notion that the Dutch painters in Vermeer's time used optical tools. That's... not what the thesis claimed. Johannes Vermeer lived in the 17th century[2]. As the clip (correctly) states, telescopes and mirrors were known to the Netherlands by then - in fact the earliest known records of a refracting telescope is from a failed patent application in the Netherlands in 1608[3].
From what I remember, the hypothesis that Vermeer used optical tools wasn't controversial even back in the mid-2000s, a decade before this film came out. While there was no direct proof, he did live in the right place and period to have been introduced to telescopes, and artists trying out new tools is obviously a thing that happened throughout history. Being secretive about his work was obviously also very suspicious. I recall that we also discussed how certain visual qualities of the painting suggested the use of optical tools - Vermeer's style was also just so noticeably different and photograph-like compared to his peers. To be clear, nobody thought this diminished the quality of Vermeer's paintings: he was still innovating and mastering his tools, and creating the beautiful paintings that he made still took tremendous skill.
However, what the Hockney-Falco thesis claims is that Early Renaissance painters like, say, Jan van Eyck[4] already used optical tools, centuries before telescopes and optical mirrors optics were introduced in Europe. We're talking 15th century onwards. And not only that, that this was secret knowledge hidden by the painter's guilds, of which no known record survives even though we have records of all the other painting techniques used. That's what makes it so controversial.
The hypothesis that there was a painter who lived during a time of great innovation in optical tools in the place where those innovations took place, then secretly used those tools to get a leg up on the competition is very plausible.
The suggestion that the entirety of Europe's Renaissance painters learned about optical tools from Arab lands but managed to keep this knowledge secret for centuries sounds like a conspiracy theory.
(also, it's completely ignorant of the realistic qualities of some of the old Roman art[5], and those painters definitely did not have high quality lenses available to them)
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XoqWwuRnj3o
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hockney%E2%80%93Falco_thesis
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johannes_Vermeer
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_telescope
This does make me wonder what kinds of secrets can and can't be kept; on the face of it, that a critical bit of insider information would be kept for oral transmission at particular times (something like a mystery cult) leads me to think that keeping such a secret is at least possible.
At the same time, people love gossip.
Of course, the only secrets we know from the past were by definition not exactly well-kept.
They'd also have to paint without anyone seeing them paint. The fact that Vermeer stood out for being so secretive about his process says something here. Even a no-lens camera obscura would be pretty hard to hide given that it would require to be painting in a darkened room next to the person being painted.
But your question is an interesting one, for sure. Revealed secrets come in different flavors - fully known ones, but also "known unknown" types of secrets, like the exact "recipes" a painter might have used for their paints being a mystery. However, when it comes to "unknown unknowns" hiddeo secrets I think it's very hard to keep those when dealing with more than a handful of individuals.
Steve Mould just released a video about the microscopy technique that was used to capture this 3D relief of the painting: https://youtu.be/o-dZKBwbsis
The microscope used for this is mind blowing. Falls squarely into the list of things I want but do not need.
After watching the video I was trying to find out just how much one of those microscopes cost. Couldn’t find a price anywhere so I’m assuming it’s far out of my budget. But this kind of video is probably the greatest kind of ad there is, just genuinely showing how cool something is. Don’t have a use for it either though, but I would love to have one anyways.
Seems like a fun DIY project. Take an off the shelf digital microscope and attach motors!
Was it the same approach? The 3D relief has artifacts akin to ones produced by heightmaps
This would line up with the approach talked about in the video. In very short terms, pictures were taken at various focus distances and height was defined as whichever distance was the sharpest. This would essentially make a 2D height map with all of the artifacts that would come with it
Click the "3D" button on the bottom-center toolbar to see the 3D scan artifact.
It's has 5x exaggerated height by default, so maybe that's what makes it look wonky. Looks way better by 1x.
If you really want to capture the full visual information of a painting, you'd need full PBR-style data — reflective, refractive, subsurface properties — essentially the response of the surface from any viewing angle in the hemisphere, lit from at least a few fixed directions (like in a museum light setup). Even limited to the visible spectrum, this would massively increase the amount of data needed to represent the image accurately.
The 2019 scan apparently deliberately removed reflections, even though they're an essential part of the artist's intended expression.
Are there models that simulate the actual physical properties of paintings — under artificial lighting, viewed from arbitrary angles? Seems like a worthwhile direction for preserving artworks beyond their flat 2D captures. It could also enable virtually accurate displays of art for single observers using head-tracked screens or VR.
Might also be a promising use case for NERFs or 3D Gaussian Splatting.
This painting really needs some Baumgartner intervention.
There are hints of overpainting around the right eye (left side facing us). Background plus eyebrow. Too smooth, doesn't have the same crackle as the rest of the painting.
The veneer may be quite yellowed. Looking at the cloth on the top of the head over the blue fabric. Might originally be a bright white, but now appears yellowed due to exposure of the last veneer aging and yellowing under UV light.
A man of culture I see :)
I watch his restorations with onesie, but his narrative (when it's not technical) is tiring because it wants to be fancy but it sounds fake to me.
His technical work looks great to me, I have no idea about conservation outside his videos. I heard that he got a lot of hate from conservators (which I do not understand) and actively fought critical comments on his videos (which I find petty).
It's been two weeks he has not uploaded anything and it is annoying :)
BTW I also watch cow hoof trimming and always wondered how many people have such weird lists of videos (art, hoof trimming, software dev, history, action movies, science, cooking, middle age, tables building, ...) - some I do a lit, some not (I saw a cow live twice)
My layperson's understanding regarding the criticisms against Julian Baumgartner is that he uses a lot of invasive methods that don't meet the strict technical standards employed by professional conservators, and this creates a misleading impression of what conservation actually is.
For example, you will frequently see Baumgartner do over- and in-painting of fairly large areas that have been lost. Modern conservation has slowly evolved to distance itself from mere restoration; the objective of conservators who work for museums or major collections is to only apply non-invasive procedures that can bring the artwork closer to its original state (e.g. grime removal) and shore up the structural integrity of the physical object to preserve it, but without adding anything non-original if possible. Baumgartner claims that all his changes are reversible, but you still see him prying lacquer off with a scalpel, completely replacing the wood of wood-panel paintings, and many other techniques that cast doubt on those claims.
I'm not a professional, so I can't judge whether all of this is accurate, but I find the drama fascinating. In the field of conservation, Baumgartner is an outsider, as he mentored under his father rather than study conservation in an academic setting. Baumgartner's videos look absolutely world-class, but he probably wouldn't meet the bar for qualifications imposed by major museums, which typically require a postgraduate degree in conservation, including formal training in chemistry. So there's probably an element of disdain for amateurs to the criticism, as well.
To be clear, what Baumgartner does is probably perfectly acceptable for many artworks, where the owner's directive is to restore the artwork back to what it may have looked like when it was made. But I'm not sure he should touch a Vermeer.
If someone is so skillful that they can restore the painting to its original state, then I think they would be skillful enough to make a perfect copy, so there’s no need to tamper with the original work.
Their expert copy of the work would be valuable and educational in itself, and avoid damaging the original
To me, it is a question of the specific artifact.
You may want to have a painting (or other art) in the form it used to be - and then you look at a "whole" painting where you can imagine the object as a continuous thing to look at -- or at what time has done to it and just at the original parts.
I like both, it really depends on what you are looking at. Venus of Milo is fine as it (mostly because I am used to it) and is quite unique. Fitting the arm back would turn it into yet another sculpture. Watching a detailed painting with a lot of losses would derail me from what is happening in the picture itself.
Keep in mind many painters of the day would intentionally distort the perspective to compensate for the viewing angle.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homography
Beauty is complicated, and imperfection itself can form a timeless lesson:
https://sambourque.com/blog/kintsugi-beauty-in-imperfection
In many ways, some suggest it is an allegory for how people grow throughout their life... and for others it is just broken pottery.
Have a wonderful day, =3
When you zoom in on the cracks, you can see the bevel on the edge of the crack. That’s incredible.
In many places on the edges of the cracks in the dark background you can see tinges of blue or pink color. Is that from the lighting, or is the color actually there, if it is there, anyone have an idea why?
Also at many places the cracks seems to be overpainted, filled in. I guess that's from the restorations...
I just looked it up and there is a picture from an analysis where they are showing its possible state before the restoration:
https://media.springernature.com/lw685/springer-static/image...
"In UV fluorescence, the natural resin varnish layer fluoresces greenish, and areas retouched in 1994 can be distinguished from the original paint as they appear darker"
The full paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s40494-019-0307-5
I think I can see a repair on the left cheek? Line of lighter "filler" that seens to follow a crack?
It's a beautiful painting.
I also can't stand the sight of it.
It has been abused as a kitchy backdrop on so much tat and assorted items — including wheelie bins, recycling bins, garden fences, pillows, phone covers, and posters — to such an extent that it just oozes bad taste by implication.
Poor girl.
I'm assuming you're in the Netherlands based on your NL suffix. Outside of the Netherlands it's rarely seen and so hasn't had the quite the abuse you state.
I still think it's an absolutely stunning work of art (regardless of whether Vermeer used camera-obscura or not).
The company behind this has a making of on YouTube: https://youtu.be/j_MvpMlgfwI?si=mK9LWleFBE8r_saz
Any work related to deconstructing these classic paintings? I’ve been thinking about an AI project where you basically analyze paintings based on brush strokes. The end result would be an animation of painting from blank canvas to completion.
Amazing, I feel like I'm zooming in to some alien city.
I'm sure people are thinking about it, but with high resolution scanning, 3D printing, etc., it feels like it should be possible to create extremely high quality reproductions of famous artwork at scale, and at a fairly reasonable cost.
Is anyone working on this?
Lots of folks in the GLAM sector are working on it.
Anyone know what they’re using to render this? Something like map tiles?
Yes. This site seems to be using https://krpano.com, but https://openseadragon.github.io/ is an open-source alternative. The New York Times has used the latter for features like this one: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/04/26/world/europe/...
Props to them for not locking out older browsers as many sites are doing these days.
There are plenty of these here :)
https://artsandculture.google.com/search/asset?project=art-c...
I was immediately drawn to the faint text in the upper left. Meer I could read but it's the artist's signature. https://www.essentialvermeer.com/references/signatures/facsi...
Projects like this are fascinating for reasons, I guess, unintentional to their creators.
Is what you can see at this level of detail helping anyone understand the painting?
Someone thinks so. So what do we now know?
I think projects like this help you develop a felt understanding of the painting as a unique physical artifact that is not fully reproduced by prints or scans.
I now know there are somewhat rectangular 1mm length fibers embedded in the paint of this work. A secret only art preservationists knew prior.
There is a company doing the same for microscopy. Super large scale images of anything in the centimeter scale.
Saw this picture at the Mauritshuis museum in The Hague. There are a couple funny things about it:
* It is surprisingly small
* It is kinda "fuzzy" or "blurry", you can't detect too much brushwork.
* It is very expressive
But my favorite Vermeer is not this, it is View of Delft, also in the Mauritshuis. The colors, hues and textures on it are just amazing.
For Brazilians, a funny curiosity: Mauritshuis means House of Maurice. It is really the former residence of Maurice of Nassau (Maurício de Nassau), the governor of the Dutch colonies in Brazil. This museum also have some interesting works by Rugendas and other painters showing life in colonial Brazil and a very cool collection of puppets made with bread paste showing life in colonial Indonesia.
The Mauritshuis is a very good reason to visit The Hague. If you go there take a walk to the M.C. Escher museum too.
Wow, View of Delft is beautiful!
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a2/Vermeer-...
I feel obliged to point anyone interested to Proust on Vermeer: https://www.essentialvermeer.com/proust/proust.html
It's worth a visit if you're in the Netherlands. Large parts of the town are the same as they've been for centuries.
My favorite is The Little Street. (https://www.johannesvermeer.org/the-little-street.jsp). I just love the quiet calmness of it. I had a copy of it made from one of those cheap Asian oil painting places online (the frame I put it in cost me more than the painting!), and was surprised what a good job the artist did. When I went to Amsterdam a few years ago, I made a point to go see the real one. But I wondered how well I'd visually remember my copy in order to make a direct comparison to the actual painting. I remembered well enough to be blown away by the real one. As pleased as I am with me copy, it's definitely not the same.
Is there a similarly detailed remastered version without all those cracks?
This scan should preclude forgery of the work. I doubt there's a way to duplicate the crack patterns that anyone can now refer to.
It would be crazy set of events to lose the provenance paper trail of this piece, at this point, cracks documents or not.
I'm amazed at how fast this is.
It's like Google Maps. I didn't look under the cover but typically the way these things work is there's a resolution hierarchy and it loads bits dynamically as you zoom in. The zoom here is a bit slow (it doesn't let you slam into the painting at warp speed) so there is likely a bit of latency hiding as it loads high res tiles.
The trick to make it super fast is to predict where the user might be viewing 1 second from now.
If an animation is in progress, that's an easy prediction.
If the user is using a mouse, they'll generally scroll or pan but not both.
If the user is on a touch screen, again the gestures are limited.
When you have your predictions, you start loading the those things.
When I visited the Mauritshuis when they were scanning it I managed to spot something looking like a Solaris workstation next to the scanner. I was kinda surprised to see it...
I'm not versed enough in history of art to fully appreciate this painting and how it became so popular, could someone point me to some resources to improve my culture on the matter?
Thanks in advance for any reply
The artist is well known for his use of light/shadow in his works and is probably going to be the first bullet on any list. Also known for expensive pigments, an unknown style/methods , and being sloppy but extremely detailed depending on your vantage / distance. Zooming in on this one will highlight that
I can recommend The Story of Art: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Story_of_Art
John Berger's Ways of Seeing, I think it's all on youtube. There's also a book adaptation though I've not read that
I very recently created an app that helps people learn art history.
https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/for-arts-sake/id6744744230
It’s a first version, and there’s a lot more content and features to come, but it’s actually already taught me so much making it!
Thank you too from me. Ideally a youtube channel or channels
Great tool for future artwork authentication.
needs a paintjob, its all chipping away
Well at this resolution we see that is an erotic picture.
Am I the only one here who is looking for the jpg?
Why does "Details 90x" seem to zoom in more than "Details 140x"?
The main image is all at the same 90x level, and those buttons just zoom in (more or less) all the way on the points, while the "140x" are separate scan patches at higher magnification (though the real point is they have 3D/height data, too).
I thought it was cool. Then I saw the 3D button!
The painting is now like a Google maps.
This is amazing!!!!
Paintings are not photographs. Paintings are not two-dimensional images. They are 3d sculptures that change based on light causing a million little shadows. Similarly, the paint has transparency and depth. A trillion pixels wouldn't be enough to convey the experience of actually being in the same room with such a painting.
Comment was deleted :(
Ah, so beautiful!
I knew everyone would immediately zoom into her mouth! If you look at the 3D view of it at a low angle it looks like the surface of Mars. Amazing.
Crap quality; I can't make out the individual atoms.
I half expected it to proceed to optical light microscopy or even scanning electron microscopy but the latter would have toasted the painting with radiation damage.
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> 3D AI girlfriend... based on the 2003 film
Unexpected cross-movie tie-in: Scarlett Johansson, who played the Girl with the Pearl Earring in the 2003 film, also played the AI girlfriend in the film "Her".
That's not unexpected, that's synergy. /s
And where there's movie "Synergy", a "Franchise" can't be far behind... followed by the inevitable "Cinematic Universe."
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This is nowhere near enough pixels. I want at least trillion. Go back and try again!
Crafted by Rajat
Source Code