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Painting A True Picture with a Youthful Heart.---The Study of 17th Century Dutch Artist Johannes Vermeer’s Painting TechniquesThere is a powerful scene in the 2006 Hollywood movie “The Prestige” where a magician is performing an illusion for a 19th century small Victorian period audience that includes a young boy and his beautiful mother. The magician covers with a wide swath of cloth a wire bird cage that is sitting on a table top. In the cage, is a perched a yellow canary. The old man picks up the cage with his two hands and without much further ado slams it hard onto the wooden table top. There is a loud thud and the cage collapses pancaked beneath the opaque cloth. The five-year boy starts to cry and the rest of the spectators are stunned. With a dramatic flourish of his arm the magician sweeps away the cloth-covered remnants of the now flattened cage. With his free hand he pulls out one single carnation, covers that with a handkerchief and pulls it away to reveal the yellow canary. The audience in relief applauses with enthusiasm but the boy is not appeased. His mother tries to comfort him and after the canary is returned to a new wired cage an assistant brings it over to the still upset boy to assure the boy that the bird is alive. The mother points out that the bird is fine but the boy questions: “Yes, but what about his brother? We soon see the magician backstage where he returns the canary to an impromptu aviary. The flattened cage is now revealed and we see the body of a dead canary as the magician tries to dump it into a waste can. Its feathers enmeshed within the spaces between the vertical wire bars hampering its quick disposal. The child with his inexperienced eyes saw the truth behind the magician’s deception. The rest of the crowd perhaps expecting to be entertained by the skill of the magician in conjuring an illusion are duped, interpreting what is seen in a way that conforms to their expectations. Conditioned with their preconceptions to believe in the magician’s art, they believe! To call such a magic trick an illusion is a misnomer since a true illusion, although a distortion of the senses, is shared my most of us and reveals how our brains interpret and organize outside stimuli. An illusionary effect may involve any human sense, but since vision dominates our perception of the world, optical illusions are also paramount. An illusion is a misrepresentation by the mind that alters the accuracy of an incoming sensation originating from a real phenomenon.A desperate and lost wanderer in the hot desert may hallucinate by falsely seeing a life-saving, watery oasis but the image is a perception that only exists within the mind with no external stimuli. It is a visual delusion. A mirage is an actual naturally occurring optical illusion where light waves are refracted from a distant object and a false image is projected near the observer. It is the different temperatures and densities of layers of the atmosphere that act like a lens to produce a displaced image that often is inverted. Images often appear somewhat distorted and as such open to interpretation by the human mind. For exhausted and thirsty travelers, it is common to interpret the blue sky that is the source of the mirage that appears as an inferior image on the desert sands as a shimmering, blue lake. The watery image is real, rather unstable but can be captured on camera. Likewise, images of actual lighthouses and ocean ships can be seen floating on the desert sands. In a similar way, ocean-going ships that are so far away that they should be invisible due to the curvature of the Earth may appear on the horizon or above it as superior images. Observed mirages in the Arctic include flying ships and coastal towns hovering above the horizon. A superior image is caused by a temperature inversion often over a large ice sheet and it is fairly stable because the cold air below the line of sight does not rise and the warm air above it is not likely to readily sink. Normally, air becomes colder with rising altitude. Passing through an inversion, light waves are bent down and the image is elevated above its true position. In cosmology, lensing can be caused by gravity because everything even light reacts to it in the same way. A photon of light passing through a strong gravitational field of a galaxy or clusters of galaxies will be refracted just like it was passing through a polished lens or warped pane of glass. Depending on its intensity, a strong gravitational field can cause multiple images of the originating source whereas a weaker field deflects the light coming from more distant stars to only distort the singular image. Only recently have we developed telescopic cameras that are precise enough to decipher the slight changes in shape of some star galaxies affected by gravitational lensing. Cameras and lenses for a long time have helped us out tease out changes in lighting that may escape our natural ability for perception. As Johannes Kepler stated it in Latin, ut pictura, ita visio: sight itself is a picture. Like magicians, artists and painters protect their trade secrets from competitors. Not only do we know that painters try to augment the mystery of the methods of their work by not documenting them, but also a painter could not as easily trick the eye of the beholder if such secrets in composition of tone and perspective were readily revealed. The formulas followed for mixing the colors and hues of paints were compiled in what were considered books containing closely held secrets. Rembrandt, his methods for engraving although renown were hidden from the other artists who painted in his own workshop. What is known is that 17th century Dutch artists strived to paint a natural depiction of the physical world. Lenses were the new technology of that century and peddlers sold them as spectacles in many towns. The telescope and microscope were recent developments that expanded our vision to include the extraordinary large to the very small. The use of optical instruments in science was an acceptance that the world is more than how it appears to us. Beyond the power of the naked eye is an unseen world that often contribute to the natural phenomenon and processes we experience. In a historical note, in the archives of the city of Delft, Holland there exist the entries recorded in November, 1632 just several lines apart of two giants of science and art; Antoni Leeuwenhoek and Johannes Vermeer. There despite living and working in close proximity in the same quarter of Delft we have little proof that their lives intertwined. There is one more entry corresponding to them where on the same page 43 years later Leeuwenhoek is appointed as part of his official duties the executor of the estate of the recently dead painter. He served fifty years as a civil servant but he had been assigned to be curator of an estate of the deceased just four times. In the other cases besides that of Vermeer there is a record of Leeuwenhoek either knowing the person or being acquainted with the property of the estate. There may have been a personal or business connection between them in life beyond this official link after Vermeer’s passing.The camera obscura with its pinhole aperture had been known for hundreds of years but by substituting a ground lens by the end of the 16th century increased the brightness of the focused image. The new, improved camera obscura perhaps was a useful tool for some of the periods greatest artists. Some of Johannes Vermeer [1632-1675] paintings are so balanced and luminous that these masterpieces are textural illusions that capture a moment in time that appear to belie the use of a brush. He left behind only 36 paintings and there is no record of how he went about his work. There are no work diaries, no letters, no anecdotes and no remaining sketches or drawings. We know little about him as a person other than that he lived 350 years ago in a far different world than ours today. Those paintings from 1657 onwards represent his prime period and art critics have since puzzled on how he mastered the effects of lighting and nuanced the soft focus of his subjects that convey the unique, slightly blurred impression that characterize his brushstrokes. Using modern scientific techniques that search beneath the surface paint they see bold differences in light and dark in the very first layers of underlying pigment. There is a notable lack of line as one would expect from a preparatory sketch. His canvasses and painted wooden panels have been scrutinized by autoradiography, infrared reflectography, spectroscopy; they have been magnified and viewed from every angle of perspective but the results are still difficult to interpret. He painted with prominent features of his work that mimic aspects of photography. In 1658, Italian painter Daniele Barbaro writes about seeing objects projected through a lens one would witness things ‘as they are in reality…colours, shadows, movements, clouds, the ripples of water, the flight of birds…you can draw with un panello all the perspective that appears there, and then shade and colour it as nature displays to you’. Subsequent English translations mistakenly translate the tracing tool as a pencil. The graphite pencil we know from elementary school was not common until the early 18th century. It meant a paintbrush in Italian, Barbaro would have authored the word penna if he meant a hard drawing implement. When one penetrates the top layers of his pictures with modern inspection, one can see the beginnings of the inventing layer beneath. In Woman in Blue Reading a Letter [1663-1664] the finished work and the underlying image in black and white is strikingly similar to the colored finish painting. The expected roughed-out underpainting is almost identical to the final masterpiece. Except for coloring, Vermeer is able to put down from the very start of his work the complete essence of his picture at once in an image composed of interlocking masses of tones that give both shadows and highlights. We can see fine detail where Vermeer allow parts of the underpainting to show through. His inventing layer serves as the backbone of his tonal organization in the final composition and it works because Vermeer chooses not to cover it further with top layers of paint. It is if the artist projected the complete woman in the surrounding room intact on his white canvas and then edited and added as necessary to this remarkable template. His dark, strong beginnings originate from the start with the very first layering of paint that serve as monochromic tonal maps, laying out providentially what is to be eventually needed to convey the beauty, accuracy and emotional impact of the final artwork. Some of his works look like an overexposed photograph in that there are only slight gradations in tone before sudden jumps from light to dark. Paintings are illusions of reality that use opposites for contrast. If the artist wants his red hues to glow he puts them next to green. If you want something to look diminutive than juxtapose it next to something big. Vermeer’s very dark underpaintings make his subjects appear brighter than what would be expected under natural light. We also require as viewers luminance or rather comparative brightness to judge three-dimensional depth on a flat surface. Our brains process color and tonal differences in separate portions of our brain. Color is not necessary to recognize spatial depth in objects as we readily interpret black and white photographs. The painter can add color later in subsequent steps. Vermeer paintings are constructed in layers but in most of his art pieces the more we examine and look for detail the less we eventually see. Distinct lines are missing, only gaps exist between the edges of forms and shapes; in the deepness of the shadows we see the underpainting erupting from below. At times, it is incomprehensible to witness that his pictures are fabrications at all. Vermeer gives us without apparent effort soft impressions of what we recognize as reality. His painted arms, hands, faces, earring are not precise representations but nevertheless lead the viewer to where he wants to take our eyes. Girl with a Pearl Earring is constructed typically from an almost complete black and white underpainting where the top layers are put on in both vertical and horizontal distinct layers where each part of each successive layer was applied separately. Each layer of paint applied in distinct, isolated endeavors. It is likely that Vermeer worked in the dimness of an improvised camera obscura constructed with draperies where he traced using a small brush dipped into a black pigment like bone black onto 17-century paper coated with linseed oil which became both imperviously and transparent once coated. Most likely the oiled paper was dried for several days so when it was pressed with its etched image onto a blank canvas less oil would leak out. The image of his study would be projected upside down and from back to front. The image size would be selected by the distance of projection to match the dimensions of the final painting. The dark paint previously ground to a viscosity that was not too runny. Also, if it was too thick it would dry to fast too print on an awaiting canvas that had been stretched and primed then rubbed smooth to leave a dusty, absorbent surface. The size of the brush like the little bear’s porridge in Goldilocks had to be just right, of enough size to carry enough pigment but fine enough to transcribe detail. The tracing itself had to be accomplished quickly in the dim workspace; the very dark image was in effect a printing reversal which the artist would correct with the actual printing on a blank white canvas. The very dark prints that resulted augmented the apparent illumination that would naturally come through the windows of a well sun-lit room because what our eyes interpret as light originates from the white canvas itself. The dark print with its sharp tonal variations if not later wholly repainted over would intensify the look of luminosity. Vermeer would have been knowledgeable about how the printers in his own artist guild practiced their craft. He lived when printed material became readily available and many books could be got on Market day in Delft held weekly at the town hall. We also know that Vermeer owned prints on paper and we know that his contemporary Rembrandt worked at times on paper. Oiled paper was readily available for it was found in Dutch pantries to wrap up food, in summer vegetable gardens as a plant covering and as a shading material to lessen the intensity in brightly sun lit windows. It was long employed by artists for tracing and Pieter Jansz Sanredam [1597-1665]—a painter of renown in the Dutch Golden Age--who lived his life in nearby Haarlem is documented to have routinely blackened the back of his drawing paper and with a hard stylus transferred it to a suitable painting surface. Present day artist Jane Jelley, who authored the 2017 book ‘Traces of Vermeer’---a reference strongly utilized in this writing--- rediscovered what she theorized was the tracing and printing process implemented by Vermeer with an improvised camera obscura. Although inconclusive, the modern-day results obtained by her efforts were impressive in outlining the possible approaches employed by him by using a glass lens in that apparatus.No reproduction of the View of Delft [circa, 1662] does adequate justice to the genius of Vermeer’s original oil on canvas painting which hangs the Mauritshuis art museum in The Hague, Netherlands. In its intimate gallery rooms, the best of Flemish and Dutch art is hung including Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring and The Goldfinch by Fabritius. Visitors to the gallery are bedazzled by the scope of the artist’s skill in capturing tone in the View of Delft with its many tiny points of encrusted beads of white lead paint that despite the soft focus bejewel the edges of many of the building’s red tile roof tops and add luster to the light scintillating off the dark boats moored in the slightly rippled but mainly calm, reflective waters on the Kolk river that mirror the image of the town under a clouded, big Dutch sky. As Jane Jelley describes it, ….’the buildings across the calm water are doubled in monumentality by their strong dark reflections on the Kolk. The clouds look threatening, and we see the silvery underside of leaves as they curl in the wind. There is something about the quality of the light; of the little speckles of illumination; of the ripple of glinting water; that feels immediate’. It doesn’t matter how closely one scrutinizes the illustrated surface for it is hard to comprehend that despite seeing it that the artwork is constructed merely with paint. Some areas are thin and smooth as satin while an adjacent thickly coated surface may be roughly textured. The shapes and forms appear abstract but the touches of his brush dabbed everywhere on the canvas is an illusion that appears as an astoundingly true account of reality.No account of the Dutch Golden Age should avoid discussing the choice of subject matter that the artists selected. Still life paintings and much of the focus in choosing suitable topics was in light of the Protestant Reformation. In 1506, angry mobs led by reform minded nobles stripped or destroyed the altars and church interiors constructed in the Catholic tradition of adorning churches with ornate biblical scenes or icons of saints. The strict Calvinists who came to control the emergent Dutch Reformed Church condemned such design as idolatry. In Delft, hostilities against Catholics reached its zenith in the 1640s when many in the city were forbidden to congregate for public worship. Catholic schools for the young were also run in secret. The Catholics also segregated themselves by living together in select enclaves of Delft such as Paepenhoek or Papists’ Corner. Simplicity and a reverence for symbols that endorsed a pragmatic work-oriented life were valued. Labor, education of the young and innovation were valued even among the very wealthy producing a society that was called by some “an island of plenty in an ocean of want.” From the 1590s onward, there was a high demand for such art especially in light of the Dutch dominance in the lucrative sea-faring trade. Dutch society was profoundly impacted by this global trade and no one alive was ignorant of the strong interplay between what was produced on land and how it was traded by sea. Commercialism brought about an exchange of knowledge and scientific investigation which was embraced for its practical benefits it delivered. The proliferation of artworks that was hung on both private and public walls heightened the awareness that the Dutch Republic was different than the rest of 17th-century Europe. It was an industrious powerhouse whose influence extended far beyond what its diminutive size would predict. The art work reinforced not only the change in religious values but encompassed the perspective of what everyone saw and felt every day in the bustling Dutch seaports. Painting became an industry that produced pictures for export especially to Germany where many Protestants shared similar tastes to that of the Dutch Republic. Vermeer would have known keenly that the most financially successful painters of the day specialized in depicting moments of everyday life including many domestic scenes. It was also common for art patrons to choose the subjects of their commissioned pictures. Some artists openly painted symbols that ambiguously could be interpreted as suggestive. Ripened fruit, shucked, wet and raw pinkish oysters, tempting food morsels lusciously enjoyed, wine freely poured from gaping jugs into glasses offered enticingly to the viewer, all were symbols employed to convey sensuality and want. Maidservants were common in the genre of the day partly because such help was the norm in many Dutch households of means; but the young girls were often viewed suspiciously. Unmarried and young, they were an essential cog in the machinery necessary to run a household but often judged as untrustworthy nonetheless. They represented a temptation for the master and their propensity for petty thievery encouraged an ambivalent attitude toward their necessity. Nevertheless, maidservants were not to be slapped or hit even for such a cardinal sin as leaving their keys in the bedroom door, were fed decently, were to be spoken to in a polite but business-like manner and were paid modest but not stingy wages. Those who excelled were given a yearly bonus. They also provided as models for the male viewer of art an invitingly young portrait of feminine sensuality without the guilt that would be expected for desiring the mistress of the house. Often, the maids were coyly posed as innocence on the cusp of womanly experience! Young woman possessed social freedoms that were unknown of in other countries. It was easy for single men and woman to meet on the street, inn or at the market square. Young, unmarried woman could go about unchaperoned, speak to whomever and it was not frowned upon if they took a glass of beer in public. Women in the Dutch Republic had legal rights in marriage, even in matters of business and could work to support themselves without being dependent on their menfolk. The women despite their discretion in wearing only modest styled clothing and wardrobe that fully covered them, were considered as ‘liberal’ by visiting foreigners. It was said that the Dutch women “did not have much regard for chastity while unmarried, but once married none [were] more chaste and true to their husbands.” Few newborns were born out of wedlock but many were born seven months or less after the exchange of matrimonial vows.“See for yourself!’ was the call of the 1600s especially in The Dutch Republic. Artists like Vermeer explored nature with glass lenses, mirrors and the camera obscura to paint art that projected a reality in light, hue and shadow that showcased variations in nature that went beyond what the human eye could see. There was more to reality than what met the eye. Self-taught scientists like Leuwenhoek peered through tiny lenses to discover the wonders of microscopic fauna and flora. Others used telescopes to explore the night skies and contribute to astronomy and physics. All investigated nature with the extended reach in sight provided by the new optics. Today, we continue our search to see the true nature of our Universe; the Hubble Space Telescope has revolutionized our understanding by sending back to us from low-earth orbit stunning images of stars, galaxies and nebulae. It being stationed above the atmosphere can detect photons at wavelengths that cannot be seen down here on Earth. We can now observe objects and processes that emit electromagnetic radiation beyond the optical, radio, infrared and microwave regions. Ironically, the ceiling of our knowledge is not only limited by the present reach of our technology but by a far more pedestrian opponent that exists within the darker shadows of human nature. It is our propensity for demagoguery in our political discourse which threatens our collective vision of nature and truth. I cannot help but revert back to the Dutch still-life art of wooden bowls mounded with fresh fruit when I see CNN’s ‘facts matter’ news campaign that an apple is never a banana no matter how many times some nameless voice tells you so. Fruit, symbolic of our need and ability to decipher the refreshing truth. For improvements in optics and technology may enhance our observations but that is not enough to see clearly and completely. Like the little boy with his caring mother whose fresh eyes saw the pernicious nature of the magician’s trick with the canary----- may we come to see not only with our eyes but also with the best nature of our youthful hearts no matter what our age.By Robert A. Saritelli 02/22/2018REFERENCES:Snyder, Laura J.: Eye of The Beholder: Johannes Vermeer, Antoni Van Leeuwenhoek & the Reinvention of Seeing; 2015. W. W. Norton & Co. New York.Jelley, Jane: Traces of Vermeer; 2017 Oxford University Press. Oxford, United KingdomMeyer, David M: Experiencing Hubble: Understanding the Greatest Images of the Universe. 2011. The Great Courses. Chantilly, VACarroll, Sean: Dark Matter, Dark Energy: The Dark Side of the Universe. 2007. The Great Courses. Chantilly, VASiegel, Ellen: Symbols of Change in Dutch Golden Age Still Life Paintings; 2011. NEH Summer Seminar for School Teachers: The Dutch Republic & Britain.Nolan, Christopher-Director: The Prestige; October, 2006. Touchstone Pictures; Movie Screenplay adapted by J. Nolan from Christopher Priest’s 1995 novel: The Prestige ................
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