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The technical (re-)examination of Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Vandivere, Abbie |
| Copyright Year | 2020 |
| Abstract | © The Author(s) 2020. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creat iveco mmons .org/licen ses/by/4.0/. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creat iveco mmons .org/publi cdoma in/ zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data. What makes Johannes Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring (c. 1665, Mauritshuis, Fig. 1) so intriguing? In 1881, the Girl was purchased at auction for two guilders (plus a thirty cent commission) [1]. Now visitors from all over the world come to the Mauritshuis to experience this painting. Seeing the Girl in person, you become captivated by her presence, her gaze, the way she opens her mouth as if to speak, and how her earring shines against the shadow of her neck. Visitors often have questions: Was she a real person? Why did Vermeer paint her? Although we might not be able to fully answer these questions using scientific means, we can discover how Vermeer brought the Girl to life. In 2018, Girl with a Pearl Earring underwent a technical examination in front of the museum public at the Mauritshuis. The Girl in the Spotlight project involved an international team of scientists and conservators. The overall goal was to find out more about the materials, techniques that Vermeer used to create this masterpiece, and to document the current condition of the painting since its last treatment in 1994 [2–4]. The research questions that guided the 2018 technical examination were: What steps did Vermeer take to create the painting? What can we find out about layers beneath the surface? Which materials did Vermeer use and where did they come from? Which techniques did Vermeer use to create subtle optical effects? What did the painting look like originally, and how has it changed? What is the chemical and physical condition of the painting? Over the course of two weeks, Girl with a Pearl Earring underwent a complete ‘body scan’ with the most advanced non-invasive imaging techniques, including: technical photography, reflectance and molecular fluorescence imaging spectroscopy (RIS, FIS), fibre optic reflectance spectroscopy (FORS), multispectral infrared reflectography (MS-IRR), macroscopic X-ray fluorescence (MA-XRF), macroscopic X-ray powder diffraction (MA-XRPD), multi-scale optical coherence tomography (MS-OCT), 3D scanning, 3D digital microscopy, and computer-assisted thread-level canvas analysis (Fig. 2). These revealed the chemical composition of the paint layers; visualised the underlayers, surface topography and differences in opacity; and provided a visual image of the entire painting at 4.4 μm/pixel. The research team also investigated the layers of the painting by analysing microsamples using: scanning electron microscopy–energy dispersive X-ray analysis (SEM–EDX), focused ion beam–scanning transmission electron microscopy (FIB– STEM), Fourier transform infrared–attenuated total reflectance spectroscopy (FTIR–ATR), ultra-high-performance liquid chromatography (UHPLC), gas chromatography mass spectrometry (GCMS), synchrotron radiation X-ray techniques (μ-XRPD/μ-XANES), and lead isotope analysis. The macro-imaging and micro-analyses complemented each other to provide a full picture of the materials and techniques that Vermeer used to create Girl with a Pearl Earring. |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| DOI | 10.1186/s40494-020-00370-7 |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | https://heritagesciencejournal.springeropen.com/track/pdf/10.1186/s40494-020-00370-7 |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | https://doi.org/10.1186/s40494-020-00370-7 |
| Volume Number | 8 |
| Journal | Heritage Science |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
