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.
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 :)
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
But say you write a pop culture hit, people start looking deeper, and the gaps become glaring.
Like the fusion drives in the expanse, it's hand waved on the first read through, but on the second I found that someone had calculated it online (like this https://toughsf.blogspot.com/2019/10/the-expanses-epstein-dr...) and now it kinda ruins the vibe, the author should have chosen something outside of current science (basically magic) or used a technology that's feasible.
Also, the ships fucking explode when they lose magnetic fusion containment...whereas in reality it would just dissipate...
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Which service did you use for the recreation? Would like to do something similar. Currently have been doing high quality glossy prints from high-res images like this but a real painting with texture would be great.
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.
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.
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?
"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"
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.
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).
Readit News
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.
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.
It also won the Modern Language Association's top award — the James Russell Lowell Prize for the most outstanding book published in 2023.
[1] https://academic.oup.com/book/46695
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."
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 :)
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.
But Vermeer is next level, especially for the time. A growing contingent of historians believe he used camera obscura to achieve the results
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hockney%E2%80%93Falco_thesis
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.
The analog equivalent of pixelation.
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 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.
Deleted Comment
But say you write a pop culture hit, people start looking deeper, and the gaps become glaring.
Like the fusion drives in the expanse, it's hand waved on the first read through, but on the second I found that someone had calculated it online (like this https://toughsf.blogspot.com/2019/10/the-expanses-epstein-dr...) and now it kinda ruins the vibe, the author should have chosen something outside of current science (basically magic) or used a technology that's feasible.
Also, the ships fucking explode when they lose magnetic fusion containment...whereas in reality it would just dissipate...
Dead Comment
[0] https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4707
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.
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.
> 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?
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
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_van_Eyck
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_art
At the same time, people love gossip.
Of course, the only secrets we know from the past were by definition not exactly well-kept.
My first guess was that it’s a clean $30k. Now I’m going to add a digit and guess $100k.
* 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.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a2/Vermeer-...
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.
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
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)
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.
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?
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 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 still think it's an absolutely stunning work of art (regardless of whether Vermeer used camera-obscura or not).