The Discovery of Nature: Art of the Netherlands & Low Countries. 9

Vermeer's Virtuality: Looking Through the Camera Obscura in the Seventeenth-Century.

Svetlana Alpers cites Kenneth Clark’s comment about Vermeer’s The Art of Painting being the “nearest painting has ever come to a coloured photograph.”¹ Indeed, some modern artists have tried to capture the “look” of a Vermeer in photographs and coloured prints. The idea of Vermeer’s paintings resembling photographs goes back to the nineteenth-century when connoisseurs employed photographs, or reproductive media such as etchings, lithographs, when identifying and presenting a painter’s oeuvre. As Ivan Gaskell shows, photographic pioneers like Fox-Talbot turned to the conventions of Dutch art: his photograph Open Door seems to reference the detail of a broom against a door in Vermeer’s The Little Street (above).² This interest in Vermeer’s photographic realism has centred on the device known as the aforementioned camera obscura, although it is not known whether Vermeer used optics to help him create his pictures. His paintings with their sharp clarity suggest optical precision, although there is no documentation to back up these claims. A number of scholars of 17th century Dutch art have used the phrase “virtual reality” to describe the startling realism of many of the paintings of the period; the art seems to possess a kind of “reality effect” making it seem more than painted materials applied to a surface.³ The term “virtual” first appears in English in the writings of Sir David Brewster about the properties of refraction in his Treatise on Optics (1831). Best known for his 1816 invention of the kaleidoscope (an optical device that demonstrated the principles of reflective symmetry), Brewster described the differing properties of an image seen by the eye and an image seen through the mediation of a lens. As we shall see next week, this fascination with the merging of science and art continues more enthusiastically within the following century- the age of Enlightenment.

1 Clark, Landscape into Art, 55.

2 Ivan Gaskell, Vermeer’s Wager: Speculations on Art History, Theory and Art Museums (Reaktion, 2000), 142.

3 For example Mariet Westermann, The Art of the Dutch Republic 1585-1718, 1996, 71-98; H. Perry Chapman, “The Imagined Studios of Rembrandt and Vermeer” in Inventions of the Studio, Renaissance to Romanticism, ed. Michael Cole & Mary Prado, 2005, 108-146.