The Essential Vermeer Glossary: Q-Z

REALISM

A type of representational art in which the artist depicts as closely as possible what the eye sees. Realism attempts to represent people, objects, or places in a realistic manner as opposed to an idealized way; also, a later 19th century art movement in France which objected to the idealized style of Romanticism by creating works that depicted a more faithful view of everyday life.

Without underestimating the efforts of (Dutch) interior painters to make their works seem realistic, it is important to be aware up to what point we are dealing with modified reality.

Many mid-seventeenth century Dutch genre paintings, including those of Vermeer, portray elegant interiors of the upper middle-class. These pictures reflect concepts that were important in Dutch culture such as the family, privacy and intimacy. However, it is likely that the world of exquisite refinery of Vermeer's compositions did not accurately portray the world he actually observed.

C. Willemijn Fock, a historian of the decorative arts, has demonstrated that floors paved with marble tiles were extremely rare in the Dutch seventeenth-century houses and that only in the houses of the very wealthy where floors of this type were sometimes found, they were usually confined to smaller spaces such as voorhuis, corridors and upper story sleeping or storage rooms. Fock reasons that the abundant representations of these floors in Dutch genre painting may be explained by the fact that "artists were attracted by the challenge involved in representing the difficult perspective of receding multicolored marble tiling."

Vermeer should not be considered a realist painter in the strictest sense of the word. He frequently modified the scale, the shape of objects and even the fall of shadows for compositional or thematic reasons. One of the most striking examples of this modified reality is a so-called picture-within-a-picture, The Finding of Moses, which appears on the back wall of two of his compositions. In The Astronomer it appears as a small cabinet size picture , whereas it appears in Lady Writing with her Maid as an enormous ebony-framed picture. Which on, if either, was true?

RENAISSANCE

A French label given to an Italian cultural movement and to its repercussions elsewhere. For Italy the period is popularly accepted as running from the second generation of the 14th century to the second or third generation of the 16th century.

Characteristic of the Renaissance is the steady rise of painting and of the other visual arts that began in Italy with Cimabue and Giotto and reached its climax in the sixteenth century. An early expression of the increasing prestige of the visual arts is found on the Campanie of Florence, where painting, sculpture, and architecture appear as a separate group between the liberal and the mechanical arts. What characterizes the period is not only the quality of the works of art but also the close links that were established between the visual arts, the sciences and literature.

The period of the Renaissance brought with it many important changes in the social and cultural position of the artist. Over the course of the period there is a steady rise in the status of the painter, sculptor, and architect and a growing sympathy expressed for the visual arts. Painters and sculptors made a concerted effort to extricate themselves from their medieval heritage and to distinguish themselves from mere craftsmen. At the beginning of the Renaissance, painters and sculptors were still regarded as members of the artisan class, and occupied a low rung on the social ladder. A shift begins to occur in the 14th century when painting, sculpture, and architecture began to form a group separate from the mechanical arts. In the 15th century, the training of a painter was expected to include knowledge of mathematical perspective, optics, geometry, and anatomy.

REPOUSSOIR

From the French verb meaning to push back. Repoussoir is means of achieving perspective or spatial contrasts by the use of illusionistic devices such as the placement of a large figure or object in the immediate foreground of a painting to increase the illusion of depth in the rest of the picture. Caravaggio had become famous for his paintings of ordinary people or even religious subjects in repoussoir compositions. Repoussoir figures appear frequently in Dutch figure painting where they function as a major force in establishing the spatial depth that is characteristic of painting of the seventeenth-century. Landscapists too learned to exploit the dramatic effect of repoussoir to enliven their renderings of the flat uneventful Dutch countryside.

Vermeer adapted various examples of repoussoir to his own compositions that he had most likely derived from other Dutch paintings. The looming figure of the officer in The Officer and Laughing Girl is very similar in color and shape to the repoussoir figure in The Procuress by Gerrit Honthorst.

The most spectacular example of repoussoir in Vermeer's oeuvre may be found in the Art of Painting. The large foreground curtain on the left-hand side of the painting seems to have been just drawn back to let the viewer enter the pictorial space. Both the curtain's warm tone and the heavy impasto paint application makes it appear even nearer to the viewer.

This kind of repoussoir was generally placed on the left-hand side of the composition tend to rapidly scan images darting from the left to the right as when reading. By consequence, Vermeer's repoussoir is suited to be looked at by the reading eye, which, after a brief moment's delay at the repoussoir, is directed immediately toward the key moment of the representation of the painter and his model and explores the rest of the painting thereafter.

ROUGH AND SMOOTH STLYE

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SCUMBLING

The technique of applying a thin, opaque or semi-opaque layer of paint over a previously painted (dry) surface to alter the color or appearance of the surface without totally obscuring it. Scumbling is rather like glazing, but with light colors over dark. The colours mix optically rather than on the palette, and the result is shimmery, opalescent. Think of the pearly water surrounding Monet's water lilies.

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SEASCAPES

Holland is more intimately linked to the sea that any other nation on the earth. It is not surprising, therefore, that a number of Dutch artists devoted their careers to seascapes. "The sea was significant in a variety of ways to the Dutch. They were constantly warring with it in the struggle to increase and retain their land. On the other hand, the sea was the source of their wealth and their economic stability. The United Provinces was a great maritime trading nation; this was the backbone of its economy. The Dutch relied on the sea for a crucial part of their food supply. The herring, so often represented in still-life paintings, was indeed a national treasure. Salted, it remained edible and provided sustenance during the long sea voyages that promoted Dutch prosperity, and it also enriched the economy as a major item for export. The sea was also the scene of their military successes. Dutch national heroes were admirals rather than generals; the great tomb sculptures in Dutch churches are tombs of admirals. Paintings of seascapes reflected the specific maritime interests of the Dutch people, and there seems to have been a large market for them in the seventeenth century.

A number of Dutch artists whose work consisted mainly of other kinds of subjects painted seascapes as well. Jan van Goyen, for example, painted numerous coastal scenes and purely marine subjects. Jacob van Ruisdael and Aelbert Cuyp also painted seascapes. Some artists, however, specialized in seascapes. Most marine painters were experts on ships."²

SELF-PORTRAIT

Jean Fouquet's self-portrait (c. 1450), a small picture created in gold on black enamel, is seen as the earliest clearly identified self-portrait that is a separate painting, not an incidental part of a larger work. However, self-portraits are known to go back as far as the Amarna Period (c. 1365 B.C. ) of Ancient Egypt. Pharaoh Akhenaten's chief sculptor Bak carved a portrait of himself and his wife Taheri out of stone. This is significant because Bak and Taheri were not like the rich and powerful who could afford the privilege of a portrait therefore the artist must have had another reason for creating this work of art. Sean Kelly points out in his book The Self-Portrait, A Modern Vieww, while we know a number of self-portraits from the ancient world, we also know very little about the psychological motivations which inspired them.

Though Dürer is credited for being the first artist to consistently create self-portraits, Rembrandt is given credit for being the first artist to intensely study the self through art.

Self-Portraits as a Self-Study http://www.research.umbc.edu/~ivy/selfportrait/study.html)

It wasn't until the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when scholars studied Rembrandt's oeuvre as a whole, that it was discovered how very many times the artist had portrayed himself. The number is still a matter of contention, but it seems he depicted himself in approximately forty to fifty extant paintings, about thirty-two etchings, and seven drawings. It is an output unique in history; most artists produce only a handful of self-portraits, if that. And why Rembrandt did this is one of the great mysteries of art history.

Most scholars up till about twenty years ago interpreted Rembrandt's remarkable series of self-portraits as a sort of visual diary, a forty-year exercise in self-examination. In a 1961 book, art historian Manuel Gasser wrote, "Over the years, Rembrandt's self-portraits increasingly became a means for gaining self-knowledge, and in the end took the form of an interior dialogue: a lonely old man communicating with himself while he painted.

Art historian Ernst van de Wetering sets forth a view that has gained a number of adherents over the past few decades. The "self-portraits" (there was no such term in the seventeenth century) could not have been made for the purpose of self-analysis, he claims, because the idea of self as "an independent I who lives and creates solely from within" is one that arose only in the Romantic era, after 1800. In the literature of Rembrandt's day, he contends, personality was seen primarily as being bound to certain immutable types discussed in classical sources. Van de Wetering basically sees that Rembrandt's "programme" in these self-portraits was to make paintings for which there was a ready market. He points out that a detailed inventory of Rembrandt's possessions made in 1656, when he faced bankruptcy, included no portrayals of the artist by himself.) In self-portraits, artists in Rembrandt's day and previous eras sometimes included a painting in the genre for which they were best known, as an example of their style. In the case of Rembrandt, he was most noted for his eccentricity of technique and for his tronies and depictions of one or a few figures. So, in making his self-portraits, which van de Wetering contends were probably all seen as tronies in their day, Rembrandt was making the kind of images art buyers expected of him, which had the added attraction of being depictions of their maker and exemplars of his unusual technique.

T H E A R T S , Jan, 2000 Rembrandt's Self-Portraits By Susan Fegley Osmond http://www.worldandi.com/public/2000/january/rembrandt.html

According to the catalogue from the 1696 Dissius estate sale in Amsterdam describing twenty-one Vermeer paintings to be auctioned, one of the works was a "portrait of Vermeer in a room with various accessories uncommonly beautifully painted by him." Unfortunately, this "uncommonly beautiful" self-portrait of Vermeer remains missing or has not survived. But over the years there have been several ultimately unsuccessful candidates nominated for consideration, beginning with Vermeer’s signature surviving work, the Art of Painting, now in Vienna. The artist depicted in this masterpiece may well be Vermeer himself, but since his back is turned to the viewer, his identity remains uncertain.

While the 1696 Dissius self-portrait remains lost or has been destroyed, the pose, the glance, the fancy costume, and the placement of the figure on the left of Vermeer's The Procuress (1656) all suggest this is the only extant supportable self-portrait (or any painter's portrait) of Vermeer, who was nearly twenty-four at the time. Although the smiling young man represented in this painting could have easily been a friend, relative or fellow painter, many scholars believe that Vermeer created an image of himself separately and inserted it rather awkwardly into the scene.

SFUMATO

A technique, theorized and developed by Leonardo da Vinci, in which the transitions from light to dark are so gradual they are almost imperceptible; sfumato softens lines and creates a very natural soft-focus effect. This slight blurring of contours was associated with the realization that air has a mellowing effect comparable of smoke or vapor. Fumo in Italian means smoke. Leonardo advised that "the painter, depicting figures and objects distant from the eyes, should put in only blots, not detailed but with distinct outlines."

"Vermeer, in his individual way of rendering sfumato, let areas of paint slightly overlap at the transition areas along contours in order to create a special luminous effect around his pictorial motifs. The result of this technique can be seen , for example, around the skirt of The Milkmaid and the Young Woman with a Water Pitcher, but also between the floor tiles in The Music Lesson."

Another extraordinary use of sfumato in Vermeer's oeuvre can be seen in the late Guitar Player. The strings of the guitar are blurred and appear that they had been just plucked. Curiously, the Spanish master Velasquez, with whom Vermeer's painting has been compared even thought objective ties have never surfaced between the two masters, also experimented with blurred contours to convey the sense of movement in the spinning wheel of the Las Hilanderas (The Spinners) c. 1657.

SITTER

A person who poses for the figure(s) to be represented in an artist's work

Women are seem to be the central focal point of many of Vermeer's paintings. "Vermeer painted about 49 figures of women, but only 12 men, and no children (despite having an extremely large family himself). This emphasis on women is logical in the work of an artist who was entirely devoted to the painting o interiors, as the domestic space was the realm which society had assigned to women. Nonetheless, while for De Hoogh and Maes the home was a setting for maternity and domestic tasks, Vermeer was alert to the appearance of a new type of woman, better educated than her predecessors and more absorbed in her interior life. It is not my chance that among the innovations of interior paintings we find a sensibility towards the intimate psychology of individuals, given the concept of an interior life was developing at just this time. Street life and family life became more separated in houses at this period and more private spaces and areas for withdrawing begun to appear." ³

Oddly enough, the only historically documented sitter in Vermeer's oeuvre was Vermeer himself who posed for a now lost self-portrait cited in the 1696 Dissius auction of 21 Vermeer paintings. The remaining women and men who populate the artist's extant interiors remain anonymous. Perhaps it is the fact has encouraged much speculation by scholars and public alike as to just who they may have been.

Due to the intimate nature of Vermeer's art, there has been a certain inclination to link Vermeer's own family members to the sitters of his paintings, some of which seemed to have posed more than once. The economic advantage of employing sitters from the artist's family willing to pose long hours without pay would be obvious. This fact would not be without precedent. Gerrit ter Borch, a fellow Dutch artist whose discreet genre interiors probably inspired some of Vermeer's own compositions, frequently used members of his own family as models, in particular his step-sister Gesina. "The tenderness with which Ter Borch portrays this woman on numerous occasions indicates his fondness for her. "

SIZE

Material applied to a surface as a penetrating sealer, to alter or lessen its absorbency and isolate it from subsequent coatings. Traditional sizes for paintings may have been rabbit skin or fish glue. Parchment was also used. Size also serves to protect the canvas, as oil paint in direct contact with the canvas will cause it to become weak and brittle.

SKETCH

A sketch is a rapidly executed depiction of a subject or complete composition, which is usually produced in preparation for a more detailed and completed work. "Despite the interest in the outdoors, the Dutch landscape painters rarely painted their. His usual practice was to make sketches of scenes that caught his eye; then, returning to his studio, he would begin to paint, using his drawings for reference. And since he might use as many as a dozen drawings from different locations in a single painting, the final scene was often entirely the product of his imagination."⁴

Many Dutch painters also sketched their initial idea directly on the canvas. Ernst van de Wetering (Rembrandt: Artist at Work,a great number of sketches on paper by Rembrandt have survived, very few of them were intended as preparatory works for his painting compositions.

Although no preparatory or final drawings of Vermeer remain, this does not necessarily mean that he had not at some time or the other produced them. Drawings, although collected by some connoisseurs at the time, did not have the same value as they do today and considering that Vermeer's preparatory drawings might have been done in a more schematic rather than expressive style, it is not unreasonable that they were not deemed of great value. A single "folio" such as the ones listed in the artist's death inventory may have contained his precious drawings which could have been lost or destroyed.

As odd as it may seem, it is possible that Vermeer was able to transfer the final image of his composition without having ever realized any kind of material sketch or drawing. Philip Steadman, in his study of Vermeer's use of the camera obscura (a sort of precursor of the modern photographic camera widely known by painters in Vermeer's time), conjectures that the artist may have actually traced the image projected by the camera obscura directly on the canvas. The camera obscura, which certainly served Vermeer as a compositional aid, would have rendered preparatory drawing superfluous. Although some scholars still strongly dissent with Steadman's arguments, a growing number have begun to concede they have a strong rational base and moreover are in conformity with Vermeer's pictorial and expressive objectives . (For detailed information on the subject, read Steadman's Vermeer's Camera: Uncovering the Truth Behind the Masterpieces, or visit his web site at: http://www.vermeerscamera.co.uk/home.htm.)

STILL-LIFE

A painting in which the subject matter is an arrangement of objects - fruit, flowers, tableware, pottery, and so forth - brought together for their pleasing contrasts of shape, color, and texture. Dutch still-life painters delighted in the play and contrast of transparent and reflective surfaces: the finely wrought metal of the ewer, the representation of smooth glass, the weave of the linen drapery, the dry crumbly texture of the bread, and the wet, shiny insides of the open pomegranate. At first glance, this still life implies an absence of human presence. But a closer look reveals just the opposite. The torn bread, half empty glass of wine, sliced fruit, and overturned glass allude to human intervention, as if these lavish delicacies were abruptly left on the table.

The term derives from the Dutch 'stilleven', which became current from about 1650 as a collective name for this type of subject matter. Still life painting flourished in Holland in the 1600s. A great interest in botany arose toward the end of the 1500s, when collectors of herbs and plants were spending fortunes on their gardens; their desire for portraits of their prized possessions fueled the popularity of flower painting. Later on, Dutch still-lives were eagerly taken up by French painters and collectors and came to decorate the most fashionable French salons.

"In 17th c. Holland the pressures of art theory were less heavy and real, and it was here that landscape and still-life, as an autonomous categories of painting, began to occupy major place in art production. Even so, there was no serious theoretical discussion of them; Dutch theorists tended to regard the practitioners of still-life in particular as something of a joke. Samuel van Hoogstraten, just after the middle of the seventeenth century, called them 'common footmen of the Army of Art. ' "⁵

"Though it started in the kitchen, still-life painting soon branched out to include a whole catalogue of decorative and useful items which Dutch burgers surrounded themselves: silver tankards, half-filled wine glasses, tobacco pipes, musical instruments, parchment and globes, along with the usual fruit, vegetables and game. As the century wore on , still-life reflected the increasing of middle.-class luxury; the late 1660s simple white tablecloths had given way to ornate Persian rugs and china was often fine Ming. Such glorification of the Good Life matched the mood of the prosperous art buyer. The paintings obviously fit nicely over his dining table, and the artists who made them were assured of a steady demand."⁶

Competition in the Dutch art market was fierce and consequentially, prices were generally low. In order to survive each painter had to secure himself a particular style to differentiate his work from others already available. Many painters depended on secondary sources of income to survive. Since it took a very long time to become proficient in any one category of painting such as landscape, still-life, or portraiture, painters usually worked in one area only.

Within this context Vermeer, like Rembrandt, was a part of a minority of more talented Dutch painters who were able to work in different categories. However, neither Rembrandt nor Vermeer are known to have painted any still-lives.

STRETCHER

A wooden chassis for textile supports that has expandable corners. Even though canvas is generally attached to a stretcher or a strainer but may remain unsupported, or be stuck onto some sort of rigid support. Stretchers and strainers are generally made of wood (most commonly pine or ash) and usually with tongue and groove joins, mitred at the corners and beveled away from the canvas toward the inside. The terms stretcher and strainer are often used interchangeably, but should differentiate between a framework which has no method of opening out the joins to tighten the canvas (strainer), and one which does by means of wedges or keys (stretcher). Recently new methods of creating a more even tensioning have been developed using metal inserts in the wood which enlarge the joint evenly through each member of the stretcher. Large paintings require the stretcher itself to be further supported. This is provided by cross members or cross bars. Today's familiar expandable stretchers which take up the lost tension by means of wedges inserted in the corners became common only in the 1750s

Vermeer's late Guitar Player is a rarity of 17th c. paintings in as much as it is one of the few canvases of 17th c. that is still is on its original stretcher complete with the original wooden pegs once used fasten the canvas to its stretcher.

STYLIZED, STYLIZATION

Simplified or exaggerated visual form which emphasizes particular or contrived design qualities.

SYMMETRY

Orderly, mutually corresponding arrangement of various parts of a body, producing a proportionate, balanced form.

The fundamental role of symmetry in the art is not exhausted by its connection with ornament or geometric abstraction. Art historians often used symmetry to characterize the formal qualities of a work of art, distinguishing symmetry as a basic principle of all artistic rules - the canons, laws of composition, criteria of well-balanced form. As the most significant property of harmony and regularity, symmetry is one of the main organizational principles in every art: painting, sculpture, architecture, music, dance, poetry. Even in the most extreme modern art - conceptualism or minimalism, it lays in their intellectual background.

The very roots of the theory of symmetry (in Greece) are inseparably linked to the establishment of the aesthetic principles - the canons and theory of proportions. The links between the theory of symmetry and aesthetics

Vermeer carefully avoided strict symmetry as a method to balance his compositions.

TAVERN SCENES

In seventeenth-century Flanders, paintings of peasant scenes began to take on a new character, emphasizing carousing, drinking, and smoking. The central action of this painting is a variation on the theme of cardsharks made popular by Caravaggio. Josse van Craesbeeck’s Card Players also shows the influence of his friend and teacher Adriaen Brouwer, who also painted sordid tavern scenes.

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TEMPERA

A method of painting in which the pigments are mixed with an emulsion of water and egg yolks or whole eggs (sometimes glue or milk). Tempera was widely used in Italian art in the 14th and 15th centuries, both for panel painting and fresco, then being replaced by oil paint. Tempera colors are bright and translucent, though because the paint dried very quickly there is little.

TEXT

A great part of European painting had drawn its subject from literary sources such as the Bible, mythology and classical texts. These subjects were considered those most adapted to achieve the highest goal of painting: that of elevating the humans spirit. In the 17th c., Dutch painters began to exploit the pictorial possibilities of direct observation of the natural world. And the new subject matters of landscape, still-life and genre, which once had been predominantly existed only as descriptive elements in history, became separated into distinct categories.

However, the remembrance of the world of classic painting which the Dutch seemed had done away with in the span of less than 50 years, was not easily forgotten and perhaps exerted itself once again under the form of allegory in genre painting. Dutch genre painting did not represent a text but rather a situation, it was through the introductions of recognizable symbols these situations could reversed into a moral example. Emblems too were used for the same purpose.

In the past decades attempts to interpret 17th c. Dutch genre painting, and that of Vermeer as well, through association with contemporary texts such as emblematic literature have flourished. Although much has been learned, no general agreement has been reached on how Vermeer employed them in his own paintings and critical investigation of the meanings of Vermeer's paintings has gradually turned elsewhere. For example, Mariët Westermann has written recently that " the pictorial and literary sources for Vermeer's interior paintings show the limited usefulness of hunting for textual or artistic precedents. What makes Vermeer's rare but powerful contributions to the history of interior painting interesting is the way in which they articulate thought in pictorial terms. Philosophers might say that Vermeer was a strongly eidetic painter (from the Greek eidos, mental image, visual thought) in that his way of conceiving his paintings and their mode of communication was distinctly visual rather than literary in origin."⁷

TEXTURE

The tactile quality of a surface or the representation or invention of the appearance of such a surface quality. Painters like Gerrit Ter Borch and Gerrit Dou were especially skilled at rendering the textures and surfaces of objects like those found in the foreground of their paintings: the roughly hewn stool, the wooden basin filled with water, the chipped ceramic crock, and the shiny metal hinges of the buckets.

Vermeer used impasto to obtain certain effects of texture above all in his early works. For example, in the Maid Asleep, the carpet in the foreground has been reinforced with rough impasto application of paint. Vermeer took great care to re-create the interwoven patterns of the fabric and one can almost feel the material presence of the carpet's knotty texture.

TIMELESSNESS

The notion that certain works of art are so filled with genius that they rise above the specifics of time and place to occupy a transcendental, superhuman plane of existence that does not belong to history.

TITLE

A name that identifies a book, movie, play, painting, musical composition, or other literary or artistic work

The titles that have been given to Vermeer's paintings present problems. Ivan Gaskell (Vermeer's Wager, 2000) has noted that some works by the artist are referred to as what we take as being a title in early documents (such as The Dissius auction of 1696 in which 21 paintings by Vermeer were sold) even though they may represent nothing more than convenient descriptions. "The only exception is the Art of Painting. John Montias has demonstrated that Vermeer's widow, Catharina Bolnes had gone to great lengths to keep the painting from being taken from her by her creditors. Two months after Vermeer's death, it was described in a notorial documents as "a painting done by the aforementioned late husband, wherein is depicted 'The Art of Painting' (' de Schilderconst' )." All other titles of Vermeer's paintings must be considered convenient descriptions based on subject and color rather than titles in the modern sense of the term.

Since the rediscovery of the Girl with a Pearl Earring in 1881, the painting has been given a number of different titles in various publications according to authors' preference. Some have identified the painting with the girl's turban, or some with the girl's youth and some have considered it as a portrait and others as a study. The discrepancies, if nothing else, show that the work was evidently not always associated so strongly with the pearl earring as it is today. The pearl seems to become a part of the title only after the first half of the 20th c. The title given by the Mauritshuis where the painting is housed is: Meisje met de parel.

TROMPE L'OEIL

Illusionism, most commonly in painting, but also in some sculpture, etc., intended to "fool the eye." A type of painting which, through various naturalistic devices, creates the illusion that the objects depicted are actually there in front of us. Dating from classical times, trompe l'oeil was revived in the 15th century and became a distinctive feature of 17th-century Dutch painting. The development of one-point perspective in the Renaissance advanced illusionist technique immeasurably. It was highly developed in the baroque period; Caravaggio's basket of fruit included insects to enhance verisimilitude.

While perspective generally creates the illusion of space behind the picture plane, trompe l'oeil creates the illusion of space in front of the picture plane.

TONE

The lightness or darkness of a color, rather than the actual color (yellow, blue, red, green etc.) is. Studies have indicated that the average person can visually differentiate eleven tones between white a black without undue effort. Line is essentially a convention because it is generally believed that lines do not exist in reality. Lines must be depicted as the boundaries between different tone values, the edges of adjoining areas of light and dark tones. Painting, in a sense is the art of making clear painted statements in flat toned areas. For this the painter must learn how to see nature in terms of lightness and darkness. Tone give shape to form and a sense of depth to a painting.

The pigments available to the artist have unsequenced tones and intensities. For example, the tone of natural ultramarine blue pigment (Vermeer's characteristic blue) is very dark. On a scale of grays it appears near black. On the other hand, lead-tin yellow, (Vermeer's characteristic lemon yellow) is very light, quite near pure white. In order to lighten the tone of ultramarine blue, the painter has simply to add white. To darken light toned pigment such as lead-tin yellow the painter must add a darker tint. However, if black is added for this purpose, the yellow immediately appears distinctly greenish in color and not longer gives the idea of a deeper shade of yellow but rather of a different color altogether. Painters often used raw umber, a deep semi-transparent brown earth pigment, to approximate the color of the shadow of a yellow tones object such as the yellow morning jackets worn by many of Vermeer's sitters. In Vermeer's time, there were relatively fixed recipes for obtaining the various tones of each color, which however , were severely limited not only by the very few pigments available but by their mutual compatibility of as well.

TRONIE

"The now defunct term (tronie) refers to heads, "faces," or "expressions" (compare the French trogne, or "mug") and to a type of picture familiar from many examples by Rembrandt and his followers. The majority of Dutch tronies appear to have been based upon living models, including the artists in question or a colleague, but the works were not intended as portraits. Rather, they were meant as studies of expression, type, physiognomy, or any kind of interesting character (an old man, a young woman, a 'Turk,' 'a dashing soldier' and so on). Garments that looked foreign, 'antique,' costly, or simply curious were of interest for their own sake and frequently offered opportunities to show off painterly techniques. "⁹ Tronies, were in effect, paintings usually made and sold for the open market. The artist was entirely free to choose the sitter, dress and technique and faced none of the restrictions of formal portraiture.

In the seventeenth century there was an avid market for tronies, which were considered a separate genre (although for an artist such as Rembrandt, they also served as a storehouse of facial types and expressions for figures in history paintings).

Historical evidence refers to three tronies painted by Vermeer. John Larson was a Hague/London sculptor who in an inventory drawn up in August 1664 had a painting described as "a tronie by Vermeer." It was valued at 10 guilders. In the Dissius auction of 1696 in which 21 works by Vermeer were sold, two of the paintings were described as tronies, The relative part of the catalogue is reproduced below.

38. a tronie in antique dress, uncommonly artful, by the same (Vermeer).............36 guilders 39. another ditto (tronie) by Vermeer..................................................................17 guilders. 40. a pendant by the same..................................................................................17 guilders

The first tronie fetched 36 guilders while the other two only 17 guilders each. Some scholars have conjectured that item numbers 39 and 40 are perhaps the Girl with a Red Hat and Girl with a Flute which are among Vermeer's smallest pictures. The prices of the three paintings were low in respects to many of the other 18 Vermeer’s sold in the same auction, a fact which has lead some scholars to believe that the Girl with a Pearl Earring was not among the tronies listed. The beauty of the painting, they argue, must have surely been evident to buyers present at the auction and it would not have been bought for a fraction of the price reached by The Milkmaid (item no.1 at 155 guilders), or Woman with a Balance (item no. 2 at 175 guilders.) However, Dutch buyers may have had a somewhat different perception of a tronie such as the Girl with a Pearl Earring and before spending their hard earned money, they may have considered more than just the work's esthetic value alone.

In any case, if we are to accept the authenticity of the Washington Girl with a Flute it would seem that four tronies by Vermeer have survived: The Girl with a Pearl Earring, A Study of a Young Woman, The Girl with a Red Hat and the Girl with a Flute.

UNDERPAINTING

In its simplest terms, an underpainting is a monochrome version of the final painting intended to initially fix the composition, give volume and substance to the forms, and distribute darks and lights in order to create the effect of illumination. The lack of color probably explains the word "dead" in the term "dead painting." In the17th c. underpainting, or dead-coloring as it was called, appears in various forms, sometimes as loose monochrome brushwork and sometimes as an assembly of evenly blocked-out "puzzle pieces" of different colors. The final color and detail was then applied over the underpainting only when it was thoroughly dry. Underpaintings were usually executed in warm earth tones or with flat areas of thin color which approximated the final color over neutral gray grounds. Raw umber at times mixed with black were frequently used for this purpose. Cool gray underpaintngs were also employed.

Underpainting is rarely practiced today. For the last century, artists have simply begun their painting directly on commercially pre-prepared white canvases with full color surpassing anything but a abbreviated sketch.

Without a thorough knowledge and mastery of the underpainting technique, the extraordinary pictorial coherence which characterizes Vermeer's most mature pictures may not have been easily achieved. The underpainting technique greatly facilitates the realization of finely balanced compositions, accurate depictions of light and chromatic subtleties.

UNITY

Like contrast, unity is an element that describes a relationship between two or more elements or objects within a composition. Unlike contrast, however, which tends to focus on isolated relationships within the composition, unity usually describes such relationships within the context of the composition as a whole. Unity can be said to define how any one element or group of elements is related to the rest of the composition. Thus, contrast itself would be an aspect of unity, as is color, value, etc. The most common quality of unity that art classes and critics focus on is visual flow or connectivity. This can be described as the way in which compositional elements "lead the viewer’s eye" from one area of the image to another.

VALUE

The lightness or darkness of tones or colors. White is the lightest value; black is the darkest. The value halfway between these extremes is called middle gray. Because a painted image is physically two-dimensional, a painter must have some tool to create a false, but convincing illusion of three-dimensionality. Value is that tool. The effects of value are most easily seen in a black and white drawing. In such a drawing, one can find a range of tones from pure black, across a spectrum of gray, ending in pure white. By using such a scale of tones, a painter is able to recreate in two dimensions the effects of light and shadow on a three-dimensional object. In a painting, such tones are usually found in spectrums of color instead of gray, but the effect is the same. Value is extremely important to a painter because without its proper use it would be impossible for a painter to create convincingly realistic imagery. It’s also a useful tool for adding further definition to forms, of which line alone is incapable of doing. Value also works in conjunction with contrast.

VANISHING POINT

In perspective, the point on the horizon at which sets of lines representing parallel lines will converge. These diverging lines are called orthagonals.

Critics have noted that Vermeer often place the vanishing point in a thematically significant area of his compositions. Perhaps the most representative example can be found in the Woman Holding a Balance. The vanishing point coincides almost exactly with the geometrical center of the composition and very near to the thematic heart of the work: the woman's hand which steadily balances the scales.

In Vermeer's times another an artisinal method of working out the perspective drawing existed as well. Jørgen Wadum has noted that¹³ paintings by Vermeer, including Woman Holding a Balance, "contains evidence of Vermeer's system, by which he inserted a pin, with a string attached to it, into the grounded canvas at the vanishing point. With this string he could reach any area of his canvas to correct orthogonal, the straight lines that meet in the central vanishing point." This system was widely used among painters of the time. In Wadum's opinion, Vermeer had most likely had fully assimilated the laws of perspective perhaps using various extant guides and did not use the camera obscura for working out perspective problems as Steadman has suggested.

VANITAS

Vanitas is the Latin for vanity, in the sense of emptiness or a worthless action. 'Vanity of Vanities, saith the preacher, all is vanity' (Ecclesiastes 12: 8). The implication of these words from the Old Testament is that all human action is transient in contrast to the everlasting nature of faith.

A painting (or element in painting) that acts as a reminder of the inevitability of death, and the pointlessness of earthly ambitions and achievements. Common vanitas-symbols include skulls, guttering candles, hour-glasses and clocks, overturned vessels, and even flowers (which will soon fade). The vanitas theme became popular during the Baroque, with the vanitas still life flourishing in Dutch art.

The vanity of all earthly things was one of the most popular themes of Dutch still-life painter. They often included objects which suggested the transience of life: skulls, bones, hourglass, flowers or a snuffed-out candle. There were countless other r symbols; the sea-shell, a collector's item, represented wealth; musical instruments symbolized the pleasure of the senses. The vanitas tradition was particularly strong in Leiden., possibly because the university there made the town the center of theological study. It has been suggested that the vanitas painting played a role in Dutch painting parallel to that of the crucifixes and religious paintings in Catholic countries.

VOLUME

Space enclosed or filled by a three-dimensional object or figure or the implied space filled by a painted or drawn object or figure. In order to give volume and create a convincing sense of three dimensionality, painters usually employed tone, or rather, various shades of light and dark to convey a sense of volume or mass.

WARM COLORS

Colors whose relative visual temperature makes them seem warm. Warm colors or hues include red-violet, red, red-orange, orange, yellow-orange, and yellow.

WET-IN-WET

Application of paint to a surface which has already been painted and is still wet. Wet-in-wet technique permits fine blending of two adjacent areas of different tones.

Vermeer seems to have employed the wet -in-wet methods in various paintings. The Girl with a Pearl Earring shows that the painter applied paint wet-into-wet. The lighter and darker parts of the young girl's blue turban were mixed wet-in-wet with rounded brushstrokes of ultramarine and white mixtures. Once dry, the area it received a transparent glazed with natural ultramarine.

Application of paint to a surface which has already been painted and is still wet. Wet-in-wet technique permits fine blending of two adjacent areas of different tones.

WORKING-UP

Working-up in Dutch was called "opmaken" which means to finish. "During the working-up the main concern was to give everything its correct coloring, to render materials appropriately, and to fix the final contours of the forms."¹⁰ Each distinctive area of the painting was generally executed as a separate entity and finished in one or two sessions. "Whenever it was necessary to achieve strong, bright colours, (for red, yellow, and blue robes and the like), the passage concerned was clearly executed within carefully delineated contours in accordance with fixed recipe, involving a specific layering or fixed type of underpainting."¹¹ (For further information on working-up, click here).

Recent technical study of Vermeer's paintings indicates that he most likely used the standard working-up method employed by Northern European artists. In his mature work, many passages are completed with only one or two pigments different than those of the adjacent ones. Furthermore, there is sound reason to believe that in the working-up stage, sittings occurred a long time from one another. Rather than a being a slow painter, Vermeer may have been a more meditative painter concentrating fully on one area at a time with long intervals between painting sessions. (see interview with Jørgen Wadum, chief conservator of the Mauritshuis)

It remains very difficult to understand the sequence in which Vermeer worked up each separate passage. Ernst van der Wetering has hypothesized that Rembrandt worked from "the back to the front" of his pictures by analyzing the system of overlapping areas of pigment.¹² No such study has been conducted in regards to Vermeer's painting. However, one might reason that the background white-washed walls, which play such an important role in the artist's pictorial conception, may have been among the first areas to be completed in the working-up phase. More than any other pictorial element, the walls' color and tone determine the amount and quality of light which will be represented in a given painting. Analogously, landscape painters often depict the sky first in order to properly gauge the correct colors of the rest of the painting. For it is obviously the sky which influences the tone of the landscape itself and not vice versa. After having defined the various tones of the wall, perhaps Vermeer then worked-up the larger areas of color such as the various costumes worn by the models which usually play a decisive role in the chromatic harmony of the painting.