Word: delft
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Dutch art restorer Daan Hartmann was trying to authenticate a painting by Johannes Vermeer when he solved a centuries-old mystery. Cued by some details in the painting, Hartmann checked archival records and found that the building in Delft where he has worked for 20 years is THE STUDIO VERMEER USED to create his 17th century masterpieces. Hartmann hopes it will now become a museum, in part to accommodate the tourists who have invaded Delft since the 1999 book and subsequent film, Girl with a Pearl Earring, about a painting by Vermeer...
...bizarre chariot comprising the body of an elephant, the head of a dragon, flapping wings and radial tires. The dusty exhibits can be comical, but in little-visited Cirebon, the tourist must be alert to art all around. Even at the palaces, there are hidden treasures: antique blue delft plates from former ruling power the Netherlands. Once they were for dining, now they decorate the centuries-old dirt walls of the palaces...
Anton Von Leeuwenhoek is famous for scraping the plaque off the exceedingly dirty teeth of the elderly men of Delft. He is still remembered today for his crude attempt at oral hygiene because he was the first person to describe bacteria and a host of other “cavorting beasties” that were visible in the plaque under his crude microscopes. (Leeuwenhoek originally called them “wretched beasties,” but time has been kind to the bacteria.) He described them jumping about with their grotesque appendages and strange methods of locomotion. He collected...
...space and temperature from his native Mediterranean. And high on the brick wall of the apartment building to the left, a pink patch: a ray of sun breaking through winter's grisaille. Surely Koch had been thinking of the "little patch of yellow wall" in Vermeer's View of Delft, the last thing Proust's connoisseur Bergotte notices before he is felled by a heart attack. Memory and desire: Koch's great understated themes...
...idea of "Vermeer and the Delft School" is a harmless red herring, a pretext for looking at Vermeer and a few lesser artists who happened to be around in the same town at the same time. There was no distinctive Delft school. In the 17th century the place harbored only one artist whose talents approached Vermeer's--the slightly older Pieter de Hooch (1629-84), who was originally from Rotterdam but worked in Delft for about five years in the 1650s. Vermeer and De Hooch had several things in common, the main one being that nothing at all is known...