Word: vermeers
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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...
Famous pictures usually surface in the end, after whoever took them realizes how hard they are to sell. But along the way the thieves can devastate a delicate image. The one who snatched Vermeer's Love Letter from a Brussels museum in 1971 crammed it under his bed, leaving creases that required restoration. The Scream is especially vulnerable because it was painted on cardboard, which is less supple than canvas and also does not absorb paint as well. The slightest bend could cause pigment to flake away. If that happens, the anguished little man in Munch's picture...
...Yarnwinder from Drumlanrig Castle near Dumfries, Scotland. That case is still unsolved. So is the most spectacular art robbery in the U.S., the 1990 break-in at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. Thieves disguised as policemen made off with 13 pictures, including a Manet, three Rembrandts and Vermeer's magnificent small canvas The Concert...
...anymore? It's not the art of fiction we have in mind here. It's fiction that manages to work in a few Italian frescoes or a Dutch still life. Stirred by the success of Tracy Chevalier's Girl with a Pearl Earring, about a household servant who inspires Vermeer, publishers have rushed in with titles like Christopher Peachment's Caravaggio; Will Davenport's The Painter, about Rembrandt; and Mario Vargas Llosa's The Way to Paradise, about Gauguin. As a rule, the books are intelligent, sometimes even ingenious, but in most, the underlying formula is plain: art plus...
Girl with a Pearl Earring, which concerns the Vermeer portrait of a delicate young woman with an intense gaze, was all sublimated passion and quiet decorum. The Lady and the Unicorn centers on the series of tapestries that today hang in Paris' Musee National du Moyen Age depicting a woman's seduction of a unicorn. Not surprisingly, the proceedings are more overtly carnal. The story begins in 1490 when the painter Nicolas des Innocents, whose appetites pointedly contradict his name, is commissioned by the wealthy Parisian Jean Le Viste to design six tapestries glorifying the nobleman's status at court...