Gerrit Dou, the renowned fijnschilder included such curtains in a few of his more ambitious compositions. When Zeuxis discovered that the curtain was a painted one and not a real one, he was forced to concede defeat, for while his work had managed to fool the eyes of birds, Parrhasius had deceived the eyes of a human beings.Ī popular story goes that Rembrandt's students had once painted coins on the floor of his studio for the pleasure of watching him bend down and try to pick them up.ĭutch painters working around the same themes as Vermeer had pioneered and perfected the curtain devise years before him. Parrhasius then asked Zeuxis to pull aside the curtain from his painting. Zeuxis had produced a still life so convincing that birds flew down from the sky to peck at the painted grapes. This story was cited by Plinius the Elder from a Greek source in his Naturalis historia, 77 A.C. Vermeer must have been familiar with the famous contest of Greek antiquity held between two renowned painters Parrhasius and Zeuxis to see who was the finest. The pervasive illusionism in The Art of Painting is based on a firm understanding of perspective and awareness of optical laws. By covering only small portions of the map, the trumpet and still life, Vermeer entices the observer to pull back the tapestry all the way thereby involving him not only visually, but physically in the painted illusion. Repoussoir is a means of achieving perspective or spatial contrasts by positioning a large figure or object in the immediate foreground, to the left or right. Vermeer's fellow painter Gerrit ter Borch repeatedly utilized a very similar chandelier as a prop in his compositions even though he never dedicated as much attention to it as Vermeer.įrom a purely visual point of view, the drawn-back tapestry functions as a so-called repoussoir. However, multibranch chandeliers were rarely found even in the houses of the wealthiest burghers (which had one at most), and in the very few inventories where chandeliers are listed they, are called kerkkroon (church chandeliers), because examples of this type were more often hung in churches or civic buildings than in houses. Willemijn Fock, a Dutch historian, noted that such chandeliers permitted artists to demonstrate their expertise at rendering shimmering and refractive brass under changing light conditions. The highlights are painted with astonishingly thick opaque blobs of light-toned paint that seems to dance above the surface of the painting imitating the shimmer of sunlight. Whatever its iconographical meaning, it is hard to imagine that Vermeer, perhaps the most "optical" artist of the Netherlands, was not attracted by the formidable technical challenge it posed to his eyes and craft. It has also been seen as an image of the phoenix, a symbol of a resurrected and reunited Netherlands. One critic suggested that the eagle may have been an allegorical symbol of sight, one of the five senses meant to strengthen the focus of the painter's activity. The fact would bring it into relation with the vertical crease in the map (made before the wars and Treaty of 1648) which accentuates the divisions between the Spanish South and the United Provinces of the independent North. Experts generally believe that the glittering golden chandelier surmounted by a double-headed eagle, the imperial symbol of the Habsburgs, refers to an earlier era when that dynasty ruled the Netherlands. Nowhere in Vermeer's oeuvre has iconographic interpretation proved so complicated as in The Art of Painting. A period chandelier in the Delft Stadhuis (Town Hall)
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