{"id":5552,"date":"2013-11-30T14:30:18","date_gmt":"2013-11-30T20:30:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/?p=5552"},"modified":"2013-11-30T14:30:18","modified_gmt":"2013-11-30T20:30:18","slug":"reverse-engineering-a-genius-has-a-vermeer-mystery-been-solved","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/?p=5552","title":{"rendered":"Reverse-Engineering a Genius (Has a Vermeer Mystery Been Solved?)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.vanityfair.com\/culture\/2013\/11\/vermeer-secret-tool-mirrors-lenses\">Kurt Anderson:<\/a><\/p>\n<blockquote><p>David Hockney and others have speculated\u2014controversially\u2014that a camera obscura could have helped the Dutch painter Vermeer achieve his photo-realistic effects in the 1600s. But no one understood exactly how such a device might actually have been used to paint masterpieces. An inventor in Texas\u2014the subject of a new documentary by the magicians Penn &#038; Teller\u2014may have solved the riddle.<\/p>\n<p>In the history of art, <a href=\"https:\/\/duckduckgo.com\/?q=%22Johannes+Vermeer%22\">Johannes Vermeer<\/a> is almost as mysterious and unfathomable as Shakespeare in literature, like a character in a novel. Accepted into his local Dutch painters\u2019 guild in 1653, at age 21, with no recorded training as an apprentice, he promptly begins painting masterful, singular, uncannily realistic pictures of light-filled rooms and ethereal young women. After his death, at 43, he and his minuscule oeuvre slip into obscurity for two centuries. Then, just as photography is making highly realistic painting seem pointless, the photorealistic \u201cSphinx of Delft\u201d is rediscovered and his pictures are suddenly deemed valuable. By the time of the first big American show of Vermeer paintings\u2014at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in 1909\u2014their value has increased another hundred times, by the 1920s ten times that.<\/p>\n<p>Despite occasional speculation over the years that an optical device somehow enabled Vermeer to paint his pictures, the art-history establishment has remained adamant in its romantic conviction: maybe he was inspired somehow by lens-projected images, but his only exceptional tool for making art was his astounding eye, his otherworldly genius.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Kurt Anderson: David Hockney and others have speculated\u2014controversially\u2014that a camera obscura could have helped the Dutch painter Vermeer achieve his photo-realistic effects in the 1600s. But no one understood exactly how such a device might actually have been used to paint masterpieces. An inventor in Texas\u2014the subject of a new documentary by the magicians Penn [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5552"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5552"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5552\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5552"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5552"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5552"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}