Johannes Vermeer is the protagonist of today’s Doodle; Google has in fact decided to pay homage to the Dutch painter on the 26th anniversary of the opening of the exhibition dedicated to him by the National Gallery of Art in Washington (with the exhibition of 21 of his 35 existing works). Among the most famous paintings by the Dutch painter, we certainly find “The girl with a pearl earring”.
Painted between 1665 and 1666, “The girl with a pearl earring”, also known as “Girl with a turban”, is carved in everyone’s eyes and hearts not only for its beauty, but also for its mystery that has always enveloped him. There are still many open questions that historians and art critics have not yet been able to answer. Who is the model and why she was portrayed by Vermeer
What is she thinking as she looks at us Is there
innocence
or seduction in those big brown eyes
? mystery and suggestion that we all perceived in front of Leonardo’s masterpiece. That enigmatic look of her, the barely sketched smile, the ambiguity of her parted lips make Vermeer’s painting a place of mystery. Because in the face of so much disturbing beauty, the ambiguity of a gaze suspended between innocence and sensuality, we can only be captivated. No critic has so far managed to identify who the young woman portrayed by Vermeer really was. His daughter
Of him A model
Or a woman of pure fantasy
We have no answers and perhaps we never will, because the mystery that hovers around this figure is perhaps the reason why we are so fascinated by it. The enigma of the pearl earring
The genre to which Vermeer refers to create this work is the tronie. It is a very popular genre at the time of the painter, which represents a portrait in costume. In this case, Vermeer paints the mysterious girl dressed in Turkish fashion . A copper-colored cloak falls on the shoulders of the girl, a blue turban wraps her hair from which a yellow cloth falls, and then that detail that made him famous: the pearl earring. And it is precisely this central element, which captures the light that pervades the painting, and is reflected in turn in the languid eyes of the girl. Although the girl appears to be of humble origins, the jewel was in Vermeer’s time a prerogative of aristocratic women. The pearls were in fact imported from the Far East and were an extremely precious commodity. The works inspired by Vermeer’s painting
The halo of mystery that surrounds this painting also inspired the writer Marta Morazzoni who in 1986 wrote the book The girl with a turban and subsequently in 2003 the film entitled The girl with a pearl earring , played by Scarlett Johanssonand inspired by the 1999 novel of the same name by writer Tracy Chevalier .
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Delft, 17th century, a house in the Protestant part of town Griet, the daughter of a tile decorator, is in the kitchen, arranging chopped vegetables. At the door, two figures suddenly appear: a man with eyes as gray as the sea and a woman who seems to be carried by the wind, although the day is calm. I am Johannes Vermeer, the famous painter, and his wife Katharina, rich and influential people from the Papist Quarter. Griet is sixteen and that day she learns her fate from her mother’s voice: she will go to the Vermeers’ service for eight stuivers a day, she will have to do the cleaning in the painter’s atelier, and she will have to act delicately without moving or bumping into anything. An intense relationship is established between Vermeer and Griet made up of looks, sighs, spoken and unspoken phrases,

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