A New Way Of Seeing: Girl With A Pearl Earring

KELLY GROVIER explores the painting techniques behind one of the world’s most famous artworks

- Kelly Grovier

She stares back at you from a kind of cosmic darkness, as if on the threshold between realms of existence and nothingness. Look closer. Is she even there at all?

At the same moment that Johannes Vermeer was painting his masterpiece Girl with a Pearl Earring, the King of England, Charles II, was busy amusing himself with optical illusions. By positioning the heads of prisoners in his blind spot (a kink in the eye’s engineering that had recently been identified by the French physicist Edme Mariotte), the king entertained himself by rehearsing the decapitation of the condemned before the executioner did so on the chopping block. Strange as it may seem, the two phenomena – Vermeer’s masterpiece and the king’s macabre pastime – have a great deal more in common than you might suppose.

We now know that our blind spots – those ophthalmological quirks at the back of the eye where the cluster of nerves creates a gap in vision – do not appear as blank spaces in our sight because our brains fill in the missing information from the patterns they perceive around us. Whether consciously or not, Vermeer’s