What Happens When Vermeer’s “Girl with a Pearl Earring” Looks Straight at You?

 

 

I was looking at a poster I have in my studio of J. Vermeer’s “Girl with a pearl earring” and suddenly wondered how her full face looked in 1665. I had not thought about it before, as it was the charm of her turned head look that enchanted people for centuries. I had wondered about something else though – the size and shape of what is proposed to be a pearl looks unrealistic. To me it looks more like metal, maybe tin.

Here is that portrait:

 

So, why do I have a photo of Vermeer’s portrait rather than one of Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa circa 1503?

Both portraits have a common appeal – they represent female facial expressions that are enigmatic, alluring, mysterious and fluid.  Da Vinci painted Lisa del Giocondo with a front view of her full face, her upper body and hence body language. Vermeer painted a young woman with a Turkish style turban headwrap, a large earring, slightly oversized eyes, head turned back from her left with lips open just enough to make men over wonder, over the next five centuries,  if they would ever meet a woman like that!

In short, I do not find Mona Lisa attractive or alluring. I have looked (from 7 meters away) at that painting at the Louvre more than once. Digital photos of it are much more explosive in and colour and contrast. The attraction of Mona Lisa is not her but the genius of Da Vinci in capturing the fleeing moment of the smile, the layers of paint he concocted, and the interpretation many art experts have provided to the public. Actually, one of the mysteries attributed to the enigma of that smile is that Da Vinci had painted a young man’s facial attributed impersonated as a female. Now that seems debunked as Lisa del Giocondo has been identified as the model.

The girl with the shiny tin earring is what many men have experienced in their lives (and revisited in their moments of recollection) – a young woman who perhaps just passed by, looked slightly back and made that encounter most memorable. And, since it is not clear who the girl was that Vermeer immortalized, she has no name.

Just like the girl many men have encountered for a brief moment. And later they gave her a name themselves, just to remember.

Ok, so it occurred to me that it would be an exercise in facial recognition reconstruction to take some of the incomplete proportions of the half-face from Vermeer’s painting and estimate how a full face portrait of Vermeer’s model would look.

I started with my earthly materials – a hare skin for canvas, a preserved quail for headpiece, bird feathers for earring extention, turquoise stones, snail shells, rabbit tails and decorative brush limbs for framing the facial proportions.

Here is the display of materials. The cranium was my heuristic visualization tool for turning the three-dimensional view of Vermeers’s model into a two-dimensional, front view of her full face. I find it useful to rotate that cranium and observe how the proportions re-adjust in the process.

It was now time to draw the eyes. I estimated that slightly oversized eyes can still retain their effect if the distance between the two eyes was equal to the measure of a single eye.  Further, since a two-dimensional full face portrait cannot easily give the angle for the playful look back, I decided to make the eyes look slightly up, giving a depth of field to otherwise a flat surface.

The lips had to have the illusion of that slight openness without making the painting become that of a fish!

So, here are the eyes and the lips with a temporary arrangement of feathers and rabbit tails:

 

The Turkish turban headwrap was now replaced by a full preserved quail:

The skin and feathers of which were preserved by salt and the desert sun. Here is the body showing the salted skin:

 

And the head placed upon that gap to complete the body:

 Now, the headpiece was in place along with the earrings. 

To reflect the blue eye colour, I used blue stone smaller than the “pearl” wore by Vermeer’s model.  Here is a close up:

 Finally, I decided to build a delicate pendent with two small sea shells and turquoise stones. Here is a close up:

The final product, before I framed it, was a metamorphosis of an idea into an image I did not predict. As I stood back and looked, it became apparent that I had created/painted a gender-free phenotype! Yes, depending on the view angle this was a man, wearing a ceremonial attire. His features could be South American, even perhaps Inca.

Or it was a woman with thick eyebrows since Vermeer’s girl had no eyebrows per se.

Or both!

... And I thought about the comment once made about the Mona Lisa. Can it be that it is not the characteristics of a smile that determines a gender but the attitude apparent or perceived during the smile? I never thought that the girl was caught off guard.

No matter, it was a pleasant experience to extrapolate from Vermeer’s model.

 

November 14, 2020

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2020