FOR ANYONE who has ever stood in front of a painting by Johannes Vermeer (1632–75), the exhibition of his work mounted by the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam is something of a miracle. It also pulled back the veil on the extent to which Vermeer, a Protestant who married into a Catholic family, was actually influenced by his pious Jesuit neighbors. The tiny but resonant dramas that Vermeer created continue to astonish even our jaded 21st-century senses, and there is no mystery as to why painters, photographers, and filmmakers perpetually seek out these images for inspiration. Even David Hockney has jumped into the fray, convinced that Vermeer must have used the device to achieve what he did. If Vermeer possesses a superpower, it is the ability to suspend time—his subjects’ time and our time—in the prism of a single imagined room, in the modest frame of a painted canvas.

Source: New York Times May 20, 2023 01:03 UTC