This is a painting from 16 65 to 66, mid career, and it is an amazingly universal painting. It's more that vermer has taken something that looks very specific and made it universal. He's allowed us to step into the ting and become part of the everyday life. All those cues that we normally get to be able to scan a face, to put an identity to it, have been stripped away. As a result, everybody thinks they knows somebody who looks like her. And here doesn't she look like this girl with the pearl earing? Even once someone said to me, i think you wrote that book because you look like girl in the pearls. How many books
We compare the works of two of the greatest painters of the Dutch Golden Age: Rembrandt and Vermeer. Making the case for Rembrandt van Rijn in this debate was historian, author and broadcaster Simon Schama. For Schama, Rembrandt's works are raw humanity personified with formal beauty being the least of the painter's concerns. Novelist Tracy Chevalier, however, champions Johannes Vermeer. She claims that the artist's charm lies in the very fact that he absents himself from his paintings and as a result they are less didactic and more magical.
The debate was chaired by art historian, writer and museum director, Tim Marlow.
For a list of works referenced in this debate, along with links to each, please go to:
https://intelligencesquared.com/events/rembrandt-vs-vermeer-titans-of-dutch-painting-simon-schama-tracy-chevalier/
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