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108B Pixel Scan of Johannes Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring

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101–110 of 144 posts

Re: 108B Pixel Scan of Johannes Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring

#101

I highly recommend the movie "Tim's Vermeer" about the likelihood that Vermeer used something like a lightbox to paint his paintings. Specifically, his ability to reproduce light and color is unmatched while he only had basic training as a painter and never let anyone see him work. A fascinating engineering problem to deduce how he might have accomplished this.

I highly recommend against watching the movie. The main figure, Tim Jenison, comes off as an arrogant know-it-all, reducing art to a technique, and insulting people along the way. In the movie, multiple times he said "I have never done this before, but how hard could it be?"

I'll note two parts of the movie that support my view. First, if his art is so great, then why is it not displayed all over the place? He has a few alleged experts giving praise without criticism, and in the end, it is on the wall in his bedroom. Surely, if the art were that easy to recreate, galleries would be demanding his piece?

Second, notice how they never actually show the real painting. In fact, at one point they make it out to be a conspiracy, that the painting is being kept in some back room nobody can access. I would loved to have seen the real painting side-by-side with Tim's alleged reproduction. I suspect they didn't push to hard for access, because it would have ruined their narrative.

Re: 108B Pixel Scan of Johannes Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring

#102

Amazing, I feel like I'm zooming in to some alien city. I'm sure people are thinking about it, but with high resolution scanning, 3D printing, etc., it feels like it should be possible to create extremely high quality reproductions of famous artwork at scale, and at a fairly reasonable cost. Is anyone working on this?

https://www.codart.nl/feature/museum-affairs/3d-printing-wor...

https://kutluart.com/collections/all

Re: 108B Pixel Scan of Johannes Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring

#103

Projects like this are fascinating for reasons, I guess, unintentional to their creators. Is what you can see at this level of detail helping anyone understand the painting? Someone thinks so. So what do we now know?

I now know there are somewhat rectangular 1mm length fibers embedded in the paint of this work. A secret only art preservationists knew prior.

Re: 108B Pixel Scan of Johannes Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring

#104

Amazing, I feel like I'm zooming in to some alien city. I'm sure people are thinking about it, but with high resolution scanning, 3D printing, etc., it feels like it should be possible to create extremely high quality reproductions of famous artwork at scale, and at a fairly reasonable cost. Is anyone working on this?

Lots of folks in the GLAM sector are working on it.

Re: 108B Pixel Scan of Johannes Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring

#106
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely. I was at the Virginia Museum of Art where they have several Monets and 3 Van Goghs. They also let you get quite close to them… less than a foot away in some cases. The amount of texture is incredible. (What also struck me in person, though I had read about it previously, is how tiny almost all Van Goghs are. Barely more than postcard size in some cases.

You should probably fact check your statement about the size of Van Gogh paintings. Easily disproved.

They're shown on big walls, so I totally get how they can seem small.

Re: 108B Pixel Scan of Johannes Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring

#107

Steve Mould just released a video about the microscopy technique that was used to capture this 3D relief of the painting: https://youtu.be/o-dZKBwbsis

The microscope used for this is mind blowing. Falls squarely into the list of things I want but do not need.

After watching the video I was trying to find out just how much one of those microscopes cost. Couldn’t find a price anywhere so I’m assuming it’s far out of my budget. But this kind of video is probably the greatest kind of ad there is, just genuinely showing how cool something is. Don’t have a use for it either though, but I would love to have one anyways.

Re: 108B Pixel Scan of Johannes Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring

#109
post #60
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you get a chance to see some of the impressionists in person, they’re kind of mind blowing for exactly the same reason - you’re looking at a scene of a ship in a storm and seeing all kinds of nuance, and then you get closer and realize it’s all your brain filling in the blanks. From a literary angle - two books I’ve read that are absolute master classes in this are Italio Calvino’s “Invisible Cities” and “This Is…

> Italio Calvino’s “Invisible Cities” So wild seeing this referenced here, it's a pretty obscure book (of poetry nonetheless), and one my absolute favorites. Cheers to having great taste :) PS: Small nit: it's "Italo," not "Italio."

I remember reading Jonathan Blow saying this book was a big influence on his approach to game design.

Re: 108B Pixel Scan of Johannes Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring

#110

When viewing this I was captivated by the girl's lips. In the full view, the bottom lip looks not just full and moist, but slightly wet. Zooming in, it's a bit of a muddy mess with only a splash of white giving definition to the (anatomical) left of the girl's mouth. In my current incarnation I'm a fledgling novelist and one of the things I've learned is to trust the audience to 'fill in the gaps'. Although this is p…

"Fill the gaps with your mind" is very broad, and applies to lighting, pointillism, etc a divers lot of things that are not obvious to a non-painter.

But Vermeer is next level, especially for the time. A growing contingent of historians believe he used camera obscura to achieve the results

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hockney%E2%80%93Falco_thesis

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