Johannes Vermeer (Ou a perfeição da luz)

Recentemente visitei o Louvre, em Paris, e tive o imenso privilégio de poder contemplar dois quadros deste grande pintor, que me impressionaram profundamente: A Rendeira e O Astrónomo.

Publico aqui duas reproduções das referidas obras, bem como alguma informação de carácter biográfico sobre o pintor.

No final encontram o link para o Essential Vermeer, o site mais completo que conheço sobre este pintor e cuja visita aconselho vivamente.

Johannes Vermeer

Johannes Vermeer or Jan Vermeer (baptized October 31, 1632, died December 15, 1675) was a Dutch painter who specialized in domestic interior scenes of ordinary bourgeois life. His entire life was spent in the town of Delft. Vermeer was a moderately successful provincial painter in his lifetime. He seems to have never been particularly wealthy, perhaps due to the fact that he produced relatively few paintings, leaving his wife and eleven children in debt at his death. Virtually forgotten for nearly two hundred years, in 1866 the art critic Thoré Bürger published an essay attributing 66 pictures to him (only 35 paintings are firmly attributed to him today). Since that time Vermeer's reputation has grown astronomically, and he is now acknowledged as one of the greatest painters of the Dutch Golden Age, and is particularly renowned for his masterly treatment and use of light in his work.

Technique

Vermeer produced transparent colours by applying paint onto the canvas in loosely granular layers, a technique called pointillé (not to be confused with pointillism). No drawings have been securely attributed to Vermeer, and his paintings offer few clues to preparatory methods. David Hockney, among other historians and advocates of the Hockney-Falco thesis, has speculated that Vermeer used a camera obscura to achieve precise positioning in his compositions, and this view seems to be supported by certain light and perspective effects which would result from the use of such lenses and not the naked eye alone; however, the extent of Vermeer's dependence upon the camera obscura is disputed by historians.

There is no other seventeenth century artist who from very early on in his career employed, in the most lavish way, the exorbitantly expensive pigment lapis lazuli, natural ultramarine. Not only do we see it used in elements that are intended to be shown as blue, like a woman’s skirt, a sky, the headband on the Girl with a Pearl Earring (The Hague), and in the satin dress of his late A Lady Seated at a Virginal (London); Vermeer also used the lapis lazuli widely as underpaint in, for example, the deep yet murky shadow area below the windows in The Music Lesson (London), and The Glass of Wine (Berlin). For the wall beneath the windows - areas in these paintings of intense shadow - Vermeer composed by first applying a dark natural ultramarine, thus indicating an area void of light. Over this first layer he then scumbled varied layers of earth colours in order to give the wall a certain appearance: the earth colours umber and ochre should be understood as warm light from the strongly lit interior, reflecting its multiple colours back onto the wall. This working method most probably was inspired by Vermeer’s understanding of Leonardo’s observations that the surface of every object partakes of the colour of the adjacent object. (see Wadum-95 in References) This means that no object is ever seen entirely in its natural colour. A comparable but even more remarkable yet effectual use of natural ultramarine is in The Girl with a Wineglass (Braunsweig). The shadows of the red satin dress are underpainted in natural ultramarine, and due to this underlying blue paint layer, the red lake and vermilion mixture applied over it acquires a slightly purple, cool and crisp appearance that is most powerful.

Even after Vermeer’s supposed financial breakdown following the so-called rampjaar (year of disaster) in 1672, he continued to employ natural ultramarine most generously, such as in the above-mentioned Lady Seated at a Virginal. This could suggest that Vermeer was supplied with materials by a collector, and would coincide with John Michael Montias’ theory of Pieter Claesz. van Ruijven being Vermeer’s patron.

(Fonte: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johannes_Vermeer)

A saber mais em:

http://essentialvermeer.20m.com/