Vermeer’s Love Letter

       The art of Vermeer, perhaps, cannot be fully appreciated without knowledge of the development of lenses and optics, as well as the idea of time stopped at an instant, a presupposition of Newton’s laws of physics.  For example, developments in optics and lenses parallel Vermeer’s possible use of imaging devices, such as the camera obscura.  Kenneth Clark suggests that Vermeer probably looked at a scene through a sheet of ground glass in a dark box, which would account for his unique way of rendering highlights as small globular dots of paint and his rendition of tones.  In painting furniture, figures and rooms, Vermeer sometimes simplified the tones without any indication that emphasized one object over another as to the object’s position in perspective.  This resulted in Vermeer’s peculiar flattening of adjoining objects, and our sense that he balanced human optical expectations, such as perspectival vanishing, with his observations of pointillist dots of light that were obtained from optical instruments. 
      The detail of The Love Letter (figure 16), notice how Vermeer emphasizes the flatness of pattern in the wall ornamentation and moldings of the room as they abut the doorway through which we view the scene.  There is no halo of light, which artists often use to separate overlapping planes.  The column and entablature seem to frame a doorway that would be too low for the ladies to pass through without stooping.  Yet each tile seen through this door appears about eight inches high, which suggests a sufficient height for passage.  Daniel Arasse suggests that Vermeer changed perspectives and vanishing points within a single painting to disallow the viewer’s mental and bodily “easy access” to the paintings and to a “simple” meaning.  Finally, the right side of the maid’s jacket has been painted in dark shade and conforms to the picture frame on the wall in a close harmony of shape and proportion.  Notice how the maid’s breast has been unnaturally flattened to further Vermeer’s decisive geometric pattern, and how we process the resulting “thinness” of the maid into a positive prehensive contrast to the relative amplitude of the matron.