Your Friday Vermeer Fix

Ready for the weekend? Having trouble focusing? Indulge yourself in this luscious nine-minute film from the National Gallery of Art about Vermeer's masterpiece "The Music Lesson." It leisurely unpacks the painting's geometry and shadows, showing a glimpse of the techniques that let Vermeer make quotidian Delft resemble a gold-drenched daydream.

Vermeers are often described as highly realistic, crisp, even jewel-like. Although the illusion of reality is powerful, Vermeer, like all good artists, made judicious alterations to the scene before him. This video of "The Music Lesson" shows an example: the mirror above the virginal is tilted forward at the wrong angle to reflect that much of the floor before it. In addition, the position of the girl's head in the mirror is not quite consistent with her head in the scene.

That mirror has always bothered me - it's so obviously off - and yet it fascinates me. Any part of the scene is utterly convincing by itself; but if you examine it closely, your instincts for geometry should kick in and tell you that the pieces don't quite fit together. Yet in Vermeer's hands, this distortion is neither alarming nor unpleasant. I'm a big fan of careful distortion in otherwise realistic, figurative work; a little disquiet lends a certain magic to a scene. It reminds me of a dream in which you can focus quite clearly on any one fragment, but when you try to recall the whole later, you have only the vaguest idea what was going on.

Ah, Vermeer. Yum.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled Friday morning.

More videos from the National Gallery of Art here.