The Quest to Decode Vermeer's True Colours

New techniques reveal hidden details in the Dutch master’s paintings

- ADNAN R. KHAN

WHEN Frederik Vanmeert stands in front of a Johannes Vermeer painting, the temptation to go close is ir resistible. In Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum, where he works as a heritage scientist, it's not hard to satisfy this craving for intimacy. Viewers may, if the moment moves them, lean in within millimetres, though the security guard will likely wag a disapproving finger.

Still, even millimetres are an interminable chasm for Vanmeert. He's seen Vermeer's work in finer detail than most at the microscopic level, down to the crystal latticework of the pigments used by the seventeenth-century Dutch painter. "I get drawn closer to, say, this area here--the dark area of the lady's dress," Vanmeert tells me, approaching The Little Street, one of only two landscapes the artist is known to have painted.

"It's difficult to decipher which type of fabric Vermeer meant to depict here, and I wonder if this is the original colour." As a chemist in the art world, Vanmeert has spent most of his career trying to understand colour: how it is produced, how it changes over time, how artists prepare the powders and substrates that become the medium through which they speak to us, and, ultimately, why they make the choices they do. If colour is the language of art, Vanmeert is its linguist.

As a scientist, though, he avoids such grand pretensions. It's a touchy subject.

The past two decades have seen an explosion of scientific inquiry into art, from chemical analysis for authentication and identifying forgeries to techniques for restoration and conservation. In the process, scientists have found themselves thrust into some vexing debates. Determining what an artist "intended" can send purists into a tizzy. The artist's intent is irrelevant, they say. Only the work matters, and what the work conveys.