Stench monsters
Earlier this week, the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister in Dresden unveiled its restoration of Jan Vermeer's Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window (c. 1657-59). As this piece from the Art Newspaper explains, the restorers determined through a variety of chemical tests that a painting within the painting of a Cupid — which had been covered over and made into an austere blank wall and was only later revealed by a late 20th century X-ray — could not have been blotted out by Vermeer, as had been assumed.
Following further investigations, including tests in an archaeometry laboratory, it was discovered that layers of binding agent and a layer of dirt existed between the image of Cupid and the overpainting. The conservators concluded that several decades would have passed between the completion of one layer and the addition of the next and therefore concluded that Vermeer could not have painted over the Cupid himself.
Thus the restorers deduced that to bring the painting back to its true state, the Cupid painting should be uncovered, even though this makes for what the museum is proudly calling a "new" Vermeer.
I'm obviously not an art historian, but this seems somewhat dubious to me, like when albums are remastered with muted tracks cranked up, or with mixes recalibrated to suit contemporary tastes. We currently have a greater appetite for novelty than the cumulative weight of history, so why not make a "new" Vermeer? Let's assume some philistine used the 18th century equivalent of Photoshop's clone-stamp tool to obliterate a major part of the original composition, which we can now command-Z and undo without too much concern for the interceding centuries and the palimpsest of interpretations. Speculations like this one from Ivan Gaskell's 2000 study Vermeer's Wager — "it is as though the artist first judged the allusion planned for the Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window to be too literal during the course of execution and therefore expunged it entirely" — need to be tossed in the trash.
Vermeer's Wager is a book-length study of a different painting by Vermeer, Woman Standing at a Virginal (1672), in which the same Cupid painting appears.
The Cupid painting also crops up within two other Vermeer works, Girl Interrupted at Her Music (c. 1660) and Woman Asleep at a Table (1657). Gaskell devotes many pages to the possible meaning of this Cupid and the indistinct object it holds, which looks to me like a blank playing card. The fact that the curtain is draped over just this spot of the newly uncovered Cupid will probably require several new books of interpretive reconsideration, given that the fresh lab results suggest that Vermeer had an entirely different intentional logic at work. Blake Gopnik, in this post, wonders if Vermeer meant to show the Cupid as "revealing (or concealing, for that matter) the surface of Vermeer’s painting of a reading lady, or whether (notionally, at least) he’s drawing the curtain on the fictive painting that Cupid himself is standing in, all naughty and nude." Needless to say, either would be hard to do with a playing card (or a tablet, or a letter, or a little book) in your little hand.
New attention must also be paid to why some unknown critic took it upon themselves to paint over the Cupid. Did it seem redundant? Did it seem to render the trompe l'oeil curtain rod illogical, because we would then expect to see a little curtain rod over the painting within the painting as well? Maybe the Cupid model filed a lawsuit as an adult claiming the image had caused him emotional distress.
And how talented was this retoucher, who had to render the light from Vermeer's window on a new bare wall? It's a question we can no longer answer with the evidence of our eyes. In The Delft School, Walter Liedtke argued that Vermeer removed the Cupid to help the "table, the open window, its shadow on the bare wall, and the green curtain ... achieve a balanced design and let other qualities come to the fore, such as superb effects of light and texture." Those superb-ables are gone now too.
Why am I writing about this here? Because the fantasy of uncovering the "real" or "true" version of some historical artifact is likely to only strengthen as everyone becomes more fluent with media-editing suites and are fully accustomed to being able to rehash and meme-ify anything, and as "documentary proof" both expands exponentially (everything is documented incessantly) and becomes superfluous (all documents can be faked). This is Baudrillard's idea of hyperreality and maybe it is some venture capitalist's idea of the metaverse too, but all of it creates a nostalgia for the idea that there is a fixed and final version of a thing that is correct — a suppression of history that is no less contrived than a Van Gogh immersive experience.
The "real" Vermeer painting is a conjecture that dirt analysis can't ultimately substantiate. And the unknown genius who painted the shadows on the bare wall on top of that Cupid is no less real, even if they are being reduced to a historical error that museum professionals have taken it upon themselves to correct.