Arguably the week’s most loudly trumpeted event in the field of the visual arts took place not in an art gallery, but in the cinema, with the release of the film Girl with a Pearl Earring. Based on Tracy Chevalier’s surprise best-seller, the movie stars Colin Firth as an almost unbearably sensitive Johannes Vermeer: a figure whose profound visual acuteness is matched by such intense verbal reticence that he might, on occasion, pass for a mute. This is the sort of phenomenon that has the self-styled populists of the museum world drooling with enthusiasm, because it makes Vermeer more “accessible” – or so the argument runs. But this is a case of mistaken identity, because the Vermeer embodied by Colin Firth bears no closer a resemblance to the real Johannes Vermeer than Kirk Douglas in Lust for Life bore to Vincent Van Gogh, or than Charlton Heston in The Agony and the Ecstasy bore to Michelangelo. He is a fiction, and a deliberately attenuated fiction at that: a personification of the artist as a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.

This might be seen as an act of commendable restraint on the part of the film-makers, a way of remaining true to the spirit of enigma pervading Vermeer’s becalmed domestic idylls. They have certainly remained faithful, broadly speaking, to Tracy Chevalier’s vision of the artist as a gentle puzzle of a man, sheltering behind deep reserve. She, for her part, has never made any bones about the fact that her Vermeer is a pure invention. But both book and film are, none the less, somewhat deceptive. They are so painstaking in their attempts to evoke a mood of historical authenticity – the film-makers even built their own version of seventeenth-century Delft in an abandoned industrial park on...

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