The piece and the whole. Studies about vision on two paintings by Jan Vermeer

Abstract

Based on the joint analysis of two paintings by Jan Vermeer, examining their compositional elements and the objects they depict, along with the use of academic literature about the painter and Dutch art of the seventeenth century, a study is proposed on the problems that these paintings raise to the observer and its relations with the painter and the image, between the pieces and the whole. Our proposal is that Vermeer shows that painting based on perspective is as illusionist and manipulated as the vision of the world that we have in maps, charts and globes, all represented in the paintings analyzed here, where the painter seems to be one of the first to realize that these are a distortion of the world and not its accurate representation. This self-awareness of its own practice that can be found in Vermeer, produces that the subject of these two paintings, when analyzed together, is our own vision and its problems when faced with different visual devices.