Hi-tech scans get under skin of Johannes Vermeer’s ‘Girl with a Pearl Earring’

THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP) — Researchers using a battery of modern imaging techniques have gotten under the skin of Johannes Vermeer’s “Girl with a Pearl Earring,” but tests haven’t answered the key question about the world famous painting’s enigmatic subject.

“Who was the girl?” Martine Gosselink, Director of the Mauritshuis museum in The Hague said in an online presentation Tuesday of new research findings. “Spoiler alert: No, sadly we didn’t find out who this young lady was and if she ever really existed. But we did get a little closer to her.”

What the 2018 research project did uncover were details including how the Golden Age Dutch master painted the girl and where he got his pigments.

They even confirmed once and for all that the girl has eyelashes and revealed that she is painted in front of a green curtain that has faded from view. Such is the interest in the painting, that even the subject’s facial hair — or apparent lack of it — is the subject of academic debate.

The eyelashes weren’t the only hairs researchers found. Microscopic scans also revealed tiny fragments from Vermeer’s paintbrushes embedded in the girl’s skin.

In this file photo taken on February 26, 2018 hows Johannes Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring painting inside a XRF macro-scanner during a research at The Mauritshuis in The Hague.

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