What the Scans Found Inside Vermeer's Pearl Earring

In February and March 2018, a team led by Mauritshuis conservator Abbie Vandivere put Vermeer's most famous painting inside a glass workshop in The Hague and aimed every non-invasive imaging tool they had at it: macro X-ray fluorescence, hyperspectral imaging, optical coherence tomography. Visitors could watch through the glass. The project was called Girl in the Spotlight.

The headline finding was about the headscarf. The blue is natural ultramarine, made by grinding lapis lazuli, and the lapis came from a single source the trade had relied on for millennia: the Sar-i-Sang mines in what is now northeastern Afghanistan. In 17th-century Europe, prepared ultramarine was the most expensive pigment available, valued ounce for ounce above gold.

For a portrait that has always been read as quiet and domestic, that is a strange material choice. Vermeer was not painting royalty. He used the costliest blue on earth for the head wrap of an unnamed girl, and he used it generously: synchrotron analysis found unusually pure, high-quality lazurite, distributed in lead-white-thinned layers across the entire scarf.

Two other discoveries came out of the same scans. Vermeer painted eyelashes. Fine brown strokes, easily missed at viewing distance, that earlier conservation literature had assumed weren't there. And the dark void behind her head used to be a green curtain. Diagonal lines and color gradients, invisible to the eye, still trace the folds in the upper right; the indigo-and-yellow glaze that made the green has chemically degraded over three and a half centuries.

Every one of those choices is a small reversal of the painting people think they know. The girl was framed against fabric, not darkness. She had lashes. And the blue she wears was the most extravagant pigment Vermeer could buy.