This is to say, Vermeer uses camera obscura in “Girl with a Red Hat” not to create a more easily comprehensible image of reality, but rather to present the world in a way the naked eye is incapable of seeing.įull disclosure, I’m not completely sure I understand Pascoe’s argument here, but this is my best take on it. However, Pascoe argues that the manner in which the camera obscura was used in “Girl with a Red Hat” differs from how it played into Vermeer’s earlier work, saying that, instead of using it “to clarify unaided vision” as before, it serves in this painting “to create images that cannot otherwise be seen, to confound unaided vision” (119). It’s generally accepted that this painting, like so much of Vermeer’s work, was made with the use of a camera obscura. In his book Peter Greenaway: Museums and Moving Images, David Pascoe discusses further the peculiarities of this particular painting, which he defines as “one of Vermeer’s most intimate paintings”. With its dark-greenish tint, right-hand light source and oddly patterned backdrop, “Girl with a Red Hat” bear some definite distinctions from the rest of Vermeer’s body of work, and probably wouldn’t be the obvious choice to use as a visual shoutout to the artist where a reference to any of his more traditional paintings would suffice. Where other characters only don Vermeer-esque costumes with the conscious intention of reconstructing his paintings in tableaux vivants, the hat stays with Caterina Bolnes throughout the film. Caterina Bolnes, wife of the deeply terrifying and Vermeer-obsessed surgeon Van Meegeren, is consistently shown wearing the red hat featured so prominently in the painting in question even when she strips off all her other clothes, to recreate a completely different Vermeer painting for her husband, the red hat stubbornly stays. Personally, the reference to Vermeer that struck me the most was that to “Girl with a Red Hat”. In Peter Greenaway’s film A Zed & Two Noughts, Vermeer is an inescapable presence, his aesthetic evoked subtly through distinctive three-quarters lighting and geometric shot compositions, or more directly through overt restagings of paintings, even through the inclusion of the paintings themselves within the world of the film.

The paintings “Girl With a Pearl Earring,” “The Milkmaid,” “Portrait of a Young Woman” all capture women whose faces, whose dress, whose gazes have rendered them recognizable enough to become famous in their own right.

For an artist whose existing (known) oeuvre consists of 34 paintings total, Johannes Vermeer has portrayed a significant number of distinctive, memorable characters.

A zed and 2 noughts