While Di Vinci's mysterious Mona Lisa enjoys star status in the world of art, Johannes Vermeer's Girl with the Pearl Earring has become so popular, the painting has been dubbed the "Dutch Mona Lisa." But while observations on Vermeer's idyllic domestic life are described as dull or elusive, his paintings present ideas on domestic bliss: the joy of music, internal harmony, auto-didactic learning, and depictions of love that are “hidden in plain sight.” For example, in one painting, Vermeer's adoring fascination with his household maid is presented as dignified and elegant, but also shown with an excited "edge of uncertainty." Other paintings suggest themes, such as his use of milkmaids and kitchen maids, which were subjects widely applied by painters of the Dutch Golden Age to covertly express objects of lust.  Overall, Vermeer’s paintings are known for their beauty, bright colors, and thought-provoking auras. Yet, messages in his paintings show a reverence toward cultural constructions of community life during his time, where "the slightest deviation from the accepted norm is a matter of great concern" to the whole communal structure.  Indeed, Vermeer had learned to circumvent this problem by painting subjects that are beautiful, engaging, but mysterious, which reveal the lengths he took to cleverly hide his passionate interest in models, maids, and possibly a mistress all the while painting artful scenes of quiet domestic bliss.

 

 

          While Vermeer’s works have been scrutinized by art historians to reveal the advanced artistic methods he developed, which were unknown in his time, along with his tendency of disclosing hidden societal truths within his paintings, no greater analysis has been captured on this subject than by the writer Marcel Proust. He sums up the importance of how Vermeer understood that overall, his society relied on deceiving appearances: “This labour of the artist to discover a means of apprehending beneath matter and experience, beneath words, something different from their appearance, is of an exactly contrary nature to the operation in which pride, passion, intelligence and habit are constantly engaged within us when we spend our lives without self-communion, accumulating as though to hide our true impressions, the terminology for practical ends which we falsely call life.”

 

 

          This subject will evaluate several paintings presented from his “authentic” collection that are mentioned in historical novels written about him, as well as films that explore fictional paintings ostensibly authored by him. We will search out the relevance of Vermeer’s The Concert painting, which is considered to be one of the most valuable “stolen” paintings in the world today. Moreover, this subject will offer an entertaining look at an entire collection of other realistic, but forged Vermeer paintings by one of most fascinating forgery cases of all time. Concerning Vermeer, there simply are few painters in history that have enjoyed such intense focus on every aspect of the stylistic approach he applied in his collection. Through expert analysis, biography, fiction and the medium of film, we will explore subtle patterns of representation that expose Vermeer's interior thoughts about the subjects he painted and investigate the hidden aura he sought to convey. Thus, it seems possible that the hidden layers, found in his painting’s thematic structures of quiet domestic bliss, appear to be the reason his paintings will have an emotional impact on viewers, for centuries.