y va marquer wrote:It's maybe not fair to call Vermeer a fake though, he just needed more supports and aids than your average painter so that he could both clearly see and process what he wanted to paint, in order to faithfully transform the three dimensional into the lines, shapes, colours and tones that described exactly in a still picture the living picture that he'd created.
Indeed. It wasn't a value judgment on my part. I don't subscribe to the idea that painting has to be done a certain way to be considered genuine. These ideas were prevalent among Baroque painters and the Dutch golden age though, which is why I found it amusing.
There was a vaguely similar controversy a while back then they discovered that Brueghel's Landscape with the Fall of Icarus in all likelihood wasn't painted by him, or indeed someone who was even famous. I know from first-hand experience that it stirred up a lot of heated arguments in the academic world. Modernism really did a trick on humanity.
