What Vermeer’s Love Letters Say

Scott Samuelson | 3 Quarks Daily | 29th July 2025

The writer mulls over a favourite theme – why do Vermeer’s paintings still enthral? Part of the reason is his intense realism, coupled with his documentation of light, “the precise flow of a moment’s illumination”. But there is more. Vermeer’s precision helps us understand the various allegorical objects such as bowls of fruit or images of Cupid.  The faces of his women “contain what can only be hinted at … the painted reality is a way of reading the allegories, not the other way around”.