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Investigating secrets of the 'girl With a pearl earring'

THE HAGUE, Netherlands — “How did the ‘Girl With a Pearl Earring’ come to life? What steps did Vermeer take to make this painting?”

The answers may lie below the surface of her luminous face, inside her layers of paint, and within the crushed minerals that make up her 350-year-old pigments. That is the motivation for an intensive, two-week, noninvasive study of the work that will begin Monday at the Mauritshuis, called “The Girl in the Spotlight,” coordinated and overseen by Vandivere.

Using a panoply of new exploratory technologies, some borrowed from medicine — with complicated names such as fiber optic reflectance spectroscopy, macro X-ray powder diffraction and optical coherence tomography — the museum hopes to harvest all kinds of data about the “Girl,” as everyone at the museum simply calls her, to explore her inner life.

It is an exceedingly rare occasion that the Mauritshuis takes the “Girl” off the wall, but it seemed justified for this enormous team effort, which takes place under the umbrella of the Netherlands Institute for Conservation, Art and Science and includes participants from the National Gallery of Art in Washington; the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam; the Delft University of Technology; and the Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands.

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“The expertise and the scientific equipment are coming from the whole world, converging on this one painting, this one masterpiece,” Vandivere said. “We’ll see how much information we can gain with the technology at our disposal in a very short period of time — two weeks, working 24 hours a day, day and night.”

The “Girl” is the star attraction of the Mauritshuis, a collection of Dutch 17th-century paintings that draws about 400,000 visitors each year. Removing her from public view hurts attendance, so museum officials tried to keep the examination period as short as possible, and to keep her in the public eye as much as possible.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

NINA SIEGAL © 2018 The New York Times

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