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A new exhibition at the Mauritshuis museum in The Hague, Netherlands, shows how Johannes Vermeer’s masterpiece, Girl with a Pearl Earring, has changed over time. Using the latest imaging technology, including a new 108-billion-pixel scan by 3D digital microscopy company Hirox, researchers were able to better understand what this work may have looked like when Vermeer first painted it around 1665. “We found out some really exciting things about the girl,” says painting conservator Abbie Vandivere at the Mauritshuis. “For instance, that the background used to be a green curtain, and that she has eyelashes that are now no longer...

Climate activists glued themselves to Johannes Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring at a Dutch museum on Thursday (Oct 27) in the latest stunt targeting famous artworks, but the painting was undamaged. Three men were arrested after the attack at The Hague's Mauritshuis museum on the 1665 masterpiece which has inspired a bestselling novel and a Hollywood film. The trio were Belgian, one 42-year-old and two 45-year-olds. "They remain in custody and are being questioned," The Hague police said. Social media images showed a man wearing a "Just Stop Oil" T-shirt gluing his head to the painting, while another glued...

A U.K. exhibit commemorating the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz includes works by an artist more often seen in front of the camera than behind it: Kate Middleton, the Duchess of Cambridge and an avid amateur photographer. Middleton contributed two portraits to the Royal Photographic Society’s exhibit of photos of Holocaust survivors with their grandchildren... In a statement, Middleton said that she wanted to emulate Anne Frank’s “sensitive and intimate” depiction of the Holocaust. But even more visible in her portraits is the influence of the non-Jewish source from whom she took inspiration: the Dutch Baroque painter Johannes...

Explanation: Welcome to the vicennial year of the Astronomy Picture of the Day! Perhaps a source of web consistency for some, APOD is still here. As during each of the 20 years of selecting images, writing text, and editing the APOD web pages, the occasionally industrious Robert Nemiroff (left) and frequently persistent Jerry Bonnell (right) are pictured above plotting to highlight yet another unsuspecting image of our cosmos. Although the featured image may appear similar to the whimsical Vermeer composite that ran on APOD's fifth anniversary, a perceptive eye might catch that it has been digitally re-pixelated using many of...

The Dutch artist Jan Vermeer painted “The Love Letter” around 1670 but the mood is timeless and so appropriate for Valentine’s Day….capturing that glorious moment of surrender to the magic of loving and being loved….

In the 17th century, global cooling, which for many years was called "the Little Ice Age," affected everyone from herring fishermen to Rembrandt and Johannes Vermeer. Over about 150 years, cooling transformed Europe. As temperatures fell, canals froze over, grain prices increased, fortunes were made and lost, nations rose and declined. Indirectly, the same process even stimulated the beaver trade in New France, establishing the economy of Canada before it became Canada. Timothy Brook, a professor of Chinese history at both the University of British Columbia and Oxford, best known for his work on the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), wants to...

Frank Wynne tells the extraordinary story of Han van Meegeren, the Dutch artist whose ‘Vermeer' made him a folk hero I've always loved a forger. It's difficult not to feel a surge of joy at the thought of an eminent critic waxing lyrical over the glories of a "17th-century masterpiece" on which the paint is barely dry. If the pinnacle of Western art is arguably Leonardo da Vinci, his shadow self in the pantheon of forgers is Han van Meegeren. In May 1945, shortly after the liberation of Holland, two officers arrived at the studio of van Meegeren, then just...

Finally, what with a snow day and all, I have time to write one more installment of the history of art. Today’s “lesson” is Baroque art. Baroque art dates from 1600-1715 or so. (The dates are different with different media. The end of Baroque art coincides with the death of King Louis XIV in 1715; Baroque music ends with the death of Bach in 1750.) The expansion in Baroque artistic space reflects the expansion of political empires (into the New World) and the expansion of scientific knowledge (the invention of microscopes and telescopes: with space expanding outward and contracting inward)....