Enlarge / Johannes Vermeer's View of Delft is considered to be his greatest masterpiece. (credit: Johannes Vermeer/Mauritshuis, The Hague)
The 17th-century Dutch master Johannes Vermeer is perhaps best known in the popular imagination for Girl with a Pearl Earring, which inspired both a 1999 novel and a 2003 film adaptation of said novel. But among art historians, Vermeer's masterpiece is View of Delft, a cityscape of the painter's hometown that beautifully illustrates Vermeer's skill with light and shadow.
Art historians have long thought that Vermeer likely created View of Delft around 1660-1661, but because we have so little biographical information about the artist, pinpointing the exact date, and even time of day, that the scene represents has proven challenging. Some have argued for late spring or early summer, with times ranging from mid-day to sunset. A new astronomical analysis concludes that Anthony Bailey, author of Vermeer: A View of Delft (2001), was correct in concluding that the painting depicts the town in the morning, "with the sun striking the buildings from the south east." Furthermore, the time is most likely 8am, on September 3 or 4, in the year 1659 or earlier.
That's the conclusion of Donald Olson, an astronomer at Texas State University known as the "celestial sleuth" for his work in so-called "forensic astronomy," and several colleagues, who describe their analysis in the September 2020 issue of Sky and Telescope (subscription required). Over the years, Olson has found evidence that the blood-red sunset that inspired Edvard Munch's The Scream was likely an after-effect of the 1883 eruption of Mount Krakatoa in Indonesia; that the Moon may have contributed to the sinking of the Titanic; helped identify the precise location of Julius Caesar’s landing site in Britain in 55 BC; and showed that Mary Shelley was probably telling the truth about a moonlit “waking dream” that inspired Frankenstein, among other findings.
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