Copyright by Laura Mareike Sager 2006 - The University of Texas at ...

on the image and its colors, but also on the materiality of the medium (“flat
surface”; “smooth and cold”) and, most importantly, on pictorial illusionism and
the complex illusion produced by the mechanical device. The image she
contemplates is twice removed from reality; it is a painted image reflected in
mechanical device (“a painting that was not a painting”); in other words, it is a
mechanical illusion of a pictorial illusion. Significantly, however, Griet needs the
security of undisturbed privacy in order to achieve a notion of these aesthetic,
pictorial complexities.
By contrast, this scene in the film focuses on the incipient proximity
between her and Vermeer rather than on the young woman’s aesthetic reflections.
Instead of sending Vermeer out while observing the image, they share the
intimacy of the darkness under the robe, contemplating the image together.
Moreover, the painter’s words, his explanation of the camera obscura, dominate
the discourse, thus silencing the girl’s own ekphrastic thoughts about the image of
the picture she sees.
Similarly, another scene highlights the film’s shift from an aesthetic to a
more erotic relationship. In the novel, when Vermeer is working on A Lady
Writing (ca. 1665), Griet aids him in the completion of the picture by making a
minimal yet significant modification to the setting on the table. Finding the scene
“too neat,” she decides to alter it by pulling “the front part of the blue cloth onto
the table so that it flowed out of the dark shadows under the table and up in a slant
onto the table in front of the jewelry box” (133). When Vermeer asks her why
she changed the tablecloth, she tells him, “[t]here needs to be some disorder in the
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