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

technique of “varying depths of field” with the help of a very detailed description
and interpretation of the painting, which he compares to Vermeer’s Lacemaker
(7), and discusses the “direction of the brush’s stroke” and the “overlapping layers
of paint” (8). Here, his descriptions with interpretive comments are aimed at
proving the work to be an authentic Vermeer.
Only one interpretive ekphrasis occurs (in the first chapter) after the reader
learns about the painting’s acquisition, when Cornelius decides to burn the
painting to atone for his father’s deed. Prior to doing so, in a two-dimensional
tactile experience, he caresses the girl in the painting, touching her entire image
on the canvas:
This one last afternoon, he would allow himself a luxury he’d never
permitted himself before: He touched her cheek. A quiver ran through his
body as the age cracks passed beneath the pads of his fingertips. He
stroked her neck and was surprised he could not grasp the tie string
handing from her cap. And then her shoulder, and he was astonished he
could not feel its roundness. She hardly had breasts. He moistened his lips
suddenly gone dry, and touched there too, more delicately, two fingers
only […] (25).
His love for this painting has become a substitute for human love. In
short, his is an aesthetic as well as an erotic appreciation of the painting, an
expression of his intense personal desire for the work evoked by the sublime
artistic quality of the painting. This interpretive ekphrasis thus almost becomes a
dramatic one when Cornelius experiences this work almost as a living being if it
weren’t for his touch. Implicitly, such a response argues for the painting’s power
and authenticity.
The subsequent chapters provide the painting’s pedigree, from the Jewish
family in the early 1940s to Vermeer’s creation in the 17 th century, ending shortly
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