The “Girl with a Pearl Earring” is a mystery.
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A special scanner is used to study the surface of Johannes Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring at the Mauritshuis museum in The Hague, the Netherlands.(AP) -
Girl with A Pearl Earring, by Johannes Vermeer (123RF) -
A visitor takes a picture of Girl with a Pearl Earring at the renovated museum. (AP) -
Vermeer's paintings are known for their bright colors and for showing people doing ordinary jobs such as cooking and washing. -
This is the only known picture of Vermeer. It is a fragment from another painting.
Scientists did a scan of the old painting. They found that the girl has eyelashes!
A curtain behind her is green. The earring’s dab of white was painted last.
But they still don’t know: Who was that girl?
READ MORE: Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer did this painting 355 years ago. Scientists recently took scans of it. They learned that Vermeer started with brown and black paint. He drew the girl’s outline in black on a green background. Then he painted her skin, jacket, collar, headscarf, and the pearl. But we do not know the girl’s name. Isaiah 43:1 comforts us with this:. “But now thus says the Lord, ‘Fear not, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine.’”
