A Lady Writing

Johannes Vermeer (Dutch), A Lady Writing, c. 1665. Oil on canvas, 45 x 39.9 cm. National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. 

Seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish artists often incorporated classical conventions into their paintings. Vermeer and his contemporaries would have been familiar with such ideas via Renaissance treatises like Pacioli's Divina Proportione or directly through classical texts like Euclid's Elements.

In The Painter's Secret Geometry (1963), Charles Bouleau describes Netherlandish interest in the Golden Ratio broadly: “It is not surprising to find in the Netherlands a persistent faithfulness to the golden proportion, as to other habits of the past. In that part of the world, with its solid traditions of painting, the transformations of thought and taste that had arisen in Italy did not penetrate except in weakened forms and, in any case, did not destroy a continuity due, above all, to the way in which teaching was organized. The guilds died hard: in them the pupils, just as in the Middle Ages, followed the practical guidance of a master; and the great desiccating breath of the Academies, which did so much to intellectualize art but at the same time cut it off from its past, did not reach them” (135). 

Bouleau labels Vermeer the first true "geometer-humanist," noting in particular his attention to perspective and likening him to Piet Mondrian in his "orthogonal strictness" (most notable in Vermeer's oft-used black-and-white tiled floor). Did Vermeer include the Golden Ratio among his arsenal of compositional tools?

I was asked to explore the possibility of Phi in this elegant oil on canvas in the NGA's collection. I approached the task cautiously; as the visitor will gather from other case studies on this site, if one is actively searching for the Golden Ratio, one will likely find it somewhere, somehow. Using the image's prominent horizontal and vertical lines (e.g. of the painting within the painting and of the table) as my guide, I took measurements to determine whether the Golden Ratio governed the artist's compositional construct. It is clear that mathematical considerations are at play -- besides acting as a demonstration of his perspectival expertise, the right side of the table bisects the painting, and the distances from the top edge to the bottom of the painting within the painting, and from the bottom edge to the top of the writing box, are equal.

The closest evidence of the Golden Ratio's presence is in the still life painting on the wall: the bottom edge of its frame occurs 60% of the distance between the overall painting's bottom and top edges, and the right edge of the frame occurs 62.9% of the distance between the overall painting's left and right edges. The question is whether these values are close enough to phi (0.618...) to support the conclusion that Vermeer based the placement of this compositional element on the Golden Ratio. Given the (albeit slight) differences, and the lack of primary source evidence, we must place A Lady Writing in the "uncertain" category (see "Conclusions").