who is this girl? Vermeer’s girl with a pearl earring has been enlarged 100 times in 3D

The 4-meter-high plastic giant will be placed in the museum’s foyer in June. Visitors can only touch it with their fingers.

digital visualization

The print girl will be part of a presentation about the painting by Vermeer, which is currently in the spotlight again due to a sold-out exhibition at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. The girl with a pearl earring also got stuck there for a while, but now she’s back home in The Hague.

The show presents the results of research on Vermeer’s world-famous masterpiece. In a digital visualization, the visitor discovers not only what the girl looked like in 1665, but also the changes the work has undergone in the more than 350 years since then, including the appearance of craquelure (small cracks in paint or canvas). Information about Vermeer’s painting technique, where the visitor learns all about the artist’s pigments and materials,” the museum reports.

Two strokes of paint

There will also be a display case containing the ten dyes he used and a map of the world showing where these materials came from, such as cochineal made from insects that can be found in Mexican and South American cacti and ultramarines made from gemstones from Afghanistan.

Special parts of the painting are also enlarged in plastic separately from the 3D print, so the details can be seen and can be touched as well.

“The pearl earring, for example, was made with just two strokes of paint. As a visitor, you can see the translucent blue layers in her veil, the sparkle in her eye, the moisture on her lips. Visitors can also touch these details and feel the relief of the surface of the paint.”

who is this girl? It can be visited from June 8 to January 7.