See Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring in 3D in a New 108-Gigapixel Scan

You may believe that you’ve had a close enough view of Johannes Ver­meer’s Girl with a Pearl Ear­ring. You may have gone to The Hague and seen the paint­ing in per­son at the Mau­rit­shuis. You may have zoomed into the ten bil­lion-pix­el scan we fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture in 2021. But if you haven’t spent time with the new 108 bil­lion-pix­el scan, can you real­ly claim to have seen Girl with a Pearl Ear­ring at all?

At that 108-gigapix­el res­o­lu­tion, notes Jason Kot­tke, “each pix­el is 1.3 microns in size — 1000 microns is 1 mil­lime­ter.” You can learn more about the tech­nol­o­gy behind the project in this mak­ing-of video pro­duced by Hirox Europe, the local branch of the Japan­ese dig­i­tal micro­scope com­pa­ny respon­si­ble for both the ten bil­lion-pix­el scan and this 108 bil­lion-pix­el one, which neces­si­tat­ed 88 hours of non-stop scan­ning this rel­a­tive­ly small can­vas of 15 inch­es by 17.5 inch­es, a process that result­ed in 41,000 3D images.

Yes, 3D images: though Girl with a Pearl Ear­ring, known as “the Mona Lisa of the North,” may be known far and wide in flat rep­re­sen­ta­tions on pages, screens, posters, and T‑shirts, it is, after all, a work of oil on can­vas.

Ver­meer achieved his ultra-real­is­tic effects not just by putting the right col­ors in the right places, but apply­ing them at the right thick­ness­es and with the right tex­tures — all of which have been repli­cat­ed in a “mega-sized” phys­i­cal 3D print, 100 times larg­er than the orig­i­nal work, com­mis­sioned by the Mau­rit­shuis for its Who’s that Girl? exhi­bi­tion.

You can per­form your own topo­graph­i­cal exam­i­na­tion of sec­tions of the paint­ing — the eyes, the lips, a fold of the tur­ban, the ear­ring, and even the reflec­tion on the ear­ring — by click­ing the “3D” but­ton at the bot­tom of the scan’s view­ing inter­face.  A look this close reveals much about how Ver­meer cre­at­ed this world-famous image, as well as how it’s weath­ered the past 360 years. It does not reveal, of course, the answers to such long-stand­ing mys­ter­ies as the iden­ti­ty of the sub­ject or the moti­va­tions behind her strik­ing pre­sen­ta­tion. Whether or not the girl with the pearl ear­ring even exist­ed, we can, at this point, be sure of one thing: she must feel seen. Enter the new 108 bil­lion-pix­el scan here.

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed con­tent:

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.