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Art of the Artist

Works by Dutch master Johannes Vermeer, such as "Girl with a Red Hat," were digitally broken down and analyzed for PBS' Vermeer: Master of Light.

Joseph Krakora gets understandably excited when discussing the art of Dutch 17^th century master Johannes Vermeer. Krakora, after all, is the executive officer of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., so his interest in classical art comes as no surprise. What really makes Krakora happy when the topic of Vermeer is discussed, however, is the fact that he, the National Gallery, PBS, and artists at Washington's Interface Media Group have figured out a way to show art enthusiasts not only what Vermeer painted, but how he painted it, thanks to a new PBS special, Vermeer: Master of Light, hosted by Meryl Streep.

“You have to understand, Vermeer was an expert at not just painting environments as he saw them, but actually creating environments,” says Krakora, who masterminded, produced, and directed the documentary in collaboration with the Interface team. “There are no edges in his work, it's all precise, yet looks soft, and the manipulation of light and color is amazing. In this documentary, we use computers to deconstruct his process, to actually reverse it, to show you what Vermeer did from the beginning, how he manipulated his environment as he worked. It's a whole new way of viewing classic art — we can show more than you could ever see with the naked eye.”

Krakora jokes that Vermeer himself served as the documentary's designer, but it was Interface's modern computer technology and painstaking artistry that permits the show to “deconstruct” his method. The approach involved taking intricate drum scans created at the National Gallery (turned into huge 60MB files that Interface imported into its Inferno, sometimes magnifying painting details by more than 3,000%) and infrared photography of several Vermeer works (only about 35 are known to exist), and literally “dissecting” them in the computer. Then, the show rebuilds sections of the paintings in CG and moves computer cameras around the images to demonstrate minute details about how Vermeer manipulated light and elements, how he changed his paintings, and why.

The centerpiece of the program examines Vermeer's masterpiece, “The Music Lesson,” by actually tracing the painting back to a bare canvas, locating the pinprick where Vermeer began the work, showing viewers animated perspective lines (called orthogonals) to demonstrate how he organized the painting to draw viewer interest, how he positioned light on his subjects, and how he altered the painting significantly.

The documentary illustrates Vermeer's compositional techniques with animated perspective lines that indicate where the artist planned to draw the viewer's attention.

Vermeer positioned the young woman featured in the painting at a virginal, while a standing gentleman apparently instructs her. Her reflection is seen in a mirror over the instrument, but it appears tilted, looking toward the man, even though the woman faces straight ahead. Based on the museum's scans and infrared examination of the painting, Interface was able to recreate the scene in CG and determine exactly what transpired as Vermeer painted the work.

“By creating a CG version of the painting, we could move the camera around and realize it would be impossible for the woman's reflection to have really looked the way he painted it,” says Jeff Weingarten, a VP at Interface and lead Inferno artist on the project. “We show how the mirror would have had to hang at an impossible angle. Then, you see from the scans, and we recreated it in CG, that the man was actually leaning closer to the woman originally and Vermeer had her turned toward him. He later straightened the man up and had the woman facing straight ahead, but he left her reflection as he originally painted it to create a certain mood that he preferred for the painting. He did the same thing throughout his paintings with shadows and light and coloring. There are shadows where it would have been impossible for them to be if the light was shining in the window as he painted it, and vice versa. So, by recreating the paintings this way, we could show viewers exactly how Vermeer manipulated reality inside the room as he worked. He was playing with light and shadow, sort of creating his own special effects, hundreds of years ago.”

In Vermeer's masterpiece, "The Music Lesson," the documentary uses CG wireframe replicas of objects, camera moves, and effects to explain how Vermeer positioned the painting's mirror and its reflections (above) and the physical relationship between the characters (below).

Interface lead 3D artist Carol Hilliard had the job of recreating portions of the paintings in CG. She calls the museum scans of Vermeer's paintings “crucial” because they gave her an exact template to follow.

“I imported them into my 3D program [Maya, version 3.0] and used them as a guide,” she explains. “You can't just trace over them, so to speak, because we were planning camera moves, but it gave me something very specific to follow. The other key aspect of using the scans was that they gave us the ability to take the actual textures directly from the paintings and apply them to the portions of the CG version that were textured.”

Not all of the CG portions were textured, however, because the documentary team made a conscious decision to use wire-frame models, rather than final textured models, whenever camera moves were involved.

“We were very conscious about not confusing the audience about what was the actual painting and what was a digital example,” says Weingarten. “The idea was that it was a different piece of art when we were moving around the painting, so we stayed with technical-looking wire frames for those portions. When it was a still shot, from Vermeer's perspective as the painter, then we did the full CG look with the actual textures. It was a fine line between showing what Vermeer created and how he created it.”

Hilliard also designed the show's titles and built a 3D illustration of the controversial image-capture device known as a “camera obscura,” which some art historians believe helped Vermeer and other artists “cheat” by giving them a guide to “trace” their work. The show breaks down an actual image from a real camera obscura, and then Hilliard's CG model demonstrates how an image forms when light passes through a pinhole in the box-like device.

Interface CG artist Carol Hilliard (left) and Inferno artist Jeff Weingarten.

Krakora considers the documentary's digital method of examining classical art an approach with wider implications for those interested in spreading the gospel of classical art through educational programs and entertainment.

“Technology has given us a whole new way to appreciate and study these works,” he says. “[The National Gallery] will be commissioning work on other painters, both for inhouse use and for other documentaries. We are already working with the Interface team on a huge multimedia, interactive film about art of the Renaissance, called Empire of the Eye, which will utilize many of these techniques, as well as others we are developing.”

In addition to Hilliard's use of Maya, Weingarten used Fire, Inferno, and After Effects for compositing, and Photoshop was also used to cut-and-paste textures from the painting scans into the CG versions.