Uncovering the Secrets of the ‘Girl With a Pearl Earring’

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“How did the ‘Girl With a Pearl Earring’ come to life? What steps did Vermeer take to make this painting?”

These are some of the fundamental questions we still have about Johannes Vermeer’s beloved 1665 painting of a young woman in a blue and yellow turban, glancing beguilingly over her shoulder, according to Abbie Vandivere, paintings conservator at the Mauritshuis Royal Picture Galleryhere.

The answers may lie below the surface of her luminous face, inside her layers of paint, and within the crushed minerals that make up her 350-year-old pigments. That is the motivation for an intensive, two-week, noninvasive study of the work that will begin on Monday at the Mauritshuis, called “The Girl in the Spotlight,” coordinated and overseen by Ms. Vandivere.

Using a panoply of new exploratory technologies, some borrowed from medicine, with complicated names such as fiber optic reflectance spectroscopy, macro X-ray powder diffraction and optical coherence tomography, the museum hopes to harvest all kinds of data about the “Girl,” as everyone at the museum simply calls her, to explore her inner life.

It is an exceedingly rare occasion that the Mauritshuis takes “Girl” off the wall, but it seemed justified for this enormous team effort, which takes place under the umbrella of the Netherlands Institute for Conservation, Art and Science and includes participants from the National Gallery of Art in Washington; the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam; Delft University of Technology; and the Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands.

“The expertise and the scientific equipment are coming from the whole world, converging on this one painting, this one masterpiece,” Ms. Vandivere said. “We’ll see how much information we can gain with the technology at our disposal in a very short period of time — two weeks, working 24 hours a day, day and night.”

The “Girl” is the star attraction of the Mauritshuis, a collection of Dutch 17th-century paintings that draws about 400,000 visitors each year. Removing her from public view for any length of time potentially affects attendance, so museum officials tried to keep the examination period as short as possible, and to keep her in the public eye as much as possible.

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