Girl with a Plague Earring?

^{Published October 22, 2020}

Lead white appears white on x-ray due to high atomic weight. Since lead white is a ground component, x-ray shows marks where ground was spread over the canvas using a knife. Other paints containing large amounts of lead white are also opaque. (Courtesy of Mauritshuis)

We know not who she was, nor any verified details about her relationship with the Dutch Golden Age master. But thanks to radiographic fluorescence scanning and reflectance imaging spectroscopy, we know now that the lead ore in that white orb hanging hookless from the left lobe of Vermeer’s 355-year-old Girl with a Pearl Earring came from England. Aided by digital microscopy and a macro x-ray fluorescence map for iron, conservators at The Hague’s Mauritshuis Museum also revealed how Vermeer’s lustrous black background was originally a set of folded emerald curtains—scant proof to confirm the plot of Tracy Chevalier’s novel-cum-film (Scarlett Johansson is Colin Firth’s maid there in Delft), but sufficient to suggest the artist was faithfully rendering a real girl circa 1665. Historically, that year is far more telling because back in England, where basic lead carbonate had been mined for white pigment since antiquity, some 100,000 of Charles II’s subjects were dead. Lasting a little more than a year, the Great Plague of 1665–1666 was the last widespread outbreak of bubonic plague in England during the 400-year Second Pandemic.—Logan Young

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