Appreciation: digital artists shed new light on the masterpieces of Johannes Vermeer.

The works of Johannes Vermeer, a seventeenth-century Dutch painter, have captivated and intrigued viewers with their masterful depictions of everyday life--a woman reading a letter, a maiden pouring milk, a woman playing a musical instrument. Yet, unlike their themes, the creations are complex and calculated to the finest detail. To illustrate the techniques that make Vermeer's paintings so special, digital artists recently used twenty-first century computer-generated imagery, bringing the master painter's works to life for the PBS documentary Vermeer: Master of Light.

While working within a high-resolution, digital palette, the team at Interface Media Group (Washington, DC) helped shed new light on Vermeer's paintings and techniques. "On the computer, we could zoom in close and see things that were not visible before," says Jeff Weingarten, vice president of creative services at Interface.

Interface provided a range of effects for the one-hour special that enabled viewers not only to see the paintings, but to "experience" them from Vermeer's perspective. "The works in our collection became a primary window through which we embarked on a visual pilgrimage in search of what makes a Vermeer a Vermeer," says director Joseph Krakora, executive officer at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. "The digital tools enabled us to take that journey."

Illuminating Facts

People's fascination with Vermeer's paintings lies in the ways the artist mixed light, color, proportion, and scale to enhance the mood of the subjects that appear on the canvases. His compositions were mathematically precise, and the characters and objects were bathed in cool, pearlescent light, usually from a window on the left side of the scene. While at first glance the pieces appear realistic in their representation, a closer look shows that Vermeer did not paint exactly what he saw. Rather, he contrived the scenes to intensify the psychological power of the works.

"The control that Vermeer exercised in his work was not always obvious when viewing a painting, but became apparent in the digital models, which were parallel versions of the originals," says Weingarten.

Vermeer's manipulation of light, perspective, and placement is most evident in The Music Lesson, which features a young woman seated facing forward at a virginal (a type of spinet), with a man standing beside the instrument watching her play. So that Vermeer's painterly style could be better explained in the film, animator Carol Hilliard re-created a 3D version of the work in painstaking detail. To preserve the integrity of the masterpiece, the gallery used a Howtech D400 drum scanner to generate a high-resolution scan, which Hilliard imported into Alias/Wavefront's Maya running on an Intergraph TDZ workstation. She used the imagery as a guideline for placing and scaling virtual replicas of the objects in the scene--from the windows, floor, table and chairs, to the virginal and mirror. For added realism, Hilliard copied the colors and textures from the 160MB scan using Adobe Systems' Photoshop, and applied them to the Maya models.