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International scientific research on the famous painting "Young with the Pearl" (1665), by Johannes Vermeer, has shown this Tuesday that the Dutch painter drew the girl's eyelashes brown, although they are almost invisible, and the background of the Painting is not an empty dark space, but a green curtain.

In the first scientific examination of the last 25 years, researchers have been unable to discover the real identity of the painting's model, stressed the director of the Mauritshuis, Martine Gosselink, who acknowledged that it is not known "if it really existed, although we are more close to it, which makes it more personal. "

Researchers have analyzed this painting for new data on the use of pigments, the type of paint, and the way Vermeer "built" this painting using different layers .

View of the scientific research carried out in The Hague of 'The young woman with the pearl'.EFE

In a 3D digital photomicrograph of the young protagonist's eye, the eyelashes are practically invisible, but a fluorescent X-ray scanner (MA-XRF) shows that Vermeer did draw hair around the eyes with a brown paint, although the tips of the eyelashes is barely visible due to the faded dark background.

One of the most underlined findings is the background: it is not simply an empty dark space, as had always been thought, but Vermeer painted the young woman in front of a green curtain , something that can be better appreciated with non-evasive scanning techniques of the image, which show diagonal lines and color variations, suggesting the existence of a folded cloth in the upper right corner of the painting.

"The curtain has disappeared over the centuries as a result of physical and chemical changes in translucent green paint," the researchers stressed during the presentation of the results.

The research was started mainly to try to find out who, in real life, was the "Young woman with the pearl", but the director of the Mauritshuis, Martine Gosselink, acknowledged that this study also failed to "know who this young woman was, and if it really existed. "

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