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It will be in February of next year.

In the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam (one of the five most prestigious classical art galleries in the world, along with the Louvre, the Prado or the Metropolitan in New York).

Dutch painter

Johannes Vermeer

almost full length.

Something never before achieved.

Only 35 pieces of the Delft Baroque master are preserved.

The Mauritshuis museum in The Hague managed to gather 22 in 1996. Now there will be 28

.

The museum expects to receive 50,000 visitors with this sample, at a daily average of between 2,500 and 3,000 people.

Something like this will not happen again, at least in the next few centuries.

Leading this adventure, the director of the Rijksmuseum, Taco Dibbits (Amsterdam, 1968).

And with him a team of curators, researchers and scientists who have studied all the works, have found that

La Lechera

is painted on the

ruins

of a previous scene.

And that Vermeer's pigments were not repeated in the same way in other contemporary artists.

Also that

he painted by thinning the paint

.

He worked from thick brushstrokes, erasing.

Conclusions that fail to complete the long mystery of a painter and a work like no other.

They will also be part of the exhibition

Santa Práxedes

(1655, from a private collection and with

certain authorship doubts

),

View of Delft

(1660-61),

Young Woman with a Pearl Earring

(1665),

Woman Reading a Letter

(1662-64),

Woman with a lute

(1662-64),

The love letter

(1669-70) and

View of houses in Delft

(1658-59), among other paintings from Vermeer's stellar repertoire.

At The Rijksmuseum, Dibbits explains, there is now an exhibition on insects.

A bet to understand what we learn from them and what there is to learn.

"They are

a tiny manifestation of god

. And the behavior of insects teaches us a lot about ourselves."

The title is direct:

From Terror to Wonder

.

And then Vermeer.

28 Vermeer works together, many for the first time. It's something historic.

Almost magic. Does any of them contribute something new? Overall, all of them.

There is news thanks to the studies carried out on Vermeer's work for this exhibition.

We have developed techniques that allow a better and more detailed examination of the paint surface, something that has never been done in this way before.

In this way, the original pigments can be analyzed in a different way and discern more precisely how Vermeer painted, how he composed the paintings. And what have they discovered? That part, unexpectedly, of thick strokes as a draft.

And from there he works from the elimination.

That is, thinning the paint until he achieved what he wanted.

He was a very innovative artist.

In the later works we can see how they are made from patches of colour,

something really new at that time. Any unforeseen attribution or some painting that could lose authorship? None of that.

What is Vermeer's is clear.

And what can raise doubts still requires more studies.

In this exhibition there are works by Vermeer's contemporaries, important pieces to better understand the time we are talking about and also Baroque painting in the Netherlands.

Almost all of Vermeer's works included in the sample do not accept any doubt of authorship...Almost? Some do not agree with everyone. And is it?

important pieces to better understand the time we are talking about and also baroque painting in the Netherlands.

Almost all of Vermeer's works included in the sample do not accept any doubt of authorship...Almost? Some do not agree with everyone. And is it?

important pieces to better understand the time we are talking about and also baroque painting in the Netherlands.

Almost all of Vermeer's works included in the sample do not accept any doubt of authorship...Almost? Some do not agree with everyone. And is it?

Saint Prassede

(1655), on display at the National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo, on loan to the Rijksmuseum by a private collector.

This work still raises questions.

Some maintain that it may be a copy by a contemporary artist of Vermeer. One of the two paintings that remain in private hands. Yes.

The other is in a collection in the United States and is 100% Vermeer. Did he paint alone or with assistants? We are not sure, but since he painted very few paintings and that indicates that it is not likely that he had a commercial size, although with so little data As we have from Vermeer, it is not convenient to give anything for certain or not in a clear way.

But we are clear that no one around him could have painted what we know Vermeer painted.

Taco Dibbits, director of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.ÁNGEL NAVARRETE

After the attacks on museums by different groups of activists to warn of the climate crisis, what security measures are you planning for this historic exhibition? I can't talk about that. Do you consider this type of action useful? No attack on a work of art It is acceptable.

None and never. The reinterpretation of history (for example, the colonial past of the Netherlands) has been a reason for reflection at the Rijksmuseum... Words like "black" were removed from the cartouches of the paintings... They were accused of cancellation. In the 1970s, the Rijksmuseum began to review the language, the words that could offend.

And it was decided to change them progressively.

Keep in mind that the Rijksmuseum is an art institution, but also a history museum.

And that forces us to recount the past in the best possible way in order to move towards the future together.

For a little over a decade, classical art museums have also wanted to participate in the social debate. Museums are public spaces, open to people, and cannot be alien to the debates of each time.

We are part of reality.

A museum like the one I run must make it easier for the public to learn, question or reflect on their past.

That is what art does.

And it doesn't have to be political art.

A good museum moves the ideas of those who visit it.

That is splendid, but it also carries dangers: history can be used, and is used, as a throwing weapon. How do you withstand the pressures not to give in to the commercial spectacle of art? With research.

Rigorously and researching.

Thanks to that we can stay away from the show.

But we do not forget that art has to do with speculating,

a mixture of mirror and spectacle.

An illusion.

And at the same time a chance to delve deeper into the human being, for better and for worse. And after Vermeer, what? For now, Vermeer.

We will never again be able to get as close to him, to his magic, to his intimacy, as we are going to do.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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