Vermeer Diminished

Just a note of horror that my favorite painting by Vermeer – and thus, one of my favorite paintings of all time – seems to have been, if not ruined, significantly diminished by an act of “restoration.” According to a report in the 9/14/21 New York Times, “After nearly three centuries behind a layer of paint, a naked Cupid has surfaced in [‘Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window’*], drastically altering the background of a quiet interior scene.” An “advisory panel of Vermeer experts and restorers” appointed by the Dresden State Art Collections concluded that the top layer of painting covering the Cupid “was a distortion by a foreign hand against the intention of the artist.” The charm and power of “Girl Reading” came from its simplicity and focus on the melancholy but inscrutable expression of the young woman, reading a letter by an open window that reflected her image. The empty pea-green wall behind her both set her off and united the composition with the bold green curtain in the right foreground. Now, judging from the reproduction in the Times, the girl is dwarfed by the image of Cupid over her head, and instead of being drawn into her thoughts we are put off by Cupid’s nakedness.
Why, oh why, did they feel this was necessary? Why the compulsion to honor the artist’s “intention” 275 years after the fact, when who can really know his intention? What was his “intention” in putting Cupid in the scene? The article notes that paintings or maps behind Vermeer’s solitary figures “add to the viewer’s understanding of the characters’ inner lives.” But in looking at the painting now, our interpretation of the Cupid figure is undoubtedly different from what a 17th-century artist or viewer would take from the scene. It might even cause us to misinterpret Vermeer’s “intention.” The fact that the same painting of Cupid appears in the background of two other Vermeer paintings makes me even less certain that I, or anyone, can identify Vermeer’s “intention” in including it. Does it mean the same thing every time? If Cupid makes the piece of paper in ‘Girl Reading’ a love letter, what is its effect on the keyboard in “Young Woman Standing at a Virginal”?
In any case, one of Vermeer’s greatest appeals to the modern eye is the ambiguity of his scenes. We are left to wonder, what is going on? what is the woman thinking? what is in the letter she is reading? Does making the answer clearer improve the painting? Not for me. The director of the Dresden gallery, according to the Times, claims that the restoration improved the painting’s composition and color balance. This, I suppose, is a subjective matter of taste, but the purity of the green color was, for me, a great strength of the altered Vermeer, and it’s hard to see how the composition is enhanced by adding a background element that takes up half the height of the work and competes for attention, poorly at that, with the painting’s delicate details: the still life in the foreground, the red drape over the window, the woman’s beautiful blouse and dangling curls.
Then there is the matter of the painting’s own history. We can’t know why Cupid was painted over, or when, although it must have been a long time ago. In a similar case I’m familiar with from my years at Mia, it was determined that a shooter was added to the foreground of a Hobbema landscape a century or so after the fact. Rather than remove the offending figure to honor the artist’s “intention,” the curator decided that the addition had acquired a historical legitimacy of its own and left it alone. One wise principle of paintings conservation that is, I think, universally accepted, is that any work done to “fix” a work should be reversible; so that if new facts or processes come to light, or even if tastes change, you haven’t committed the future. By analogy, this restoration of “Girl Reading” is clearly not reversible. The overpaint is gone; and although someone could conceivably paint over the Cupid again, it’s hard to imagine.
The Times rightly refers to “Girl Reading” as “one of the world’s best-loved artworks.” It has been loved absent a naked Cupid in the background. Why mess with the world’s love? To pose the question in crass and hypothetical terms: what if you had a painting that was worth $100 million, and if you removed overpainting to restore its original composition it would  be worth $50 million, would you feel obliged to make that change? No one can put a dollar value on this Vermeer, but I wonder if Dresden is not destroying a lot of love that is surely worth something.

*The painting has also been known as “The Letter Reader,” “Young Woman Reading a Letter,” and “Lady Reading a Letter at an Open Window,” and probably other descriptive titles.