August
30
/ 2021
After three years of painstaking work, an added layer of paint that obscured an image of Cupid on a famous painting by the Dutch artist Johannes Vermeer has been fully removed. Only now can Vermeer’s 17 th century masterpiece 'Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window' finally be seen in its fully restored form, now including a critically important feature that helps explain the true meaning of this previously enigmatic painting. The hidden Cupid was originally discovered in 1979, when Vermeer’s composition was analyzed with X-rays at the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister (Old Masters Picture Gallery) in Dresden, Germany. This finding was confirmed in 2009, when infrared reflectography gave museum officials an even clearer look at the obscured image, that
