Works in Progress: Painting and Modelling in Seventeenth‐Century Holland

Abstract

The object of this essay is to demostrate that Johannes Vermeer's keen interest in different ways of modelling his paintings -the camera obscura, mannequins, maquettes, perspective- stems from a broader preocupation shared by a number of his contemporaries, highlighting the key role played by models either real or mental in the development of Dutch painting of the seventeenth century. The question posed in this essay, based on the example of painters who shared this new understanding of their practice, is the conditions in which, progressively, in Dutch artistic seventeenth-century culture, the genesis of a work becomes no longer merely that work's site of preparation, but the site where work inprogress, increasing in autonomy, makes its entrance, even at this early stage, and on an equal footing, into the artistic space.