Psst...Allen...Vermeer seems to have put the same Cupid painting in the background of three other paintings:
1. A Young Woman Standing at a Virginal (The National Gallery, London), whose
Google Arts and Culture webpage says:
Quote:
The figure painting in the background shows Cupid standing in a landscape, holding up a playing card or tablet. The motif is adopted from a well-known emblem book by Otto van Veen, entitled ‘Only One’ with a verse praising fidelity in matters of love.
The painting’s style is reminiscent of Caesar van Everdingen, but no such painting has been identified in the artist’s oeuvre. It may be a painting of Cupid mentioned in the inventory drawn up in 1676 of the possessions of Vermeer’s widow.
|
2. Girl Interrupted at Her Music (The Frick Collection, New York), whose
Wikipedia entry says:
Quote:
|
The hazy painting in the background of the scene is of Cupid. The painting within a painting was discovered after its restoration in 1907; it had been covered up by a wall and a hanging violin. Several observations have been made about the Cupid painting and what it could have to do with the overall painting, including that Cupid may be warning the couple about the dangers of love, that Cupid's upraised hand was a symbol that you must only have one lover, that Cupid is holding up a blank card which represents love as a game, or shows that "love is in the air". The reason for Vermeer including the miniature Cupid painting may never be revealed due to the painting's damaged condition.
|
3. A Maid Asleep (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), whose
entry in The Complete Interactive Vermeer Catalogue says:
Quote:
The lower part of a black-framed picture on the background wall allows us to see part of the left leg of a standing child and a mask. The obscured figure has been associated with two contemporary images: an emblem in Otto van Veen's popular Amorum Emblemata (Antwerp, 1608) and a standing Cupid holding up a card, in the style of Cesar van Everdingen. The background painting in A Maid Asleep probably corresponds to a Cupid described in an inventory list of household goods of the Thins-Vermeer residence taken after the artist's death.
Vermeer must have been attached to the Cupid painting since he pictured it again in the Girl Interrupted at her Music and the later Lady Standing at a Virginals, in both cases without a trace of a mask. Furthermore, it once assumed a dominant compositional role in the early Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window but was painted out by the artist himself for an unknown reason.
|
Apparently that last sentence will need a bit of updating, since the restorers of
Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window contend that differences in the layer of microscopic dust between the layers of paint and varnish in various areas indicate that the Cupid painting could not have been painted over during Vermeer's lifetime.