Vermeer's Riddle Revealed: The Sphinx, the Jester, and the Grail Geometry: Robert A. diCurcio's Analysis of Vermeer's Pictorial Compositions
Category: Books,Arts & Photography,Painting
Vermeer's Riddle Revealed: The Sphinx, the Jester, and the Grail Geometry: Robert A. diCurcio's Analysis of Vermeer's Pictorial Compositions Details
From the Author I believe I have made the case that J. Vermeer, the Sphinx of Delft, Holland, was a geometer and a jester. He used geometry to compose many of his paintings, and -- for fun -- hid all kinds of faces and animals in the drapery and shadows of his images. Read more
Reviews
The first mistake that the reader might make would be to judge this book by its cover. A spiral-bound book is often considered the work of a stubborn amateur who decided to self-publish the result of his discoveries after being rejected by every possible publisher. This hypothesis is soon rejected after checking Amazon's extensive data concerning the author. We find that he wrote other spiral-bound books, among which, one is about his own Nantucket - nothing less than a book about Herman Melville's "Moby-Dick". Of the four books currently listed in amazon.com's online catalog, three of diCurcio's books are spiral bound, while the fourth is a hardcover edition containing almost 100 superb color reproductions of historic paintings. After reading "Vermeer's Riddle Revealed", the purchaser will understand why this book was produced in two spiral-bound volumes: to open both wide and to lay both flat -- so that the text volume and the full-page illustrations volume can easily be compared.His starting point is something we take too many times for granted. We do not see everything around us. This untouchable truth is, alas, most of the time fully ignored. Our eyes cannot discern every chromatic line of colours (sometimes they can't see some at all), just as our ears cannot hear every possible sound outside the 20 to 20,000 Hz. range. What lies before us is not always perceived.The "unperceived" is Robert diCurcio's starting point. In his analysis of Vermeer's paintings, his approach seems heretical - he removes all the colours from the paintings he examines. He reproduces them in black-and-white, like those dark illustrations we would prefer to see in colour in art books. But this is exactly the procedure that serves his agenda. The author maintains that Vermeer's paintings conceal a hidden occult geometry - a coordinated pattern of points, lines, and angles. The reader soon realizes that by removing colour to enhance the tonal values used by the artist, the author is able to see - and enables the reader to see -- patterns hitherto camouflaged for centuries. His analysis, demonstrating a geometrical basis for Vermeer's compositions (and some other very remarkable discoveries), appears to be undeniable.This reviewer has no sympathy for those who might reject these findings by saying that you can see anything you want to see. The patterns are solidly confirmed by careful numbering of features that Vermeer placed at the nodal points of the same pattern that emerges in eight of Vermeer's paintings - in at least eight paintings out of the entire total of only 35 paintings in a lifetime's oeuvre. It is truly remarkable that modern technology - photography, the computer, and the laser printer - has enabled us to dig down below the camouflage of color to see the geometrical tonal patterns that Vermeer painted as underlayment for his masterpieces. One wonders if the Dutch master painter might ever have dreamed that one day the secret patterns, faces, and figures he lightheartedly concealed in the folds of drapery and carpeting would see the light of day some three hundred years in the future.DiCurcio's work takes the reader into the world of Dutch master painting via the magic carpet of geometry - a field in which he spent many years as a teacher and as an engineer. After reading this extremely interesting book, a quote from Bob Dylan came to my mind: "There's no exit in any direction `cept the one that you can't see with your eyes."