Vermeer painted The Astronomer and The Geographer in 1668-1669 in the same interior

While you were making a discovery, Vermeer managed to paint two pictures. The pictures are called The Astronomer and The Geographer; they were painted in 1668-1669, and they show one and the same man in one and the same interior, but with different attributes. The Astronomer is in the collection of the Louvre, The Geographer in that of the Städel Museum in Frankfurt, and once it belonged to Demidov and hung in Paris, in his Palazzo San Donato.

The interior and the objects on the table have, naturally, become the subject of a multitude of studies. These have shown, for example, that on the Astronomer's table lies a treatise of 1621, open at page 111, Adriaan Metius's «On the Study and Observation of the Stars»; this very passage says that in astronomy it is not only knowledge and instruments that matter, but divine inspiration too.

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Vermeer painted The Astronomer and The Geographer in 1668-1669 in the same interior

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September digest: archaeological finds, exhibitions, museums, theatre and the Church

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