According to legend, Vermeer's canvas acts like a flawless mirror: The picture is conjured onto it as though it is painted by Nature itself – the canvas reflects undistorted images of the real world. Vermeer seems to be a master in the art of describing; he paints with striking realism. But is there any truth to this legend? We well know that the female body was also seen as a speculum sine macula in the seventeenth century’s eyes. A two–thousand–year–old belief in human generation gave the power of procreation to men alone; the female body was a merely passive matter, a medium in which the embryo could grow. – Vermeer has painted pregnant women. But when we talk about Vermeer, we never ask about this belief, although it was in Delft, only a few streets away from Vermeer's home, that it was challenged and disproved for all time.

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It has been argued persuasively that we should see the art of the portrait miniaturist as being closely related to the art of the goldsmith – with the painted ‘jewel’ of the portrait set into a richly ornamented piece of jewelry. Indeed, there is a close affinity between Nicholas Hilliard’s art of portrait miniature painting and goldsmithery. His Treatise’s famous section devoted to precious stones reflects this idea, as it is concerned with the relationship of those stones to the colors used in the miniatures, colors that can be seen as surrogates for the stones themselves. Color, light and shadow – these three aspects of how to render the natural world into paint are closely related: it is the complexity of the relationship that demanded a painting technique that took care not to create chia­roscuro-effects and specifically not let color be ‘corrupted’ by shadows or ‘mixed’ with other colors.

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