Venus and Cupid in a Landscape

The Art of Painting (The Allegory of Painting), painted around 1666-1668, is Vermeer's most ambitious work and his most personal statement about the nature of his art. It depicts a painter, seen from behind, at work on a canvas showing a crowned woman who holds a book and a trumpet - the attributes of Clio, the Muse of History. The painting was clearly intended as a manifesto. Vermeer, who rarely painted complex allegories, here constructed a systematic statement of the painter's art and its place in the hierarchy of knowledge. The map of the Netherlands on the back wall represents geography; the bust of sculpture on the table represents sculpture; the painter himself represents the art that surpasses both by creating the illusion of reality. The painting's most remarkable feature is the quality of light. Streaming from a window on the left, it falls across the map, the chandelier, the model, and the painter's back in a sequence of luminous rectangles that organize the composition into a checkerboard of light and shadow. This light is Vermeer's true subject: the medium through which the visible world becomes visible, and through which the painter's art becomes possible. Vermeer apparently valued this painting above all his others: he kept it in his studio until his death and refused to sell it, even during the financial crisis that preceded his bankruptcy in 1675.

The Art of Painting is Vermeer's testament to his art and one of the most beautiful self-portraits in Western painting - even though the painter's face is never shown. It influenced every subsequent painter who reflected on the nature of their own activity, from Velazquez's Las Meninas to Picasso's Studio series.

This painting is Vermeer's claim that painting is not mere craft but a form of knowledge - as rigorous as geography, as enduring as history, and as luminous as the light that makes all of them possible. The painter at his easel, seen from behind in the most beautiful studio in art, is Vermeer himself: the man who understood that light is the origin of everything we see.