Vermeer ’ s maps : a new digital look in an old master ’ s mirror

The links of Cartography to Art and culture are as old as the field itself. The art of painting has always been present within maps, which, in turn have always been regarded as a combination of scientific and artistic skills. One of the most prominent examples of the harmonic duality of maps as scientific tools and objects of culture is witnessed in the Netherlands during the 17 century, when the Dutch were world leaders in the field of cartographic production. This period is also known as the golden century of the country: state power and world dominion were combined with progress in science and in arts. Dutch mapmakers of the time were usually combining more skills: they were surveyors, cartographers, painters of landscapes and even more. On the other hand, many seventeenth-century Dutch painters such as Hals, Vermeer, Ter Borch, De Hooch, Steen, Ochtervelt, Maes and others, introduced depictions of real maps into their works and decorated their interiors with maps for symbolic or allegorical reasons. A typical example is Johannes Vermeer; in his painting ‘Officer and laughing girl’ (~1660) an officer and a young girl are placed in an interior, sitting at a table in front of a window. On the wall behind the girl a large map is hanging, occupying a large part of the painting and being equally important as the rest of the scene. The map on the painting depicts part of the Netherlands; its remarkable similarity with the original topographic map of its time (~1620) makes comparison processes a real challenge. Such a comparison is nowadays made much easier than in the past with the tools offered by the new technologies. Issues of interest for the history of Cartography reveal new dimensions through the use of these tools. A typical example concerning the study of old maps is the deformation analysis of those maps. Such a deformation analysis was attempted, for the two maps mentioned before (i.e. the map on the painting and its original -oldtopographic counterpart). In this paper the comparative method of analysis is applied on the ‘painted’ map and its actual counterpart, by transforming optimally one onto the other. Apart from the analytical and digital component of the process, an interesting result is the visual representation of the transformation (dynamic morphing) from one map to the other. This revealed some remarkable indications about the method followed by the artist (use of the camera obscura) in his painting.