HOW HE DOES IT The technique Tim Jenison thinks Vermeer used is mindbogglingly simple.
  • HOW HE DOES IT The technique Tim Jenison thinks Vermeer used is mindbogglingly simple.

The movie Tim's Vermeer is the kind of mystery where you keep thinking you've found the answer only to realize the mystery just got deeper. Tim Jenison, a tech inventor with time and money to burn, tinkers extensively until he believes he's figured out the system for how Vermeer made those magically gleaming, precise paintings. (Vermeer left no record of how he worked except the paintings themselves.) To prove his theory, Jenison—a non-artist who has never made a painting—is going to re-create The Music Lesson himself.

Jenison is friends with the horrid Penn Jillette of Penn & Teller; Jillette narrates the movie, and Teller is behind the stilted camera. The movie succeeds in spite of them because Jenison's discovery is so relentlessly pesky—and mechanically, so mind-bogglingly simple. The secret-ingredient mechanism is just an adjustable round mirror barely larger than a compact, but it facilitates the astonishingly precise recording of the subtlest shades of color.

Re-creating The Music Lesson requires an obsessive exercise in reverse engineering. Inside a warehouse in San Antonio, Jenison precisely reconstructs the actual room from the painting in order to paint his replica. (A dead semiotician just got his wings.) ...

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