For the author Tracy Chevalier, the allure of the Girl with a Pearl Earring sprang from the mystery surrounding Johannes Vermeer’s enigmatic subject. “How old is she?” the novelist wrote in The Times in 2019. “Why is her mouth open — is she about to speak? What will she say? Her clothes are so plain, yet the earring is so large and luxurious.
Is it hers?” Now scientists have proposed a less poetic explanation for her appeal: the painting’s ability to pull the viewer into “a sustained loop of visual attention”. “Normally when you look at a person, you look at the eyes and then the mouth,” said Martijn den Otter, a neuroscientist who was asked to explore how viewers respond to the painting. • Tracy Chevalier: Not that girl with the pearl earring again.
