He considered Tom Hanks and Jack Nicholson for the role neither was interested and Warren Beatty was briefly in

He considered Tom Hanks and Jack Nicholson for the role (neither was interested) and Warren Beatty was briefly in the frame until an early conversation made it clear that actor and director had very different conceptions of the character.The final choice was Anthony Hopkins, whom Stone had been struck by in The Remains of the Day. Praxedis has reverently sponged up his blood, which she expresses into an ewer. One might think the subject both violent and absurd, yet the painting has that radiance of calm we associate with Vermeer, and no doubt this quality first led Kitson to make his attribution.Looking at this work and its Catholic subject is to ask oneself how Catholic Vermeer himself was. He was brought up within Dutch Calvinism but converted to Catholicism before his marriage in 1653. Probably he did so at the wish of his future mother-in-law, Maria Thins. This Maria had an effect on Vermeer that is difficult to calculate.

He and her daughter lived in Maria's house after their marriage Maria had a picture collection which Vermeer knew well. One of her paintings was coarse: Dirk van Buren's The Procuress. A drunken prostitute bares her breasts to a lascivious man while an elderly woman holds out her hand for money. Is it not odd that the (presumably) devout Catholic Maria should have had such a canvas in her home? Even odder, perhaps, that her son-in-law should have been so engaged by The Procuress that he included it in two of his own paintings. It's plainly visible in A Lady Seated at a Virginal and The Concert, both of them domestic scenes of great refinement.An obsessed saint with her bloodied sponge, a whore at her trade: these things came within Vermeer's purview of the world, but they neither exemplify nor explain his art.

He must have known about the passions, war, conflicts between Protestantism and Catholicism, creativity, life and death. Old Masters do think of these things and on occasion represent them. But no other painter of the highest rank is so temperate as Vermeer Here is the clue to his character. One feels that he had considered the extremities of life and emotion but was not troubled to report such things. We don't find tragedy, or wisdom, in Vermeer: just an endless series of hints that he was possessed by his own equanimity.He was neither an intellectual nor a moralist Some Vermeer scholars may not agree. The catalogue is the joint work of Frederic Duparc of the Mauritshuis and Arthur Wheelock of the National Gallery of Art in Washington.

I suspect that Wheelock's views predominate, since they are often repeated in his book Vermeer and the Art of Painting (Yale, pounds 30) He's always keen to extract lessons. A Lady Seated at a Virginal, for instance, has got to be about a conflict between profane and divine love A pearl earring has got to be a symbol of virginity. Whenever a girl smiles, or there's a glass on the table, or a gentleman is descried in the corner, Wheelock comes bustling in with a cautionary homily. Of course Dutch painting as a whole was full of religious allegory, and also replete with jolly boors and their ladyfriends. Vermeer's point, though, is that these subjects can be purged. Their theatrical nature is replaced by quite pure aesthetic contemplation.The sententious Wheelock is better with technical description.

His book and the catalogue contain much detail about the scientific examination of Vermeer's paintings. Should you wish to know about the chemical constitution of his pigments, or the work of X-radiography, here is your source. Wheelock also discusses Vermeer's perspective and his possible use of the camera obscura. For most of us, however, the technical interest of this retrospective lies elsewhere. No fewer than eight of the pictures have been cleaned in the last four years. We're interested in the way the pictures nowadays look after the removal of old varnishes.Some people find the cleaning and restoration too radical, and they may be disturbed by the bright, almost abrupt appearance of The Milkmaid Cleaning has none the less brought many benefits.