Our entry time to the Vermeer exhibition at the Rijksmuseum (above) was at 9:30 pm last Saturday. At that late weekend hour, we had the place practically to ourselves. The 27 works ( The Girl with a Pearl Earring had been returned to Mauritshuis at the end of March) were displayed over at least 10 rooms, so there was no difficulty in examining the paintings closely. The show has been sold out for months, but you can take a virtual tour of the exhibition produced by the Rijksmuseum and narrated by Stephen Fry here . There have been many articles written about this once-in-a-lifetime retrospective of 28 of Vermeer’s 37 known works, but the article I found the most intriguing is this one from The Guardian . What caught my interest were the author’s references to “immaculate,” “madonnas,” “sacred,” “grace,” and “annunciations” with respect to the women in some of Vermeer’s domestic interiors. Indeed, if you see these women as secular madonnas receivin...