Looking Good: A Review of “Vermeer’s Afterlives”

“Taste, with the painting it follows, has turned another way.”

Throughout the summer of 2026, there has been much abuzz about Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey. Drawing responses from figures as diverse as Elon Musk and Whoopi Goldberg, the discussion has been primarily about Nolan’s casting of a Nigerian woman as the Mycenaean princess Helen as well as the choice of the female Elliott (formerly Ellen) Page to play the male figure Sinon. However, there has been further concern over Nolan’s (over-) simplification of Homer’s language. There also has been some concern that Nolan’s work is a defeatist and even nihilistic adaption of a heroic poem, presenting Odysseus not as the wily hero, but as a PTSD-haunted and broken man. The divide between those who love and hate Nolan’s Odyssey is usually framed along culture war and political lines. Conservatives, allegedly, insist on a work that celebrates Western heritage and casts Westerners for Western roles and which celebrates the riches of Homer’s language as well as the heroic tenor of his works. Liberals, allegedly, like to see race reversals of characters as ways of expanding Western notions of beauty and as a way to atone for past exclusion of people of color. These liberals, allegedly, further argue that the language should be democratic and celebration of heroics is dangerous.  

There is some truth to this simplistic divide of the film’s critics, but, at the same time, there are conservatives who deeply enjoyed not only The Odyssey but also the other more controversial Nolan films, including Oppenheimer (2023), Dunkirk (2017), and, yes, even the deeply confusing COVID-era Tenet (2020). These conservative Nolan fans suggest that Nolan, rather than having entered a period of decline after The Dark Knight (2008), has, in recent years, entered into his own as an auteur of epic masterpieces that rival the works of Stanley Kubrick, one of Nolan’s idols. One of the strongest arguments these Nolan fans have is that the Anglo-American author is a visual craftsman and technical virtuoso behind the camera—Quentin Tarantino has argued for Dunkirk having one of the greatest shots in war movie history. These fans may have a point. Nolan is a skilled visual artist even though the dialogue, philosophical richness, as well as the “fun” element of his films may have imploded. Ultimately, the discussion of Nolan’s visual artistry is part of wider discussion of decay or Marvelization of film in the twenty-first century in which spectacle has replaced thought and artistry in movies.

There are still good movies being made, and one of the key influences on the best visual films is paintings. This is one of Yale English professor Ruth Benard Yeazell’s points in her recent work from Princeton University Press, Vermeer’s Afterlives. In her work, Yeazell explores how Vermeer has been read and understood for the past two hundred years as well as how Vermeer has influenced both visual art and the written word. Johannes Vermeer (1632-1675) is, ironically relatively unknown among popular American audiences. While most Americans can identify the most famous sculptures and paintings of Michelangelo, da Vinci and Raphael (and maybe Botticelli), Vermeer’s paintings are better identified than the artist himself. Vermeer’s paintings are pervasive on book covers, but their identification with the Dutch author is somewhat elusive. Vermeer’s most famous painting—The Girl with the Pearl Earing—was popularized by Tracy Chevalier’s 1999 historical novel and then made into a 2003 film starring Scarlett Johannsson. Although about a fictionalized version of Vermeer’s life, it is the painting, not the life of Vermeer, that has imprinted itself most strongly in Western consciousness.  Yeazell notes that, in his own time, Vermeer was not well known and his work underground for centuries until becoming rediscovered in the mid nineteenth century by Théophile Thoré-Bürger, inspiring a host of American painters.  Moreover, Yeazell makes the critical point that Vermeer entered Western consciousness after the formation of art history, and thus it is hard to see Vermeer outside of a heavy historical-critical lens.

After his rediscovery, Vermeer has gained an almost obsessive following by both artists and critics alike. There is even an expression, “Travel the world and see all the Vermeers,” which captures the preoccupation many have with the Dutch painter. Vermeer, unlike his contemporaries, only produced 35-37 paintings in his life, and there is thus a sense of rarity about his work. Yeazell’s main point is that Vermeer is “at once a product of the man who lived and died in seventieth-century Delft and of those who later responded to him with visions of their own.” Marcel Proust was famously influenced by Vermeer, but he was influenced by Vermeer through the writings of the French critic Jean-Louis Vaudoyer. At the same time, Vermeer’s paintings, stand on their own, as encounters with a moment frozen time. Famous for his paintings of women capture in everyday moments, Vermeer’s paintings pull the reader into a quiet meditative gaze on not only the beauty of people and things, but the beauty of the harmony of everyday human life.  

Called the “first cinematographer,” Vermeer has exercised influence on films. Yeazell notes that the 1941 Bette Davis film The Great Lie (1941) is connected to Vermer by the (beautifully phrased) “momentary arrangement of bodies in space.” Yeazell, drawing from Anne Hollander’s analysis in Moving Pictures, provides a still from The Great Lie and Johannes Vermeer’s The Lover Letter in which two women look at each other. Both the still and The Love Letter are gorgeous, demonstrating the ability of an artist to capture a collection of people and images in a beautiful frame. Hitchcock, the master himself, was influenced by Vermeer—Yeazall provides stills from North by Northwest (1959) along with Officer and Laughing Girl.  The best and most beautiful shots in many films achieve Vermeer’s ability to draw the viewer into quiet beauty.

Vermeer has also proven to be an object of pastiche and homage. The American painter George Deem is perhaps the most famous person to paint Vermeer portraits. Deem combined Vermeer with other artists such as George de La Tour and Hans Hofmann. He was also known to dissemble Vermeer’s paintings, painting rooms emptied of figures or variations on Vermeer’s depictions of women. His How to Paint a Vermeer, which later became the title of a book Deem published in 2004, lays out six versions of Young Woman with a Water Pitcher. His Vermeer Palette further explores how Vermeer’s work was painted. He likewise produce the Seven Vermeer Corners, which depict denuded Vermeer corners. Perhaps Vermeer’s most famous work, The Girl with the Pearl Earring was parodied in 2023 when The Hague invited the world to create their own versions of the painting. There was an infamous AI painting by Julian van Dieken called The Girl with the Glowing Earrings as well as depictions of a Middle Eastern man, and African Woman (Jenny Boot’s Black Girl with a Pearl Earring Reimagined), and a dog (Miriam Martinic’s Luta with Pearl Earring). These paintings were, like Christopher Nolan’s recasting of The Odyssey, attempts to make social and racial justice points by recasting famous works of Western art in alternative form. However, like Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, these works were pale imitations of the original. 

One of Christopher Nolan’s key influences—especially on his work—The Dark Knight is Francis Bacon (1909-1992). Perhaps best known for his horrific 1953 Pope Innocent X (a distorted variation a papal portrait by Diego Velázquez), Bacon’s works are disturbing to say the least. Very likely reflections of his own tumultuous life, Bacon’s paintings are searing and terrifying works, depicting gross eroticized depictions of the human body in a state of torment. These works are clearly reflected in the make that Heath Ledger wore as Joker in The Dark Knight. However, the mood of Francis Bacon’s paintings permeate Nolan’s other works as well. Nolan, in an interview with the Tate museum, specifically stated that he is attracted to the “bleakness” of Bacon’s paintings. Indeed, it would be difficult for even the most devoted Nolan fans not to label even his best works as bleak. It is further this bleakness that has come to dominate much of twentieth and now twenty-first century art.  Some of George Deem’s variations on Vermeer are clever and well done, but overall the postmodern effort to parody and pastiche everything has run its course and now presents itself not as cleverness but as farce.

Vermeer’s Afterlives
By Ruth Bernard Yeazell
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2026; 320pp

Print