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"A Sleeping Maid",
Johannes Vermeer, 1656, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
City. This painting shows a Lotto carpet with a cartouche
border. Chris said “This border of this carpet
at first struck me as very simple, but also very deep in its
visual resonance, so I just had to understand it, to draw it, to
possess it, and then to make a carpet with that particular
border. But the Lotto field that we see in the carpets this
late in this line of development is actually less sophisticated,
more what the scholar call degenerate, than the earlier
classical Lotto fields. Vermeer might have agreed
with us, as he shows the cartouche border pattern clearly, but
the field pattern is out of focus. For me, he is saying, he likes
this border but the field wasn't worth painting in detail.” |
