Vermeer’s “Girl with a Pearl Earring”, along with several other Dutch masterpieces, was part of an exhibit that recently finished its run at the Frick Collection in New York City. This painting has been called the “Dutch Mona Lisa” due to the woman’s beauty and her restrained emotion. However, Vermeer’s woman is not based off an actual model. Instead, this portrait is an amalgamation of various ideals. The work does not feature an exact representation of a woman; rather, the work features the idea of one.
“Girl with a Pearl Earring” is considered a tronie. A tronie is a type of portrait from the Dutch Golden Age that features an unidentified model as well as exotic costumes. While these works may have been based on actual models, they were not meant to be exact portraits of the sitters. The artist took liberties in changing the subject’s features in order to demonstrate studies in expression and physiognomy. The exotic garments were added to show painterly skill and to provide entertainment to the viewers in the open art market. The exotic details in “Girl with a Pearl Earring” include the turban on her head and her large pearl earring. These details were most not copied from real life and were instead taken from Vermeer’s imagination.
By calling this work a tronie instead of a portrait, the viewer is acknowledging that this work is outside the realm of a general portrait and thus does not have to portray a reliable representation of its model. Instead, this image is meant to provide pleasure to the viewer and to entertain. “Girl with a Pearl Earring” is an idealized study that includes exotic details to excite the audience. If one thinks of Vermeer’s work in this way, one can’t help but to draw modern day analogies. How would we view images in magazines if they were called tronies instead of pictures? Would we stop comparing ourselves to the photoshopped images of models in their underwear and instead view them as idealistic studies from a male point of view of a “sexy” woman?
Although this thinking may seem like a large leap, it is still something to consider. In calling “Girl with a Pearl Earring” a tronie, the viewer knows that the subject matter is an idealized study, a work that is outside the realm of portraiture because it does not portray an accurate representation of its model. However, this is not the case for the images that are featured in magazines. Even though the viewer knows that the images have been photoshopped, the viewer never knows to what extent. It is not clear what is real and what is not in most celebrity and fashion photographs, and so most viewers assume that what they are looking at is mostly real. This obviously creates unrealistic expectations of female beauty and can confuse the viewer into thinking that they have to look like the image in the magazine in order to be beautiful. If these photographs were called tronies or a different word that held a similar denotation, then perhaps people would look at the subjects in these pop culture images differently.
While this is a rather simplistic summary of the problem, it does bring up the question of when an image can no longer be considered a portrait. If a woman is changed so much so that her body type is altered and her aging is hidden, we can no longer call such an image a portrait. We must instead give it a different name to acknowledge the idealized portrayal of the image’s subject matter.