Johannes Vermeer Painting The Astronomer: Elementary's Invisible Hand

Summary: A fake Johannes Vermeer painting The Astronomer suggests someone and something else behind global business on Elementary's The Invisible Hand May 1, 2016.

Johannes Vermeer's The Astronomer, ca. 1668 oil on canvas; Louvre, Northern Schools Paintings (room 848), Paris, France: Web Gallery of Art, Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The appearance of the Johannes Vermeer painting The Astronomer on dust jackets associates an alleged assassin and an assassination attempt in the Columbia Broadcasting System procedural drama series Elementary May 1, 2016.

Director Guy Ferland and writers Robert Doherty and Jason Tracey bring one of the three signed paintings by the Delft-born Dutch artist into The Invisible Hand. The fourth season's 23rd episode, as the 95th overall, concerns Joshua Vikner (Tony Curran), economics professor in New York, and his Johannes Vermeer painting The Astronomer. Sherlock Holmes (Jonny Lee Miller) describes Vikner's Johannes Vermeer painting The Astronomer as "a rather impressive reimagining of one of the Dutch master's famed lost canvases."

Sherlock explains to Joan Watson (Lucy Liu) that "Now, when I still knew [Jamie] Moriarty as Irene Adler, we had a rather interesting conversation about Vermeer."

Sherlock furnishes further recollections "About the problems that she encountered trying to reproduce his work. I've been studying her work. Her brushstrokes, her use of light." He guesstimates, without glimpsing the "pseudo Vermeer," that "I strongly suspect that she gave that painting to Vikner, as well as the keys to her kingdom."

The Musée du Louvre in Paris, France, legitimately holds the 19.68-inch- (50-centimeter-) high by 17.72-inch- (45-centimeter-) wide painting by Johannes Vermeer (Oct. 31, 1632-Dec. 15, 1675). It includes neither the first-dated, 56.29-inch- (1.43-meter-) long, 51.18-inch- (1.3-meter-) wide Procuress from 1656 nor the third-dated, 20.47-inch (52-centimeter-) long, 17.91-inch- (45.5-centimeter-) wide Geographer from 1669.

The Geographer and The Procuress oils on canvas respectively joined Germany's Städelsches Kunstinstitut ("[Johann Friedrich] Städel Art Institute") in Frankfurt and Gemäldegalerie ("Picture Gallery") in Dresden.

Nobody knows why Vermeer kept the same-coiffed model, perhaps Delft-born microbiologist Antonie Philips van Leeuwenhoek (Oct. 24, 1632-Aug. 26, 1723), for The Astronomer and The Geographer.

Looking for locations through celestial and terrestrial compasses, globes and maps and through telescope lenses, such as those by lens-maker van Leeuwenhoek, links astronomers and geographers. A brass astrolabe by Willem Janszoon Blaeu (Dec. 9, 1571-Oct. 21, 1638) moors atop a celestial globe by Joost de Hondt (Oct. 14, 1653-Feb. 12, 1612). The 1621 edition of Institutiones Astronomicae et Geographicae ("On Exploration and Observation of the Stars," loosely) by Adriaan Adriaanszoon (Dec. 9, 1571-Sep. 6, 1635) nestles nearby.

The Johannes Vermeer painting The Astronomer observes book section 111's first page on astrolabes and the upper globe surface's Dragon, Great Bear, Hercules and Lyra constellations.

The green-robed astronomer poses his left hand on the window-lit desktop that a blue and green, plant-patterned tapestry protects and his right hand over the globe.

The Finding of Moses event from Exodus 2:5 qualifies as painting-within-a-painting wall art there and in the Lady Writing a Letter with Her Maid of 1670-1671. The Johannes Vermeer painting The Astronomer respects ancient cultures since Adriaanszoon, Blaeu and Hondt retained the respective Latin monikers Metius, Guilielmus Jansonius Blavius and Jodocus Hondius. Moses, whom Acts 7:22 says "was educated in all the learning of the Egyptians," and 10 stacked tomes suggest things ancient and unseen, scientific and seen.

The fake Johannes Vermeer painting The Astronomer tells Sherlock to turn ancient truths upside-down in order to track temporary and true heads of terminally traumatic transactions.

(left) Sherlock Holmes (Jonny Lee Miller) suspects that (right) Joshua Vikner's (Tony Curran) impressively reimagined Vermeer painting, The Astronomer, may have been gifted by Irene Adler/Jamie Moriarty: Carissa Pavlica @CarissaPavlica, via Twitter May 2, 2016

Acknowledgment

My special thanks to talented artists and photographers/concerned organizations who make their fine images available on the internet.

Image credits:

Johannes Vermeer's The Astronomer, ca. 1668 oil on canvas; Louvre, Northern Schools Paintings (room 848), Paris, France: Web Gallery of Art, Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons @ https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Johannes_Vermeer_-_The_Astronomer_-_WGA24685.jpg

(left) Sherlock Holmes (Jonny Lee Miller) suspects that (right) Joshua Vikner's (Tony Curran) impressively reimagined Vermeer painting, The Astronomer, may have been gifted by Irene Adler/Jamie Moriarty: Carissa Pavlica @CarissaPavlica, via Twitter May 2, 2016, @ https://twitter.com/CarissaPavlica/status/727035036592041984

For further information:

Brook, Timothy. 2009. Vermeer's Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global World. New York NY: Bloomsbury Press.

Carissa Pavlica ‏@CarissaPavlica. "#Elementary Season 4 Episode 23 Review: The Invisible Hand." Twitter. May 2, 2016.
Available @ https://twitter.com/CarissaPavlica/status/727035036592041984

Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. London England: George Newnes Ltd., 1892.

"The Invisible Hand." Elementary: The Fourth Season. Los Angeles CA: Paramount Pictures Corporation, May 1, 2016.

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