The Art of Painting (The Artist's Studio)

In a hushed, curtained studio the painter, seen from behind, works at his easel on a model who poses crowned with laurel and holding a trumpet and book - Clio, the muse of history - while a great map of the Netherlands fills the wall and a chandelier hangs overhead. Vermeer made this elaborate allegory of painting's nobility and kept it for himself, never selling it. Now in Vienna's Kunsthistorisches Museum, the Art of Painting is his largest and most ambitious work, a luminous manifesto on the dignity and lasting glory of his craft.