![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() In our June 2023 issue, the scholar Mary Beard examined a biography of Cleopatra’s daughter and the risks of turning a figure from antiquity into a thoroughly modern hero. That desire sometimes ignores the constraints of actual archives. Even more tempting is the urge to flesh out the people who made that history-to picture Maria at the mirror, with parted lips. Revising settled history is a juicy prospect. Could the little-known Maria have been an artist in her own right? Might she have stared at herself with a slack jaw while painting the self-portrait that became Girl With a Red Hat? Could they have “come from someone else’s hand?” Lawrence Weschler posits. A set of late-career works don’t match the artist’s established style, and the hypothesis hinges on their dates, the identities of their subjects, and the clumsily painted hands-sometimes stubby, pudgy, or absent altogether. He has a controversial theory: Several of the paintings attributed to Johannes Vermeer were in fact made by his young daughter Maria. Can hands that look like lobster claws hold a secret that could upend the artistic canon? The historian Benjamin Binstock thinks so. ![]()
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