Sky & Telescope - September 2020 - 27

the famous tower of the Nieuwe Kerk is aggrandized, with a
width twice as large as it would have appeared."
If these assertions were true, then our calculations would
be suspect. But we can show that Wheelock and Kaldenbach
made a serious mistake of measurement, calculation, or transcription and that their numbers for the tower's width are
greatly in error, by about a factor of two.

M A P OF DELF T: LIBR A RY OF CONG RESS;
V ER MEER'S LOCATION: COLLECTION OF DON A LD OLSON

Seeking Ground Truth
Two of us (Olson and Doescher) from Texas State University
traveled to Delft and The Hague in the autumn of 2019, and
another of us (Jenison) made several trips to the Netherlands
in the past ten years. We were able to make accurate measurements at the Mauritshuis museum. On the framed canvas,
the width of the Nieuwe Kerk tower at the octagon's upper
level with the tall vertical opening is actually 23 millimeters,
corresponding to 1/50 of the painting's total 1,157-mm horizontal width. The lower level of the tower is 32 mm wide on
the painting, that is, 1/36 of the total width.
In Delft, our topographical survey established that the
painting's ﬁeld of view is 42° wide. At the Nieuwe Kerk we
used measuring tapes to determine the tower's width at various levels. We calculated that the projected angular width
of the tower as seen from Vermeer's location would be about
0.85° and 1.2° at the upper and lower levels, respectively,
in good agreement with the ratios that we measured on the
painting.
High-resolution digital images of View of Delft are readily
available online. Without making a trip to The Hague, readers
can use image editing software to verify that the tower's width
ranges between 1/50 and 1/36 of the painting's total width.
Despite the many contrary statements in the existing
literature, we can be certain that Vermeer accurately depicted
the width and proportions of the Nieuwe Kerk tower. This
gave us conﬁdence that our azimuth calculations for the Sun's
position were indeed valid.
As shown on map detail at right, Vermeer's location for
View of Delft was just south of a triangular harbor known as
the Kolk (the Pond). By aligning architectural features on a
combination of 17th-century maps and prints, 19th-century
maps, and Google Earth imagery, we were able to identify the
artist's viewpoint as a window on the upper ﬂoor of an inn.
Unfortunately, the inn burned down in 1879, but from
nearby locations we were able to take photographs over sevu VERMEER'S DELFT (Top) This detail from the 1649 Delft map by Johannes Blaeu has been rotated so that north is up. Vermeer's viewpoint
(indicated near the bottom) was just south of the triangular harbor known
as the Kolk. His line of sight was generally north, looking over the town's
wall, entrance gates, and roofs, toward the tower of the Nieuwe Kerk
(indicated near the top of the map).
u VERMEER'S VIEWPOINT (Bottom) The artist's location for View of
Delft was one of the windows (indicated) on the upper floor of an inn,
seen in this print from 1736. Wim Weve, the leading authority on early
Delft architecture, established that this inn existed by 1632 and burned
down in 1879.
sk yandtelescope.org * SEP TEMBER 2 02 0

http://www.skyandtelescope.org

Sky & Telescope - September 2020

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Sky & Telescope - September 2020