Abstract

The drama that Vermeer sets up on his stage. It’s about some-
thing very different, it’s about the desire to understand the world:
not the one regarding the domestic interiors, or from Delft. but
the endless expenses in which merchants and travelers will ven-
ture, bringing home beautiful objects and amazing stories. Some
of them are attracted from the view, to others the imagination has
been kidnapped, and the most acute minds of the Vermeer gen-
eration, reflecting on them, learned to see the world in a new way,
redefining its dimensions by proposing new theories and new sci-
entific models extended at a macroscopic level, to the whole ter-
restrial globe and, to the microscopic one, depths that began to
reveal themselves in a drop of water or in a speck of dust. The ge
ographer refers on this.