The following is an encore presentation of Everything Everywhere Daily.

Johannes Vermeer was one of the greatest painters of the Dutch Golden Age.

Unlike many of his contemporary painters, however,

he didn't leave a large body of work behind.

The paintings he did create have left experts

in both art and technology, wondering

if he didn't have a secret that helped him with his craft.

A technical secret, not necessarily an artistic one.

Learn more about Vermeer, and the question as to if he and other painters used optical devices to help them paint

on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Book your ticket to happiness with Sun Express Airlines. And Johannes Vermeer, hereby known just as Vermeer, was born in 1632 in Delft, Holland. He was born to a

middle-class family and as far as we know he was born, raised, and died in Delft,

never traveling beyond the Netherlands. We don't know a lot about his early life, but we do know that his father

was an art dealer and the owner of an inn and when his father died, Vermeer took

over his father's art business. We know he was born a Protestant and married a Catholic woman and then converted to Catholicism before his marriage in 1653.

His career as a painter is much more ambiguous, and this is where the mystery of Vermeer begins. Most painters from this time

period were members of a local painters guild and would have been trained by a local

master painter. While we like to think of these great painters as tortured artists, in reality it was mostly a job.

Painting was a business, and they were hired by clients to paint.

Perhaps the analogy isn't quite apt, but in many respects, they were like the photographer you'd hire

at glamor shots down at your local mall. A painter from this period would

probably declare who trained them because that training would be part of their

pedigree. It is what they would use to convince a buyer that they were worth hiring.

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