VERMEER IN THE AGE OF THE DIGITAL REPRODUCTION AND VIRTUAL COMMUNICATION

Resumo

The twentieth century was responsible for the revival of the visual arts, lending techniques to literature, in particular, after the advent of cinema. This visual revival is illustrated by the intersemiotic translations of Girl with a Pearl Earring: a recent low-budget movie was responsible for the revival of ordinary public interest in an art masterpiece from the seventeenth century. However, it was the book about the portrait that catalyzed this process of rejuvenation by verbalizing the portrait and inspiring the cinematographic adaptation, thereby creating the intersemiotic web. In this media-saturated environment we now live in, not only do books inspire movie adaptations, but movies inspire literary works; adaptations of screenplays are published; movies are adapted into musicals, television shows and even videogames. For James Naremore, every form of retelling should be added to the “study of adaptation in the age of the mechanical reproduction and electronic communication” (NAREMORE, 2000: 12-15), long previewed in Walter Benjamin’s milestone article (1936). Nowadays, the celebrated expression could be changed to the age of the digital reproduction and virtual communication, since new technologies and the use of new media have been changing the relations between, and within, the arts. The objective of this essay is to explore Vermeer’s influence on contemporary art and media production, with focus on the collection of portraits from the book entitled Domestic Landscapes (2007) by the Dutch photographer Bert Teunissen, confirming the study of recycling within a general theory of repetition proposed by James Naremore, under the light of intermediality.