Soldier and a Laughing Girl by Johannes Vermeer and the Golden Rectangle

Successive Golden Rectangles dividing a Golden Rectangle into squares (Soldier and a Laughing Girl by Johannes Vermeer).

Johannes Vermeer (1632 - 1675) was a Dutch Baroque painter who specialized in exquisite, domestic interior scenes of ordinary life. Vermeer worked slowly and with great care, using bright colors, sometimes expensive pigments, with a preference for cornflower blue and yellow.

Soldier and a Laughing Girl. c. 1658 Oil on canvas 49.2 x 44.4 cm The Frick Collection, New York.
Soldier and the laughing Girl is related to the foregoing in lighting and technique. This time Vermeer has used the soldier, like a cone of shadow, to give depth to his interior, probably the same room as in the Lady reading a Letter. Daylight pours through the open window and falls full on the young woman, in striking contrast to the man, whose profile, alone visible, is turned away from the light.

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A golden rectangle is a rectangle whose side lengths are in the golden ratio, one-to-phi, that is, approximately 1:1.618. A distinctive feature of this shape is that when a square section is removed, the remainder is another golden rectangle, that is, with the same proportions as the first. Square removal can be repeated infinitely, which leads to an approximation of the golden or Fibonacci spiral.
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