View of Houses in Delft by Johannes Vermeer and the Golden Rectangle

Successive Golden Rectangles dividing a Golden Rectangle into squares (View of Houses in Delft 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.

View of Houses in Delft, known as "The Little Street". c. 1658; Oil on canvas, 54.3 x 44 cm; Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
In a cobblestone street are two houses with a gate opening onto the passageway between them. A woman sits in an open doorway, busy sewing; two children are playing on the stoop. Soapy water is washing down a small runnel between the paving stones - probably the woman in the passageway has just scrubbed her part of the stoop. Vermeer has recorded this everyday scene with apparent casualness. Although world-famous, not much is known about Vermeer's Little Street. In fact the original location has never been identified, and indeed may never have existed. Source: WebMuseum Paris.

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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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