Woman with a Balance by Johannes Vermeer and the Golden Rectangle

Successive Golden Rectangles dividing a Golden Rectangle into squares (Woman with a Balance 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.

Woman with a Balance (c. 1664). "'Woman with a Balance' provides us not with a warning but with comfort and reassurance; it makes us feel not vanity of life but its preciousness. Against the violent baroque agitation of the painting behind her, the woman asserts a quite, imperturbable calm, the quintessence of Vermeer's vision." Edward A. Snow, A Study of Vermeer, 1979.

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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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