17 The Picture in my Bedroom

There is a picture hanging in my bedroom made from a poster of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam of the painting "The Beautiful Shepherdess" by Paulus Moreelse from Utrecht, from the beginning of the seventeenth century. I like to look at this picture. It has complete mastery of technique and style. It is realistic in so far as the face turned towards us is in exact proportions, the shadows create the illusion of natural light that comes from a definite direction and the face has a live expression that speaks to us.

But the picture is not realistic, and its name gives us a hint of this: "The Beautiful Shepherdess". This delicate shepherdess, fancifully dressed and decorated with flowers, did not get up at the crack of dawn, open the gates of the sheep pen and lead the herd to pasture, dirtied by mud. The entire picture is a mythical fantastic image of the shepherdess as a beautiful, aristocratic maiden, as gentle and heavenly as an angel. That is the way seventeenth century Europeans imagined "the shepherdesses" of ancient times – the ideal, imagined golden age, in which the door between heaven and earth had not yet been closed, and the gods intervened in human affairs and beauty was divine.

What attracts me is the enigmatic, cryptic aspect of the picture. What is the beautiful shepherdess thinking about? Is she in love? Is she about to burst into laughter? Does her expression indicate resentment? Irony? It seems that the secret of the picture's magic is that it captures an unexplained emotional expression and thereby enables the viewer to interpret it in innumerable ways. The shepherdess gazed into our eyes. She doesn't leave us in peace, and she demands an interpretation. But at the same time she enables us to ascribe to her glance a vast number of emotions.