While The Girl with a Pearl Earring was hardly a wallflower at the Mauritshuis, she wasn’t quite the type to headline a show–until 2003, when she got her Hollywood break. Being played by Scarlett Johansson in Peter Webber’s film version of Tracy Chevalier’s novel brought the painting new fame; to the dismay of art historians, though, the audience sometimes concluded that the book’s main character, a maid who posed for Vermeer, was real.

Dutch Old Masters get a different twist in Hendrik Kerstens’s color photographs, up through Saturday at James Danziger. Each one depicts the artist’s daughter Paula in get-ups that evoke 17th-century portraits, but with their lovingly rendered hoods and bonnets replaced by bubble wrap, tin foil, and other humble materials. These in turn inspired high fashion when Alexander McQueen used them as fodder for his fall 2009 collection. http://www.artnews.com/2013/02/14/fun-with-vermeer/