Form in art is the three dimensional quality of an object: length, width and depth. In sculpture the form is real. In a painting it is an illusion, built with light and shadow on a flat surface, so that an outline turns into something that seems to have weight. Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring, painted around 1665 and now in the Mauritshuis in The Hague, is the easiest place to watch it happen.
A shape is flat, and a form is what a shape becomes once light has worked on it: a circle is a shape, a ball is a form. The Getty's guide to the elements of art lists forms of the same kind, balls, cylinders, boxes and pyramids.
The pearl in Vermeer's picture is a ball in exactly this way. A thin gray layer laid over the shadow of her neck gives it its outline, and a thicker touch of lead white at the top gives it its light.
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The pearl is the place where the illusion is easiest to catch, because there is so little to it. The Mauritshuis says Vermeer used only a few brushstrokes of lead white, and from those few strokes the eye builds a ball that seems to hang beside her cheek.
Even hang may be too generous a word. Nothing attaches the pearl to her ear, and the Mauritshuis points out that there is no hook to hold it. Costume and jewellery specialists also consider it too big to be a real pearl, and glass, silver, lacquered tin and mother of pearl have all been suggested.
So the most famous sphere in painting may not be a pearl at all, and nothing holds it up. It still reads as a solid object, because all the eye needs is light where it expects to find it. One of the painters who tried to write down where that light belongs was Leonardo, and he started with a mirror.
Why did Leonardo tell painters to study a mirror?
Because a mirror does what a painting has to do…
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