Vista de Delft

Fabritius painted this small view of Delft in 1652. It looks odd at first, the church leaning, the near buildings stretched and bent, and that is deliberate. The distortion suggests it was made to sit on a curved surface inside a perspective box and be seen through a peephole, so that as your eye crossed it the crooked lines snapped into a convincing deep street. He had trained in Rembrandt's studio and was one of the most inventive painters in Delft, admired by the young Vermeer nearby. Two years after he finished this, in 1654, the city's gunpowder store blew up, flattening a whole quarter of Delft and killing roughly a hundred people. Fabritius was one of them, dead at 32, and only about a dozen of his paintings survive. The corner of town shown here is close to where he lived.