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Vermeer signed and dated this on the cupboard in 1668, and the moment matters. These were the years when Louis XIV was building his grand observatory in Paris and telescopes were being reground across Europe for a sharper look at the sky. Vermeer, in quiet Delft, painted a scholar leaning toward a celestial globe, his hand just resting on it, the light coming soft through a window onto his robe. The globe is a real one, made by the Dutch mapmaker Hondius, and the book open on the table is a genuine astronomy manual of the period. There is a companion piece, The Geographer, thought to show the same man at a different desk, and study of the canvas suggests both were cut from a single bolt of cloth. Some have wondered whether the sitter was Vermeer's townsman, the microscope-maker Antonie van Leeuwenhoek.