Honestly their main downside. Especially that big piece that you just cannot break into smaller pieces.

Is the joke that nobody knows what it says on the blackboard?

Author handle to hopefully make them easier to follow (and at least notify them that they’re on Lemmy): @[email protected]

The Louvre has two paintings with that name it seems, but I’m guessing it must be this one (this is the other one).

And then there’s Toto, who actually have a million hits, but each of them feels like it must be some band’s one-hit wonder, until you find out that it’s another Toto song.

I might be a little more informed because I’m Dutch, but Vermeer is fairly well-known, and e.g. The Milkmaid and View of Delft are, I believe, other fairly famous paintings of his (albeit less famous than The Girl with the Pearl Earring).

Vermeer might have been a pupil of Carel Fabritius, who was a pupil of Rembrandt. The interesting thing about Fabritius is that many of his paintings got destroyed in an explosion (that also killed Fabritius), and only about a dozen remain. Which I think is also mind-blowing: this potential important link between two famous painters might very well himself have produced such wonders, but we’ll never know.

(If you’re ever in the area, I would highly recommend a visit to the Mauritshuis in The Hague. And if you like reading, The Goldfinch (referencing the Fabritius painting) by Donna Tartt is the novel that got me into all this in the first place.)