Did Vermeer secretly paint with a camera?

Maybe, but nobody has proved it. Johannes Vermeer, the 17th-century Dutch painter of quiet interiors, is famous for light so precise it can look photographic, and some people think he had help from a camera obscura. That's a dark box or room where light entering through a small hole projects an upside-down image of the scene outside. With a lens, such devices were already popular drawing aids in his time, and they later evolved into the photographic camera.

The clues are tantalizing. The researcher Philip Steadman found six Vermeer paintings that would be exactly the right size if they had been painted from a camera obscura set in the back wall of the room they show. Supporters say the sparkling pearly highlights in his pictures look like the halos a primitive lens produces. In 2008 the inventor Tim Jenison proposed a method using mirrors, then spent five years re-creating Vermeer's The Music Lesson himself, as filmed in the 2013 documentary Tim's Vermeer.

But the case has holes. There's no historical record of Vermeer being interested in optics, and the inventory of his belongings drawn up after his death lists no camera obscura and no lens. Curator Walter Liedtke pointed out that tracing a fleeting image makes little sense when the light changes in seconds and a painting takes months. Many historians now think Vermeer may well have used optical devices in some way, just not as a secret tracing machine.