it is invested with a significance which the scene itself lacks. Or lacks for most people! For Vermeer, presumably, differs from most people in being able to see in the scene the significance which we cannot observe save in the picture, What he has done is to drag it forth from the irrelevant setting in which it lurked, and throw it into high relief. He does not create beauty; he is the midwife who brings to birth the beauty that is latent in things.