The Milkmaid is an oil on canvas painting of 45.5 x 41 cm by the famous Dutch painter we have been studying this semester, Johannes Vermeer. The work shows a kitchen maid performing one of her most ordinary duties: the pouring of milk into a container. The picture is held in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, Netherlands. Although the exact year of the painting’s completion is unknown, experts determine the years between 1657-1661 as possible dates.

“The Milkmaid” was painted in a time of great wealth and power in the Netherlands, in which trade, art and science developed so much as to be among the most acclaimed in the world. In 1568  The Seven Provinces that signed the Union of Utretcht started a rebellion against Phillip II of Spain which eventually led to the Eighty Years’ War. Before Spain started to   reconquer the Low Countries again, England declared war to Spain. The Eighty Years’ War finally ended with The Peace of Westphalia in 1648, where the peace settlement was signed by Spain and the Republic of   the Seven United Netherlands. The Dutch East India Company settled a Dutch monopoly on Asian trade which prevailed for two centuries. The Dutch also dominated the trade between European countries, by the year 1680 an average of nearly 1000 Dutch ships crossed the Baltic Sea each year.

As we have learned in class, due to the strong doctrines of Calvinism, the artists of the time were not allowed to depicted sex in their paintings. However, Vermeer, along with other artist of the time, knew how to circumvent the censors by leaving subtle symbols that evoke lust or female sexuality. The pouring of milk might have lascivious connotations, the Dutch word for milk “melken” might also be defined as “to sexually attract”. The milkmaid’s body becomes the center of attraction. It was not only the thickness of her waist that attracted the viewer of the time, but also the contrast between the rough leather sleeves with the nudity of her forearm. It seems that Vermeer was well acquainted with the reputation of milkmaids, who were known for their sexual availability. In the end, it is not only the allusions to female sexuality, but also the depiction of an honest and hard working milkmaid that give the picture its romantic or emotional meaning.

To achieve this level of precision, Vermeer used a sophisticated painting technique which was developed and enhanced throughout his life. At first, in his early works he used a thick impasto paint   layer. By using this technique Vermeer puts an emphasis to the materials present in the picture rather than in the characters portrayed. Later he started working with a new technique called “pointillé”, or little dots of paint applied to a canvas in order to obtain a higher level accuracy and detail. Although it is not very clear, some experts maintain that the use of this specific technique along with other visual peculiarities, suggest that Vermeer might have used the “camera obscura”, a precursor to the modern photographic camera, in some of his works. 

On the other hand, Vermeer used a few number of pigments if compared to his contemporaries.  However, less than twenty pigments have been detected in Vermeer’s works and ten of those seem to have been of regular usage. As an interesting  fact, in Vermeer’s time each pigment was differed from the other in terms of permanence, drying time and workability.

The difficulty of painting with these pigments was that many of those were often not compatible   with each other and had to be used separately. Although it is unlikely that Vermeer had every pigment in his palette when creating one of his works, it is possible that he had the pigments needed for each part of the     painting he was working at. Vermeer commonly employed seven different types: white lead, yellow ochre, vermillion, red madder, green earth, raw umber and ivory black. A interesting detail to tell is that to paint     bluish tones in The Milkmaid, Vermeer used a the  pigment ultramarine, which was more expensive and finer than the commonly used azurite.

If we were to analyze the most important parts of the picture, we could start from the face of the milkmaid. it is important to focus on the light coming from the window and reflecting directly upon her face in shadows and pale scales therefore, creating an effect of three-dimensionality. For the face Vermeer used small touches of paint like reddish brown, white, light ocher and brown combined all together. The window becomes another central theme of the picture, providing the portrait with light and luminosity. Vermeer gives importance to little details, thus we can see a broken piece of glass or the irregularity of the window frame.

The basket and the copper pail next to the window are elements related to the thematic of the painting: the pouring milk. Both being objects used when shopping in the market. The basket is  painted using the white, ochre and black, which eventually mingle to adapt to the form of the basket’s wicker.  The milkmaid’s dress is said to be a winter dress due to the amount of layers it has.  She wears a robust leather top and a blue apron over a heavy red wool skirt. Taking a close look at the milkmaid’s garment we can see that it was painted applying thick and quick dabs of yellow  and brown pigments to give it the rough texture required ( the impasto technique again).

The jar, the vessel, the pieces of bread on the table and the care with which pours the milk are elements that give great meaning to the final composition. These elements  suggest that the woman  was making curd; this might be a possible reason to explain why the milkmaid is pouring the milk with such care. The slightly porous texture of the stoneware and the  “pointillés” used for  painting the bread, give the picture an extraordinary luminosity and lifelikeness.

The decorated tiles in the lower part of the wall behind the milkmaid, served as a skirting that  protected the plaster from the daily damage of brooms and were made tiny works of art of the finest  porcelain. On one of the tiles a Cupid can be appreciated which leads to two different schools of  thought, one supporting an amorous interpretation of it and a more skeptical one, who believes  that those Cupid were symbols often used in the Dutch houses of the time.

To end up with this article it must be said that  the identity of the milkmaid has been a matter of debate for  critics. Some of them have speculated that it was Vermer’s family  maid (hrough some  documents of 1663 it is known her existence and character). In addition, as some of us have mentioned in our Facebook page “Johannes Vermeer’s influence and inspiration ( a view from  Deusto)”,  it is largely known that many of Vermeer’s paintings, after having been exposed to X-rays, have revealed some items which were painted over.  In the case of the picture I have been  analyzing, a clothes basket can be found near the bottom of the painting, behind the maid’s red skirt!

Sources:

• The Essential Vermeer. May 7, 2011 at 16.00 from http://www.essentialvermeer.com/
• Johannes Vermeer. The Milkmaid. Retrieved. May 2 , 2011 at 21:00 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Milkmaid_(Vermeer)
• Johannes Vermeer. Retrieved. May 2, 2011 at 21.00 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johannes_Vermeer

She did not have more clothes than those she had on the day she had arrived: a red skirt, a white shirt, a yellow sweater, a blue apron and a white headscarf, which helped her to gather her hair and maintain the hygiene in the kitchen. Every night she had to wash everything to put them on again in morning.

Once she got herself washed, she took her milk pot and went walking to a little house in the middle of the countryside in which cows, sheeps and goats grazed. By the time she arrived, the shepherd had already milked his animals and she would buy him the milk of the cows to make breaksfast for the family she worked for. Sometimes, she would also buy the milk of the sheeps and goats with which she would make cheese and curds. She was very good at making desserts. Isabella had learned from her grandmother how to make homemade curd and every Sunday the family had it for lunch. The technique was easy: a) she boiled the milk, b) she poured it into little containers, c) she let it cool, d) she added a drop of rennet in each container, e) she stirred it a little bit and f) she let it thicken.

Next to the house where she worked, there was a farm which grew chicken. She used to go there sometimes and used to buy eggs and some chicken, and as she dare not kill it, she would order it and pick it already stripped the following day.

Once a week it was usual to hear a towncrier in the streets. Who was it? It was a fisherman who with his boat and his rod used to obtain fishes from the sea and the river. When they heard his voice, the town women, Isabella among them, used to run to his encounter to buy some fish. Being Isabella a unbeatable cook, she would prepare different and succulent dishes containing it.

By nine o’clock in the morning the family, that is, the masters and their children, went down from their bedrooms to have breakfast in the dining room: scrambled eggs and milk or coffee. After that, the house would remain empty. The masters and the children would go to church. That was the time of the day in which Isabella would do the houseworks: open the windows to refresh the house, make the beds, sweep the floor of the bedrooms, clean the dust, etc.

The majority of the neighbours worked the land and harvested wheat and corn. In general, all of them owned a vegetable garden where they grew onions, garlic, lettuce, carrots, potatoes, leeks and also fruits like apples, plums and oranges.

In the midst of all those fields a stream ran vividly and when its water arrived to a pile of pebbles, it jumped in such a way that it was a reminiscent of a waterfall.

When Isabella walked the way down the river she would find the mill where the wheat and the corn were crushed and there she would buy the flour to cook bread, cakes and pastries. Later, she would buy the necessary vegetables to prepare Sunday’s lunch.

When the masters and their children arrived home, they would found a delicious meal on their dining room: homemade bread, vegetable soup, chicken and what it was typical of every Sunday, curd with cherry. As the days passed, the masters were happier and happier with Isabella’s work and that is why appart from increasing her salary, they gave her some extra money for her to buy new clothes so that she did not have to wash every night the only ones she had.

Isabella used to save part of her salary with the purpose of visiting her family at least once a year. Another part she saved to send it to her elderly parents, who never did spend it. Instead they would put the money in a little bag waiting for the moment when they would give it back to Isabella.

Isabella lived happily in the house where she worked. When she finished working and the children came back from school, after giving them something to eat, the three of them would play hide-and-seek out in the yard. They would also sit on the swings and she would push them.

The years passed and the day arrived when the children had to go to university and the master of the house had to move to a bigger bank in another country, so the lady of the house quit her job to move with her husband and her children to a new place.. Isabella was already old and felt weak and tired and decided to return back home with her parents. With the money they had collected in that little bag, the three of them went on a trip to visit the capital of their country, where they had not been and which they had not seen before. 

Slide 2: Background

Johannes Vermeer  was a Dutch painter born in Delft on 31 October 1632. He specialized in exquisite, domestic interior scenes of middle class life. Vermeer was a slightly  successful genre painter in his lifetime. He seems never to have been particularly wealthy, leaving his wife and children in debt at his death, perhaps because he produced relatively few paintings.

Since that time, Vermeer’s reputation has grown, and he is now acknowledged as one of the greatest painters of the Dutch Golden Age.

Slide 3: Painting Technique

The Milkmaid, sometimes called The Kitchen Maid, is an oil-on-canvas painting of a “milkmaid”, in fact a domestic kitchen maid, by the Dutch painter. It is housed in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, Netherlands, which esteems it as “unquestionably one of the museum’s finest attractions”.

This painting has “perhaps, the most brilliant color scheme of his oeuvre”, says the Essential Vermeer website.

Slide 4

One of the distinctions of Vermeer’s palette, compared with his contemporaries, was his preference for the expensive natural ultramarine where other painters typically used the much cheaper azurite.

Along with the ultramarine, the lead-tin yellow is also a dominant color in an exceptionally luminous work. The white walls reflect the daylight with different intensities, displaying the effects of uneven textures on the plastered surfaces. The artist here used white lead, umber and charcoal black. Although the formula was widely known among Vermeer’s contemporary genre painters, “perhaps no artist more than Vermeer was able to use it so effectively”, according to the Essential Vermeer website.

The woman’s coarse features are painted with thick dabs of impasto. This technique consists on leaving the paint on an area of the surface very thickly.

The seeds on the crust of the bread, as well as the crust itself, along with the plaited handles of the bread basket, are rendered with dots. Soft parts of the bread are rendered with thin swirls of paint, with dabs of ochre used to show the rough edges of broken crust.

One piece of bread to the viewer’s right and close to the Dutch oven, has a broad band of yellow, different from the crust, which Cant believes is a suggestion that the piece is going stale.

The bread and basket, despite being closer to the viewer, are painted in a more diffuse way than the illusionistic realism of the wall, with its stains, shadowing, nail and nail hole, or the seams and fastenings of the woman’s dress, the gleaming, polished brass container hanging from the wall. The panes of glass in the window are varied in a very realistic way.

The woman’s bulky green oversleeves were painted with the same yellow and blue paint used in the rest of the woman’s clothing.

The brilliant blue of the skirt or apron has been intensified with a glaze (a thin, transparent top layer) of the same color.

Slide 5: What does the painting suggest?

Despite its traditional title, the picture clearly shows a maid   (a low-ranking servant) in a plain room carefully pouring milk into a container  on a table.

Also on the table are various types of bread.

She is a young, sturdily built woman wearing a linen cap, a blue apron and work sleeves pushed up from thick forearms.

The painting is strikingly illusionistic, conveying not just details but a sense of the weight of the woman and the table.  With half of the woman’s face in shadow, it is “impossible to tell whether her downcast eyes and pursed lips express wistfulness or concentration,” wrote Karen Rosenberg, an art critic for The New York Times.

“It’s a little bit of a Mona Lisa effect” in modern viewers’ reactions to the painting, according to Walter Liedtke, curator of the department of European paintings at The Museum of Modern Art, and organizer of two Vermeer exhibits. “There’s a bit of mystery about her for modern audiences. She is going about her daily task, faintly smiling. And our reaction is ‘What is she thinking?’”

Slide 6: Relationship Picture-Poem

In this last slide, I have analised the relationship between the picture of “The Milkmaid” and the poem that went with it in our books and we have been looking at in class with Claire:

The poet takes us back on time to what has been done. It is not a static moment in time.

The picture shows a rude woman, not a delicate or fine one. Everything she touches is hard, crude. There is no flattery at all.

She is holding the jug as if it were a baby, as if she were bathing him.

The maid is an earthy woman, not a delicate one, but she turns into kind of holly or precious when the light shines on her. Light transforms her actions onto something holly, full of grace and admirable.

References:

• Johannes Vermeer. Britannica. Retrieved: May 2, 2011 at 21:00 from http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/626156/Johannes-Vermeer
• Johannes Vermeer. The Milkmaid. Retrieved. May 2, 2011 at 21:00 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Milkmaid_(Vermeer)
• Johannes Vermeer. Retrieved. May 2, 2011 at 21.00 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johannes_Vermeer
• Slideshare http://www.slideshare.net/
• English for Specific Purposes. Orange Book.

Sources:

Flickr. (2010, January 17). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 17:03, January 27 2010, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Flickr&oldid=338376583

Para Domingo Buonocore, en el sentido etimológico del vocablo, biblioteca significa guarda o custodia de los libros, vale decir institución que provee a su conservación. En el sentido técnico, es una colección de libros más o menos numerosa y selecta, catalogada de acuerdo con un sistema dado y puesta a disposición de los estudiosos para su consulta. Tiene un doble fin esencial: conservar libros y facilitar su uso a los lectores.

Según Joaquín Costa, es una librería organizada con un objetivo de utilidad pública o particular, obedeciendo a la intención de formación intelectual en el campo científico, literario y técnico, de índole social y estética. También la define como colección mayor o menor de obras, generalmente seleccionadas que se editan con un fin de divulgación superior o popular de cultura, estudio o recreo intelectual.

El Diccionario de Términos de Informática dice que es la institución que realiza la recopilación, procesamiento y almacenamiento de obras impresas y su entrega a los lectores, divulga los conocimientos y dirige la lectura.

Sobre el concepto de “biblioteca electrónica”

Según el trabajo titulado Los prototipos y la terminología, es la que se encuentra ricamente dotada de equipos microelectrónicos y de instalaciones de telecomunicaciones, que permitirán acceder a la información en formato electrónico ´in situ´o a larga distancia; y en las colecciones de estas bibliotecas convivirán todo tipo de materiales y formatos. Pilar Moreno se refiere a todas las funciones de una biblioteca que se gestionan electrónicamente: ejemplo, adquisiciones, catalogación, préstamos, etc.

Según Alfonso Pérez es aquella que ha sido capaz de integrar las tecnologías de información en el ámbito de su trabajo cotidiano, de forma permanente y eficiente, de forma tal que le permita crear nueva información con valor agregado; es aquella que ha sido capaz de almacenar la totalidad de la información en soportes eléctricos, magnéticos o digitales. Es aquella que ha sido capaz de seguir el ritmo de crecimiento y actualización de la información en el mundo.

Para Alexeis García y Magdelivia Cruz es aquella que gestiona todas las funciones de una biblioteca tradicional utilizando equipos microelectrónicos y de instalaciones de comunicación; ella logra integrar las tecnologías de información de forma permanente para crear nueva información con valor agregado y utiliza las posibilidades de la red, permite así acceder a la información ´in situ´o a larga distancia en todos los formatos; conservan el total de sus colecciones impresas y el local donde el usuario va a satisfacer una necesidad.

Sobre el concepto de “biblioteca digital”

Para J.W. Berry es la biblioteca donde el usuario puede acceder al universo de conocimientos con mayor rapidez, desde su escritorio o terminal de comunicaciones. En este sentido, se afirma que las personas dejan de depender de la biblioteca como edificio.

Otro autor, Shigeo Sugimoto, dice que es la expresión genérica que designa a estructuras federadas que permiten al ser humano el acceso, tanto intelectual como material, a la masa enorme y continuamente creciente de información que circula por el mundo entero, en forma codificada, a través de las redes digitales multimedia.

Según Alexeis García y Magdelivia Cruz es una colección de documentos digitalizada, disponible en red con alcance global, por lo que implica una nueva forma de acceder y usar la información. Ella es una institución que ha sustituido todos los documentos impresos por sus versiones y realiza todos los procesos básicos de una biblioteca a través de software, para lo que se apoya totalmente en la computación y las redes. Es aquella que ha digitalizado todas sus colecciones y el usuario accede a ellas mediante el ordenador.

Sobre el concepto de “biblioteca virtual”

Según Andrea Duda, se plantea que hay mucha similitud entre estos términos, pero no cree que se diferencien la biblioteca virtual de la digital; ambas están disponibles en red a diferencia de la electrónica que sólo utiliza las posibilidades de la red.

Jesús Blázquez considera que ella sería aquella en la que sus fondos están en formato electrónico, pero se diferencia de la primera en que es accesible únicamente mediante Internet y no existe físicamente en ningún lugar.

Para Ximena Feliz, biblioteca virtual, es la presencia de nuestra biblioteca en un nuevo escenario invisible, inmaterial pero real, desarrollada por los hombres y la ingeniería, en los últimos decenios, y que se denomina ciberespacio. Significa nuestra permanencia activa, integrada, relacionada con otras instituciones del quehacer bibliográfico en el tratamiento automatizado de la información mediante el cual estamos contribuyendo a la generación de un gran tesoro del conocimiento a nivel planetario. La biblioteca deja de ocupar un determinado lugar físico y se transforma en una institución que puede estar en todas partes, aunque no esté físicamente representada en una calle.

En conclusión, parece ser que la biblioteca virtual es la que más se diferencia de las demás, porque nunca tuvo colección impresa ni edificio y se crea a partir de documentos digitalizados y sitios. Es importante señalar que a pesar de incorporar la realidad virtual no deja de ser biblioteca. Por su objetivo y sus procesos, ella atiende la selección y adquisición, el procesamiento analítico sintético de la información, y la organización de la información y los servicios.

Es preciso destacar que la biblioteca electrónica y la digital no son más que bibliotecas con un determinado grado de desarrollo en respuesta al desarrollo tecnológico, por lo tanto cuando se hable de biblioteca de estos tipos puede incluirse en su definición los términos tradicionales y agregarle el uso de las computadoras en los procesos de la biblioteca y la digitalización de sus colecciones.

Fuentes:

“Bibliotecas electrónicas, digitales y virtuales: tres entidades por definir“.Lic. Marlery Sánchez Díaz y Dr. Juan Carlos Vega Valdés

http://bvs.sld.cu/revistas/aci/vol10_6_02/aci05602.htm

It is possible to use this stream of information to create customized feeds to share, as well as originate new posts-discussions, (and comment) with friends.

The goal of FriendFeed according to their website is to make content on the Web more relevant and useful by using existing social network as a tool for discovering interesting information. . Bloggers writing about FriendFeed have said that this service addresses the shortcomings of social media services which exclusively facilitate tracking of their own members’ social media activities on that particular social media service, whereas FriendFeed provides the facility to track these activities (such as posting on blogs, Twitter and Flickr) across a broad range of different social networks.

Starting out life as a video blogging website, its original aim was to make video uploading from webcams easier to promote online video conversations.  Seesmic made its debut at the Demo tech conference where it was called the “Twitter of video”. It had 20,000 users and 70,000 viewers per month as of 2008^] On April 3, 2008, Seesmic announced that it had purchased Twhirl, an Adobe AIR based Twitter client.

In 2009, Loic Le Meur, Seesmic’s founder, announced that the video portion of the site had stagnated as it struggled to attract new users. He refocused the site, changing the objective from creating a new video social networking tool to creating a site that would instead aggregate content from other social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook . The video site, whilst remaining available, was relegated to a subdomain of the new site.

LeMeur moved from Paris to San Francisco to launch Seesmic due to the perception that it would stand a better chance of success there. It is backed by a number of investors, the primary one being Atomico, a venture group that includes Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, who sold Skype to eBay in 2005 for $2.6 billion.

For example, metadata would document data about data elements or attributes, (name, size, data type, etc) and data about records or data structures (length, fields, columns, etc) and data about data (where it is located, how it is associated, ownership, etc.). Metadata may include descriptive information about the context, quality and condition, or characteristics of the data. It may be recorded with high or low granularity.

An example of metadata occurs within file systems. Associated with every file on the storage medium is metadata that records the date the file was created, the date it was last modified and the date the file (or indeed the metadata itself) was last accessed.

Source:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metadata

Senders can restrict delivery to those in their circle of friends or, by default, allow open access. Users can send and receive tweets via the Twitter website, Short Message Service (SMS) or external applications. While the service itself costs nothing to use, accessing it through SMS may incur phone service provider fees.

Since its creation in 2006 by Jack Dorsey, Twitter has gained notability and popularity worldwide. It is sometimes described as the “SMS of the Internet” since the use of Twitter’s application programming interface for sending and receiving short text messages by other applications often eclipses the direct use of Twitter.

Most of Twitter’s usage share comes from older adults who might not have used other social sites before Twitter, said Jeremiah Owyang, an industry analyst studying social media. “Adults are just catching up to what teens have been doing for years,” he said.

Twitter collects personally identifiable information about its users and shares it with third parties. The service considers that information an asset, and reserves the right to sell it if the company changes hands. While Twitter displays no advertising, advertisers can target users based on their history of tweets and sometimes may quote tweets in ads.

The Wall Street Journal wrote that social-networking services such as Twitter “elicit mixed feelings in the technology-savvy people who have been their early adopters. Fans say they are a good way to keep in touch with busy friends. But some users are starting to feel ‘too’ connected, as they grapple with check-in messages at odd hours, higher cellphone bills and the need to tell acquaintances to stop announcing what they’re having for dinner.

Sources:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter

En esta  edición de la Feria del Libro y de la Música de Durango, la novedad ha sido la presentación del libro digital, también conocido cono “e-book”. Jorge Jiménez, presidente de la Asociación de Editores Vascos y editor de Alberdania; Enric Faura, responsable del portal edi.cat; e Ignacio Latasa, director de Leer-e, empresa distribuidora del lector electrónico, explican como el libro digital aspira a convertirse en algo imprescindible.

A pesar de que es “un mercado que todavía no ha explotado” y que aún falta tiempo para consolidarlo, el libro electrónico va a suponer una revolución en el mundo editorial. Es una oportunidad para las lenguas minoritarias porque dan mayor visibilidad y permite divulgación a menor precio. Latasa afirma que no es una amenaza para los libros de papel y no va a suponer la desaparición del “formato tradicional”. Por otra parte, recomienda acercarse al stan del azoka para informarse, y afirma que por lo general, el libro digital está teniendo muy buena aceptación.

El interés ha sido,  más mediático que real. Mientras que los profesionales han debatido sobre el futuro impacto de los libros digitales en la industria, las ventas de contenidos sólo han alcanzado, al parecer, poco más una decena de ejemplares entre el público en general. Una novedad muy interesante ha sido la presentación por parte del editor Jason Epstein, en el marco de la feria, de la Expresso Book Machine , un expendedor de contenidos similar a los cajeros automáticos o a los expendedores de vídeos en los videoclubs. Se elige la obra y esta se imprime al instante en formato libro. Hoy en día ya se puede utilizar en EEUU, Egipto y Australia.

Hay varios stans informativos y aunque también se distribuyen títulos, la funcion de los puestos es informar a los ciudadanos sobre esta nueva forma de lectura e invitar a comprar un libro aunque no se tenga el lector, ya que se puede leer en el ordenador.

Fuentes:

http://biblumliteraria.blogspot.com/2009/12/feria-de-durango.html

http://www.eitb.com/noticias/tecnologia/detalle/308899/el-libro-digital-protagonista-azoka-durango/