In our series Why Is This Famous?, we aim to answer the unanswerable: How does a work actually enter the public consciousness? (See all installments.)

Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa may well be the most recognizable painted figure in the world, but did Scarlett Johansson ever play her in a movie? No. That honor goes to Johannes Vermeer’s Girl With a Pearl Earring. Dubbed “the Mona Lisa of the North,” Vermeer’s 17.5-by-15-inch masterpiece is undoubtedly the most famous painting to emerge from the 17th century’s Dutch Golden Age. But it wasn’t always so well-known.

In this series, we’ve found that identifying why a work is famous is a complicated task, but that isn’t the case here. It’s quite simple, actually. Though by all measures the painting deserves to be famous—who hasn’t been lost in the girl’s mysterious, fleeting glance?—its ubiquity came all of a sudden, thanks to another cultural artifact.

Fictional caricatures

Little is known about Vermeer’s life and career. The broad strokes are that he had 15 children and lived the type of modest, middle-class life often found in his paintings. Almost an inverse of van Gogh, Vermeer sold most of the paintings that he tried to, though he didn’t complete many. He finished Girl With a Pearl Earring in 1665, at the height of his (and his country’s) financial troubles, exactly 10 years before his death. Despite popular assumption, the painting is not a portrait, as it doesn’t depict a real person. It instead falls into a genre very specific to the Dutch Golden Age: tronie. A tronie depicts expressive faces of generic subjects used to represent broad caricatures. Frans Hals may best represent the genre, with tronies like The Merry Drinker (1628), Singing Boy With Flute (1623), and The Gypsy Woman. In this vein, the caricature Vermeer evokes is a beautiful, anonymous girl in exotic, fashionable wears. As Europe engaged in wars with the Ottoman Empire, aesthetic nods to distant, mysterious Oriental lands (such as the turban she wears) were “cool,” although not entirely commonplace.

Like its subject, the painting is difficult to define; just as it isn’t really a proper portrait, as it never really had a proper name. Vermeer didn’t title it, instead referring to it in his records as “painted in the Turkish fashion” or a “Portrait in Antique Costume, uncommonly artistic.” The painting had numerous owners within Vermeer’s hometown, Delft, and the nearby city, The Hague, before it was sold to the Mauritshuis museum, where it has been, for the most part, since 1902. There it was called Girl With a Turban or Head of a Girl until the 1990s, after its most recent restoration, when it was dubbed Girl With a Pearl. In 1995 it received a good deal of attention from an exhibit at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., but that would pale in comparison to what would truly canonize the “earring” at the end of the title: Tracy Chevalier’s 1999 book, Girl With a Pearl Earring. A bestseller that has sold over five million copies, it also inspired the movie of the same name, released in 2004, which has grossed over $30 million.

It’s relieving to know that Chevalier was by all measures a Vermeer junkie, though it should be said that the book in no way represents the truth or even a part of it. Her story features the subject of the painting as a servant and love interest of Vermeer’s, a relationship that came strictly from her own imagination. There’s no question why it was made into a movie; the plot and drama within are already Hollywood-ified, with complicated love affairs, mounting tension, and sentimental departures. It’s a story that could theoretically be applied to many portraits across the history of art. But even this begs the question: What about the painting made it so easy—tempting even—to inhabit?

Keeping us at a distance

Most Vermeer paintings are set in the domestic sphere and portray the intimate moments normally found in a home. While he gives us access to these private scenes, he places his viewers at a distance, often emphasized by a “zoomed-out” view, or a curtain covering the corner of the canvas, as if we are peeping in. Vermeer only executed a few paintings that don’t have a background or setting: including Girl With a Pearl Earing and the very similar Study of a Young Woman. Instead, these works use a “zoomed-in” view, placing the viewer right in front of the girl, as if you were just conversing. But Vermeer manages to keep us at a distance regardless: In most of his paintings, we can see what the subjects eat, how they decorate their homes, and how they interact. But we don’t know anything about the subject.

This emotional distance seems to be the thing that begs writers to treat the painting like clay. Without context or signifiers, an author can project whatever story they want onto the subject; since little is known about Vermeer, they can fully invent the possible relationship between artist and subject. Vermeer was first imagined in this way in Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. Girl With a Pearl Earring was reimagined in poems by Marilyn Chandler McEntyre, W.S. Di Piero, and Yann Lovelock, as well as a novella by Marta Morazzoni, all before Chevalier had a go.

The popular conception of a “novel” didn’t really take flight until after Vermeer’s time. And he certainly couldn’t have imagined what sort of mainstream forces books have become—how fictional characters can invade the public consciousness and become cultural touchstones. In many ways, today’s protagonists serve the same purpose as tronies once did: a fictional concept used to mirror the trends coalescing in reality. It’s interesting to think about how Vermeer was, in essence, painting a character to be written later. It’s surreal to think about how this enabled him to become one himself.