Jan Vermeer (1632-75) was little known outside Holland either during his lifetime or for more than 200 years after his death, yet he is now acknowledged to be one of the most gifted and intriguing painters of the seventeenth century. This film looks at the social, political and scientific context in which this most enigmatic of painters lived, from the birth of an independent Dutch society to the incredible developments in the fields of optics, astronomy and geography that so transformed the seventeenth century. Vermeer's life and his art is shrouded in mystery - he left no papers, no drawings, no clues as to the meaning or intention of his paintings, and he died leaving such substantial debts that his widow was forced to sell all his work. This film explains his revolutionary techniques and his exploratory process of pictorial composition while academics including Jonathan Miller and Svetlana Alpers discuss the meaning of Vermeer's settings and subjects, and the formal simplicity and intensity of feeling that make his jewel-like paintings so moving.

John Berger's Ways of Seeing changed the way people think about painting and art criticism. This watershed work shows, through word and image, how what we see is always influenced by a whole host of assumptions concerning the nature of beauty, truth, civilization, form, taste, class and gender. Exploring the layers of meaning within oil paintings, photographs and graphic art, Berger argues that when we see, we are not just looking - we are reading the language of images.