A room sits empty, save for a lone chair and a shaft of golden light. Yet in the details—a patterned marble floor, blue Delft tiles, a stained-glass window pane—the setting for George Deem’s painting Extended Vermeer (2000) is unmistakably a 17th-century Dutch home. What other period’s interiors have become so immediately legible, and psychologically captivating, to contemporary viewers? Thanks to the work of Johannes Vermeer, the quiet simplicity of a world four centuries removed from our own has come to stand for a distinctly modern subjectivity—one that is private, contemplative, and individual.

Deem, an American artist who died in 2008, at the age of 75, is central to Ruth Bernard Yeazell’s new book about Vermeer’s legacy: Vermeer’s Afterlives, out next month from Princeton University Press. Deem copied Vermeer’s paintings but removed their figures, leaving more space for the kind of projection that Yeazell argues is essential to Vermeer’s enduring popularity and continued emulation, by artists from Vilhelm Hammershøi to Gerhard Richter.

Vermeer is best known for tonally painted genre scenes, precise enough that he was believed to have used a camera obscura, and yet atmospheric enough—that glorious light!—to seem almost otherworldly. His scenes of everyday life are evocative yet without strong narrative components. Their interpretive openness makes space for viewers to develop their own associations, either dwelling in absorptive ambiguity or writing their own endings, as in the many works of fiction and poetry based on the artist’s oeuvre that Yeazell catalogues. The mystery of Vermeer’s figures, often female, gave rise to works from Tracy Chevalier’s blockbuster novel Girl with a Pearl Earring (1999) to lyric poetry. Eamon Grennan’s line, “Since he painted her, she will always be putting this pearl necklace on,” takes the artist’s work deliberately out of its own time and offers it up to eternity.

In absenting the paintings’ principal figures, Deem’s gesture mimes the treatment of Vermeer himself, who was largely removed from history for two centuries before a French art critic rediscovered his work in the 1860s. Théophile Thoré traveled to Holland in 1842 and was struck by “a superb and very singular landscape” in the museum at The Hague, painted by an artist who “very much deserves to be known”—Vermeer’s View of Delft (ca. 1660-63). His 1866 article catalogued the artist’s work and identified in Vermeer much of what he found lacking in French art of the time: authenticity, nature, light. From the earliest historiography, then, Vermeer was employed to respond to the needs of the present. He re-entered the historic record at precisely the time that French painting became more concerned with atmosphere than story, a development that has come to define modern art.

To make the Dutch artist’s work modern required forgetting its original context, an oversight that Andrew Graham-Dixon seeks to redress in his recent biography of the artist. Vermeer: A Life Lost and Found restores specificity to the artist’s oeuvre, finding in the smallest detail symbolic allusions to the particular concerns of the seventeenth-century Netherlands.

So invested is Graham-Dixon in setting the historic scene that the artist’s birth only occurs on page 77 of his 416-page tome. Before that, he takes the reader through the complicated wars of religion that ravaged the region and outlines the formation of alternative religious movements, most notably the Collegiants (an outcrop of the Remonstrant church). Opposed to strict Calvinist principles, the Collegiants promoted pacifism, tolerance, and personal spiritual practice.

Archival evidence reveals that Vermeer’s patrons, Pieter Claesz van Ruijven and Maria de Knuijt, were not only members of the Collegiant movement but hosted Collegiant meetings at their home, known as the Golden Eagle—meetings for which Vermeer’s canvases may have provided the backdrop. (Maria was both the leader of the meetings and Vermeer’s primary patron, a feminist twist on the standard history of patronage.) For Graham-Dixon, it is Vermeer’s affiliation with the Collegiants above all that defines his work. He sees Vermeer’s painting as an act of faith, a sacrament akin to baptism or communion and a way of manifesting a better world in times of strife.

Yeazell and Graham-Dixon’s accounts of the recently restored Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window (ca. 1657–59) demonstrate their divergent approaches to Vermeer. The work had long been thought to feature a blank wall in the background. But the painted blankness concealed a picture-within-the-picture of a naked Cupid. While it was initially assumed that Vermeer himself had covered over the Cupid, thus embracing a more mature style based in contemplative space and an expanse of pure painting, recent restoration work reveals that the overpainting happened after the artist’s death. For Graham-Dixon, the presence of the symbolic Cupid proves this is a marriage painting depicting sacred love; for Yeazell, it is a challenge to Vermeer’s presumed modernity.

Which version of Vermeer appeals—whether Yeazell’s modern inspiration or Graham-Dixon’s religious devotee—depends on what we want from art: its past truths or its present resonances. Both authors deepen our understanding of this singular figure, whose scant oeuvre of some three dozen pictures has bequeathed a continually radiating light.