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De Wit, as a painter, is not at all in Vermeer’s league, but I’m struck by the details his painting shares with Vermeer’s “The Geographer,” painted in the same year, 1669: the single open window to the left, the leaded glass, the terrestrial globe, the richly patterned rug on the table.

After the translation of Ptolemy’s Geography there is a record of a terrestrial globe being made in 1443 ‘according to Ptolemy’s description’.

If you stand close to her 2009-2010 “Globe” — a terrestrial globe, hand-drawn on paper and wood and as light as a feather — you can use your breath to make it move slightly in the air.

Hopeful astronomers called these planets “super-Earths,” imagining them to be larger versions of our own terrestrial globe, but the few with measured densities proved to be more like “mini-Neptunes,” lighter and puffier than any rocky world could ever be.

But in Japanese, it is “diplomacy that looks down upon the terrestrial globe.”