August 05, 2003
Did the Old Masters trace their most famous paintings?
Ever go to the Louvre and wonder how the hell Caravaggio made his faces so crazily lifelike? A controversial book suggests that the Old Masters were quietly getting some technological help on the side. Artist David Hockney has a new book -- Secret Knowledge -- that claims da Vinci and his contemporaries were using camera obscuras and mirrors to project their real-life subjects onto the canvas, and then simply tracing the images. As CBS reports:
Hockney says it started in Bruges, Belgium, one of Europe's great 15th century commercial centers, where that optical look, a photographic look, first appeared in the works of Flemish masters like Jan van Eyck.
“[He was] a painter who knew about optical projections and had looked at them,” says Hockney. “One thing the mirror projections do is project surfaces quite amazingly, especially shiny surfaces. And there's lots of shiny surfaces.”
As Hockney points out, plenty of artists like Leonardo da Vinci were keenly aware of the camera obscura -- hell, they practically invented and refined the device. And the "smoking gun," Hockney argues, is that as soon as Old Masters art became hyperrealistic, there was a profusion of paintings of left-handed people. That would seem to support the idea that the artists were tracing right-handed figures that had been reversed in a camera obscura.
Art critics argue, quite rightly, that there is no written evidence proving Hockney's theory; no artist of the period has ever discussed using optics and tracing. But there may be a reason for that:
Even today, he says, the artists wouldn’t tell: “They're very secretive. Remember, they're competing in business as well.”
It was also the time of the Inquisition, when mirrors and lenses were associated with witchcraft.
“When Caravaggio is painting in Rome, around the corner in the square, they're burning Claudio Bruni for looking through lenses,” says Hockney.
If you're intrigued by this, check out an exhibit the New York Institute for the Humanities held in late 2001 to evaluate Hockney's claims. It's fascinating stuff, and there's an archive of other stories that have been written about it here.
Personally, I doubt the tracing thesis, for one simple reason: I simply don't think the Mona Lisa looks particularly lifelike at all. Truth be told, she creeps the hell out of me. That weird pointy chin. Yeeee.
(Thanks to Plastic for finding this one!)
Posted by Clive Thompson at August 05, 2003 10:15 PM
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Well one thing is to precisely draw the outlines and perspective, another is to render volume and light effects on surfaces. In my opinion the later represent a good share of the revolutionary impact of 15th century portraits compared to previous centuries' masterpieces and I don't think they can be achieved by optical gizmos...
Anyway, interesting!
...Well interesting untill you read the insane X-file babble in the link (http://www.artandoptics.com/index.html)!
Where it says for instans (2) "Gee the carpet is going out of focus!" wel if a lens was used even the couple would have been out of focus, because it's in the background compared to the part of the carpet that's in right focus. Or he was using two different projections and merging them with Photoshop...
One more thing: > Okay, so why did they write books on their other techniques (like Vasari and Cellini did) and why none of the many "photoportrayed" dudes ever spoke about mirrors?
One last: okay they had mirrors, but they are nearly allways affected by imperfections that should be seen on the projections and on the subsequent picture. Why nothing is said about this? (Apart from slide 6 where the stretched hand has to do with perspective and not "multi focusing", The tall woman is larger than real probably because of the convention, dating back to the egyptians, to make important people...Well... Larger! Multi ellbows? This guys new about nathomy! If he finished the painting like that I don't think it's because he didn't find out that he did something stupid while tracing the projections could have been a real misshapen person (?)...
Sorry for insisting on this, please note I'am no expert in art nor in optics :D
Ciao,
Mario
Right there with ya on the whole Creepy Mona Lisa deal Clive. One thing that has always struck me is how much her face looks like it's slightly too large. Like a quick photoshop merging of a face onto a generic head. Maybe he didn't get the face right in the first sitting, had her come back and for the second projection she was slightly closer? Hmmmmm?
K
-- Conspiracy - from the roots 'Cons' and 'Piracy' perhaps?
Whether Hockney's theory is ever provable or not, it's certainly interesting. Anything that can so wholly consume years of a man's life (particularly one of the pre-eminent figures in the British art world) is worth giving some time to, at least to make up your own opinion.
Hockney himself first presented his arguments in a television show here in the UK - a one-off documentary profiling what he had been doing with the past few years, and explaining his research and his theories on the use of optics.
A nice touch was seeing him set up a portrait studio with all the appropriate lenses etc in place and knock out some quite amazingly authentic looking classical pieces in super-quick time.
That thing about the left-handed people is interesting. I remember reading a few years ago in a Stephen Jay Gould book about how most snail shells are right-handed (that is, they swirl in a right-handed corkscrew), but most texts from the 19th century show them twisting to the left, and people couldn't figure out why. This is probably why.
Excellent comments, folks. Mario, yeah, I know, parts of that online exhibit are rather wacky, eh?
Kirk, you are my freaky-Mona-Lisa brother.
Tony: that documentary sounds cool! I'd love to see Hockney in action, doing paintings that day. I wonder if it's going to air in the US ...
Marc -- aha! That's an incredibly cool potential proof of the thesis!
I thought I should do my academic duty and provide a better attribution to that snail article I mentioned above.
The essay is called "Left Snails and Right Minds," and can be found in the book, "Dinosaur in a Haystack: Reflections in Natual History," by Stephen Jay Gould.
