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David Hockney
Secret Knowledge, Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters
New and expanded edition with 510 illustrations, 442 in colour
New York, Viking Studio, 2006
Review by Francesco Mazzaferro
Part Three
[Original Version: June-July 2016 - New Version April 2019]
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| Fig. 47) The cover page of the brochure for the New York conference of December 2001 |
Plenty of controversies
Since the publication of the first edition in
2001, Secret Knowledge gathered the
interest of press and public opinion, but also gave rise to a lot of
controversy.
Hockney's theses were invigorated, as mentioned
earlier, by the scientific research of Charles M. Falco. Today, the latter is
still particularly active in defence of his views on the use of optics in the
art; his web page http://fp.optics.arizona.edu/SSD/art-optics/index.html offers an impressive list of contributions
to the topic, including a collection of scientific notes, essays on art history
and other inputs, which is continously updated. Since 2000, i.e. even before the
publication of the book, Lawrence Weschler took their side. He was the director
of the New York Institute for the
Humanities, and a sincere admirer of Hockney. Together with several
monographs on and interviews to the painter [85], he also authored the famous
article that, as early as January 2000 [86], disseminated the research on
opticality of the English artist in the United States. In support of Hockney
lined up many journalists, who interpreted his argument as a revolutionary step
against the elitist and monopolistic arguments made by the official art
criticism: finally, something new!
On the other side, i.e. against Hockney, positioned
itself the majority of art critics. There were indeed also art critics who, in
parallel to Hockney, studied the use of optics by artists over the centuries,
especially by some artists like Vermeer, Caravaggio, Canaletto, and Ingres.
Philip Steadman - for example – published, in the same year as Secret Knowledge, a fortunate monograph
on the use of the camera obscura by
Johannes Vermeer, developing theses dating back to the nineteenth century [87].
Even Martin Kemp documented in his The
Science of Art: Optical Themes in Western Art from Brunelleschi to Seurat the
certain use of optical instruments, alongside other procedures like linear
perspective techniques, and certainly had a lot of sympathy for the empirical
approach of the British painter: indeed, his rich correspondence with Hockney
is included in Secret Knowledge.
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| Fig. 48) Martin Kemp, the 1990 essay on the Science of Art |
And yet the majority of historians believed
that the interpretation of Hockney was wrong: they rejected the first edition
of 2001 of Secret Knowledge, and the
main thesis of the book: the fundamental break in continuity of the history of
art, in the early fifteenth century, was due to the spreading from new Northern
Europe of new techniques (the use of lenses) that offered alternatives to
linear perspective, which remained rather typical of Italian Renaissance art.
Even more so, they must have opposed to the extension of that thesis, in the
second edition of Secret Knowledge of
2006: according to this second interpretation, the invention itself of the technique
of the Italian perspective would be the result of the use of optical
instruments (in particular, the convex mirrors). Several historians (Svetlana
Alpers, Johathan Crary, Walter Liedtke) recognized the use of optical instruments
by painters, although in a later period and especially in the Baroque age;
nevertheless, they considered it as a pure support to the artistic creation,
and indeed as a tool for developing special effects and get away from reality,
In sum, they rejected a reading of art history dominated by optical
technologies.
This triggered a discussion among art lovers
about the essence of artistic creation. On the one hand, there were those who,
like Hockney, believed that art is a visual activity and an experimental
science (or, to use the aforementioned expression by Barbara Bolt, were
convinced of "the material nature of
visual thinking" [88]) and on the other hand there were those who
above all considered artistic creation as a moment of liberation from material
constraints. Even when artists made use of technology, according to this second
view they freed themselves from the materiality of the work that they were creating.
This was their main criticism to Hockney. From this point of
view it is interesting to notice that, after a decade and
more of discussions, the strongest supporters of Hockney's thesis are today to be found among restorers (Roberta Lapucci and SACI in
Florence), as the materiality of artworks is fundamental to them: technical
characteristics reveal to us their true story.
In the artistic production of Hockney himself,
the impact of technology on the work of art had cyclical ups and downs: there were
times when the use of the latest generation of optical instruments (the
Polaroid camera in the seventies, the digital photography in the first decade
of the new century and the iPad in recent years) took the centre of his
creations. In between these phases, the artist had moments when he returned to
pure painting: he confessed to Weschler: "I ‘ve getting bored with the whole controversy [n.d.r in optics
art]... I had other things I needed to be
doing. Like Paintings! For a short time,
but only a very short time, I wondered if there were some way I could adapt
optics to my new purposes. But I quickly realised that no, the trouble with
optics is the trouble with photography: it’s not real enough, it’s not true enough to lived experience. The Chinese say that painting draws on three things: the
eye, the heart and the hand. And I longed to return to the hand."
[89]. A recent article by Farah Nayeri
in The New York Times, entitled
"David Hockney Takes a Fresh Look at
Portraiture" [90] reveals that it was the suicide of an assistant in
his studio to first remove him completely from artistic creation and then to get
him back to traditional painting.
We will try to document three stages of the more
than decade-long discussion: the New York conference in 2001 and two episodes
in Italy, respectively in Florence in 2008 and in Rome in 2010. Of course,
these were not the only moments of discussion. I would like to remember the
conference "Optics, Optical
Instruments and Painting: The Hockney-Falco Thesis Revisited" which
was held in Ghent (Belgium) on November 12-15, 2003 [91] and the annual session
of the Optical Society of America in
Rochester (USA) on October 10-13, 2004 [92]. Over the years, some arguments have
become highly personal, especially among the rivalling scholars of optics, leading
to exhausting and perhaps inconclusive duels; these aspects, which are
unfortunately among the most cited on the Internet pages, are not in my opinion
the most important. What seems most relevant in my view is that the painter was
able to animate a decade of studies in art history: if Hockney had not been
there, the issue would have remained confined in specialised journals.
The New York conference in 2001
The disputes started immediately after the
publication of Secret Knowledge in the
UK on October 15, 2001 and the simultaneous TV broadcasting of a film by the
BBC. But it was in New York that all aspects of the discussion were documented
in December of the same year, with the conference "Art and Optics: Toward an Evaluation of David Hockney's New Theories
Regarding Opticality in Western Painting of the Past 600 Years". For
two days, the Humanities Institute at
the New York University, directed by the already mentioned Lawrence Weschler, one
of the closest art critics to him, organized a meeting of historians, optical
scholars, and artists. The meeting was a remarkable success, as described in
the newspaper articles published on those days, which described the crowded
auditorium hall of the New York Law
School (400 seats), adjacent rooms opened in a hurry to allow the paying public
to sit down and long queues at the entrance, to acquire the admission ticket.
I have managed to get a copy of the conference
brochure, which offered (scarce) information on the program and speakers, as
well as a brief introductory text. Unfortunately, the conference proceedings have
never been published, at least as much as I understood. Even audio and video
reproductions of the meeting, once available for purchase on the internet, are out
of commerce. There are even no publicly available photographs of the event too.
At a distance of only a few years, it is therefore no longer possible to
reconstruct completely what was said (and therefore one would think that internet
tools may indeed not be adequate, after all, to ultimately replace the printed
documentation). The official website of the conference [93] is no longer
operational. I fear that in a few decades, the internet archaeologist will
become an important professional figure to decipher the history of our century.
I found a still available (but for how long?) semi-official site [94] that has replicated
the contents of the official one which disappeared, as well as one second
private site [95]. Numerous press reports can be used to better understand what
happened [96], but there is an evident risk that , one day, every internet trace
of the event might disappear.
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| Fig. 49) The semi-official internet site of the conference http://www.zoharworks.com/artandoptics/index.html |
The New York meeting was organized over two
days. It started on December 1, 2001 with the screening of David Hockney’s BBC
video, showed for the first time to the American public, and an initial
declaration by Hockney and Falco. Nothing is known of what the two said in their
opening remarks, except that Hockney apparently wore a T-shirt with the text
"Optics do not make marks",
i.e. optical tools do not produce any drawing. Therefore, the painter wanted to
reiterate that the camera obscura and
the camera lucida, as well as lenses
and mirrors, can project images but do not replace artists: drawing and
brushwork are always the product of a style and a creative spirit. In sum: the
painter proclaimed himself innocent of any crime of treason. Indeed, as we have
often repeated in the earlier parts of this post, the use of technology is for
him an integral part of the artistic genius.
The first session
The New York conference sought to address the
issue from several perspectives. The first session (General Perspectives) hosted art historians (Keith Christiansen,
Jonathan Crary, Samuel Edgerton and Linda Nochlin) but also cultural figures
(such as Susan Sontag, the intellectual, writer and scholar aesthetics). The
historian of the Renaissance Anthony Grafton chaired the panel. The art
historians were all important names in the American scenery, with a
specialization in the history of painting techniques (Christiansen on
Caravaggio, Edgerton on perspective in the Renaissance, and Nochlin on realism
and impressionism in the art of the nineteenth century).
With his usual clarity, Ms Sontag blamed
Hockney to devalue art. She started saying that his thinking revealed deep
logical weaknesses: she took note that Hockney had taken the concrete point of
view of an artist and drawn logically false consequences from some assumptions.
The painter had merely observed that he was not able to realize certain complex
drawing through ‘eyeballing’, i.e. without
the aid of optical instruments, and had come to the conclusion that even the
great masters could not do so [97].
In short, a bad syllogism: Hockney's thought would be self-referential, or to
put it as Ms Sontag said, he documented the view that "To a hammer, everything looks like a nail" [98]. Moreover, Sontag defined the artist's
attempt to create a "continuity
between van Eyck and television” as a ''Warholization
of art'' [99], typical of the American capitalist way of thinking. She
said: while Hockney was born as a British, in fact he has become "one of us." All newspaper reports
reported her joke: "To say that
there were no great painters before optical devices (…) is like saying there
were no great lovers before Viagra" [100]. Simply this joke went
around the world in a few days.
Keith Christiansen, the director of European
art at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, and scholar of Caravaggio [101] was
totally convinced that the tools mentioned by Hockney would not offer painters a
sufficient optical strength to project images. He read an open letter to Hockney
in which he told he had bought a concave mirror (like those that serve every
day to shave the beard) in a commercial chain and had come to the conclusion that
the reflectivity of the mirror might not be enough to project images within a
dark room. Finally, he claimed that painters like Michelangelo, Raphael and
Caravaggio had no need to use "strange
upside images", because they were very able to produce sketches by
hand, at any time and in any situation, regardless of what they wanted to
paint.
The critic and art historian Jonathan Crary is
a professor of modern art at the Columbia University. In the essay Techniques of the Observer, on how to see
art [102], he said the darkroom had a dominant role in the visual culture of
the centuries preceding the nineteenth century. But his interpretation of the
use of this tool was very different from that of Hockney: the camera obscura had not been used by the
artists to copy and paste images, but by theorists and intellectuals to study
the relationship between the image and the observer in more rational terms (we were
in the age of Descartes and Leibniz). The camera
obscura - Crary wrote - was not an invention, but the simple reproduction
of a natural physical phenomenon, which produces projections objectively, without
human influence. Its use was thus a proof of the then prevailing concept
according to which subject and object, painter, art work and spectator, remain all
ontologically separate entities. It was only with Goethe's colour theory and
Schopenhauer that the observer's senses made their entry in the relationship
between the individual and the image. Therefore, the camera obscura cannot be the creative tool designed by Hockney:
since, for centuries, its use was the realization of a visual conception excluding
all subjectivity in the production of images.
Samuel Edgerton (historian of the perspective
since the seventies) was the only scholar in the first session embracing the
ideas of Hockney. His more comprehensive essay "The
Mirror, the Window, and the Telescope: How Renaissance Linear Perspective
Changed Our Vision of the Universe" was published in 2009; it explored
among others the techniques of linear perspective invented by Brunelleschi. He put
forward the hypothesis that the perspective drawings of the Baptistery in
Florence (the very moment of the discovery of the modern perspective) were not
tracked by the Florentine on two now lost wooden panels, as written by Manetti,
but directly on a mirror. The discovery by Brunelleschi of the natural capacity
of a concave mirror to identify perspective lines - Edgerton wrote - took place
around 1425, by applying and adapting techniques, which were already known in
the Middle Ages. Brunelleschi actually belonged to a world, which was still
influenced by the late Middle Ages. The perspective was theorized in those
years by the Florentine religious circles as a tool to produce more realistic
and credible religious images (think of Masaccio’s Trinity in Santa Maria Novella and the Brancacci Chapel, both in Florence, produced in those years).
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| Fig. 50) Masaccio, Trinity, 1426-1428. Source: Wikimedia Commons |
It is only with Leon Battista Alberti (and his De Pictura, written ten years later)
that perspective (and optics) would become instruments applied to secular
purposes, gradually leading over the centuries to the scientific use of optics
by Galileo and his tensions with the church [103]. It is interesting that the
episode of Brunelleschi tracing as first artist ever the perspective of the
Baptistery was absent from the first edition
of Knowledge Secrete (2001) and
became instead one of the fundamental arguments of the second one (2006).
Linda Nochlin, art historian of the nineteenth
century realism, did not hesitate to attempt a coup de théâtre: at a sign from her (as reported by Sarah Boxer,
the correspondent of the New York Times [104]), she asked that her wedding
dress is brought to the stage, together with a sketch of the dress made by the painter
Philip Pearlstein, one of the masters of American Neorealism (present at the
conference as a speaker in a later session): she showed that picture as a
perfect copy of the dress, made by eye before her eyes, and without any helping
tool. Moreover, the same could be said of the beautiful wedding dresses by
Bronzino, in his portraits of Eleanor of Toledo. This was the proven scientific
evidence, in her view, that a great artist need not to use mirrors and lenses
to achieve full likelihood.
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| Fig. 51) Agnolo Bronzino, Eleanor of Toledo, 1543. Source: Wikimedia Commons |
The second session
In the second session, the scientists took the
floor. Unlike the first session, all their texts are still included in the
available websites on the conference: it is a sign that the today documentary
record of the discussions in New York is focused on those technical issues,
rather than on matters of art criticism. The session was chaired by Martin Kemp,
the art historian who studied the relationship between art and science, and was
a 'moderate partisan' of the Hockney thesis.
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| Fig. 52) Hans Holbein the Younger, Ambassadors, 1533 (with the skull on the floor seen from the side). Source: Wikimedia Commons |
The scientist Sidney Perkowitz [105] supported
the basic thesis of Hockney: artists always made extensive use of the most
modern tools and technologies in their days. He cited anamorphic images, always
known in art history. He first showed the famous anamorphosis in the Ambassadors by Holbein, where the
painted image on the floor can be identified as a skull only watching it from
the far right side. He later presented some works of the contemporary artist
Kelly Houle, whose images become recognisable only by applying a mirror. The
use of technologies, Perkowitz concluded, does not reduce the merits of artists
as creators, but rather enhances their merits.
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| Fig. 53) Jan van Eyck, Portrait of Cardinal Niccolò Albergati, Silverpoint and portrait, 1431. Source: Wikimedia Commons |
The statement of David Stork, optics scientist
and scholar of art history, was quite different. David Stork has become over
the years Charles Falco’s technological antithesis (and probably his mortal
enemy), and the greatest supporter of the technical impossibility of the Hockney-Falco
theses. At the conference in New York he objected, one by one, all main
conclusions on the optical instruments contained in Secret Knowledge, arguing that the same images in the paintings would rather
prove the use of the classical techniques of linear perspective, based on the
use of grid made of threads, a widespread method in those days. One of the most relevant examples quoted by Hockney was the portrait of Cardinal Niccolò Albergati, executed
during a visit to Bruges which lasted only three days. The portrait exists in
two versions: a painting and a preparatory silverpoint. The two works are
different in size, but Hockney had noted that the images are nevertheless perfectly
coincident, and had concluded that the silverpoint, performed quickly due to
the very short duration of the stay of the cardinal in Flanders, had been
projected onto the canvas through a concave mirror and thus perfectly
reproduced as painting; this gave opportunity to the Flemish painter to produce
a perfect picture in the time it takes to paint a masterpiece in oil on canvas.
Stock analysed the two works in detail: he recognized, through the use of the
computer, that the images are indeed almost exactly overlapping, although they
have different sizes. Experimentally, he commissioned the painter Jim Moss of
Philadelphia to produce a copy of the design and to expand the size of the
painting: he found an almost perfect coincidence, and therefore did not exclude
that van Eyck could have produced a perfect copy of the drawing simply by eye. He
also created a grid structure in threads and tested himself to reproduce the
image of the painting, using just a ruler and a set square. He reduced the
image by 40% and placed it electronically on the silverpoint, once again getting the perfect compatibility of the outlines. He commented that a Renaissance painter would
surely have been able to replicate, much for the better, the same procedure. The
electronic analysis of images of the silverpoint and the painting also revealed
that the subtle differences between the two were to be explained precisely by
the presence of a grid structure. Finally, he proposed a third thesis: the use
of a proportional compass or Reductionszirkel,
actually invented in the time of Galileo. Stork made the hypothesis that
something similar might have also existed in 1400 and did not rule out this
third solution. In any case, there would be no reason to use the more complex
idea of an image projection through the combination of lenses and mirrors.
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| Fig. 54) David Stork, Studies on the portrait of Cardinal Albergati after Jan van Eyck, 2001 |
Stork refuted all the arguments of the English
painter and the interpretation of all paintings mentioned in Secret Knowledge, in an attempt to
systematically prove their fallacy: for example, on the Supper at Emmaus by Caravaggio, he came to the conclusion, based on
physical calculation models, that only a concave mirror of a really unusual
size for that time (two and a half meters in diameter) could produce the
effects indicated by Hockney; he explained that the proposed technique (that of
the separate projection of figures on the canvas) would in this case have
created alterations and real aberrations that were not present in Caravaggio’s images.
He estimated that the necessary light to project the image to the canvas
through the concave mirror would have required to bring together 1,250 candles.
In short, the hypothesis of Hockney was not plausible. Other refutations exist
for the Arnolfini Wedding by Jan van Eyck, and the paintings of Vermeer and
Campin. Over the years, all the works cited in Secret Knowledge were analysed in an impressive series of articles,
interviews and contributions to conferences, in a permanent remote duel with
Charles Falco, and for each of the painting alternative options were proposed on a
scientific basis: in short, even in the case of Stork, the issue has become
almost the obsession of a life [106].
Also Christopher Tyler intended to context the
arguments of Hockney and Falco on a technological basis, with a series of reports
and articles that kept him busy for a few years [107]. In particular, at the
New York conference he rejected what is called, in Secret Knowledge, as the "Rosetta
Stone" of the optical thesis: the coexistence of different perspective
lines in the carpet of Husband and Wife
by Lorenzo Lotto, already discussed in the first part of this post. To this
theme, he also devoted a subsequent article in 2004 [108]. There Tyler showed
two black and white pictures of the carpet: the first documented the interpretation of
Hockney and Falco, according to which the particular of the carpet would reveal
the use of optical instruments based on mirrors and lenses. Drawing the carpet,
Lotto would have depicted three images next to each other. All of them revealed a (per se correct)
different perspective; however, it was impossible to align them with each other,
since they were viewed through three different projections with different
focuses within the camera obscura.
The second picture proved instead the views of Tyler: even the perspective
lines of the three images, taken separately, were not intrinsically consistent. In short, the painter would have simply worked freehand, without
pursuing any precise objectives in prospective terms, and thus in a maybe intentionally
approximate way. In other words, the three images were not observed (and then
assembled) with the camera obscura,
because their individual perspective structure is wrong, and therefore cannot
have been drawn with the aid of optics. Tyler noted that the same expressive
freedom as in Lotto’s design of the carpet was found years later in the
paintings of Titian, Tintoretto and Rubens, all characterized by a deliberately
blurred focus of images.
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| Fig. 55) Christopher Tyler, Visual application of the Hockney-Falco thesis to a detail of the painting Husband and Wife by Lorenzo Lotto, Source: http://christophertyler.org/CWTyler/Art%20Investigations/ART%20PDFs/TylerHockneyLeon2004.pdf |
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| Fig. 56) Christopher Tyler, Refutation of the Hockney-Falco thesis applied to a detail of the Husband and Wife painting by Lorenzo Lotto, Source: http://christophertyler.org/CWTyler/Art%20Investigations/ART%20PDFs/TylerHockneyLeon2004.pdf |
When analysing the 1438 Madonna in the Gothic Church by Jan van Eyck, Tyler in fact concluded
that all painters have always made a free use of perspective, combining
different focal points and thus demonstrating they were drawing freehand. The
artists did not certainly care proving the existence of scientific theorems.
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| Fig. 57) Christopher Tyler, Analysis of the prospective of the Madonna in the Gothic Church by Jan van Eyck 1438, Source: http://christophertyler.org/CWTyler/Art%20Investigations/ART%20PDFs/TylerHockneyLeon2004.pdf |
Ellen Winner is a psychologist, specialised in
the study of the cognitive process of art by children and in the interaction
between neuroscience and art. She too tried a coup de theatre [109] showing the designs of a runaway horse,
performed by an autistic girl of five years. She explained that the child has never
seen skittish horses, but she just imagined them. It would seem Ms Winner attempted
to state that talent is quite natural, that the Renaissance painters were
certainly able to do even better than an autistic child for 5 years and there
is therefore no reason to believe in the use of optical instruments to produce
drawings; and yet the scholar was a fervent partisan of Hockney’s thesis (see her
article Art History Can Trade Insights
With the Sciences [110] in 2004). In fact, the existence of a natural
talent does not exclude that it may also be used to make creative use of
technology. Following the empirical theories of David W. Galenson [111], Ms
Winner differentiated between experimental artists (the heroes of Hockney) and
conceptual artists; she also explained that artists cannot clarify with their
own statements the experimental or conceptual nature of their art (individuals
have great difficulty in describing and defining rationally their own mental
processes). However, it is exactly the procedure they use which defines it,
especially depending on whether they make or not preparatory drawings. Those
who do not use them are by definition tempted by experimentation, and therefore
much more willing to test the use of technology in art production [112].
The third session
In the third session, the discussion focused on
individual artists. It was chaired by the art historian John Walsh, one of the
historical directors of the J. Paul Getty Museum. Six historians participated
in it, commenting on the use of optical instruments by five artists: James
Marrow (Van Eyck); John Spike (Caravaggio); Walter Liedtke and Philip Steadman
(Vermeer); Gary Tinterow (Ingres) and Nica Gutman (the American realist Thomas
Eakins).
Unfortunately, here are becoming evident the
holes in the existing documentation on the conference. None of the web pages on
the conference reveals the contents of the intervention of James H. Marrow,
professor emeritus at Princeton and scholar of Flemish iconography in
Renaissance painting and miniature [113]. None of the other available internet
sources reveals his views in this regard. If we do not know what Marrow said, we
should add that the use of optics by Van Eyck continued to raise interest with
an article by Crimsini, Kemp, and Kang in 2004 [114] and a study in two volumes
of Stephen James Hanley in 2007 [115].
John Spike, one of the main living scholars of
Caravaggio, published the reasoned catalogue of the works of that painter [116] in
2001, the same year of the New York conference. Also his text is not available
in any of the web pages dedicated to the conference, even though we know his
thoughts, thanks to the intervention on Caravaggio’s
Optical Realities at the conference in Florence in 2008 (see below). The art
critic confirmed the insights of Hockney on the use of the camera obscura by Caravaggio and thus certified that, in his
opinion, he was the artist who perfected the use of the optical instruments. On
Spike we also know that - in addition to having supported the accuracy of
Hockney's thesis – he has been his great friend (the painter portrayed him with his
wife in 2009).
Walter Liedtke and Philip Steadman faced each
other in New York on the subject of the use of optics by Vermeer van Delft.
Liedtke was curator of European painting at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in
New York and author of numerous works on Vermeer and the Delft school. Steadman
published instead, in the same year of the conference in New York, the book
"Vermeer's Camera: uncovering the
truth behind the masterpieces", whose main thesis is that the Dutch
master had made extensive use of the camera
obscura [117]. We have both interventions by Liedtke [118] and Steadman
[119] at the 2001 conference.
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| Fig. 58) Johannes Vermeer van Delft, Officer and Laughing Girl, around 1658. Source: Wikimedia Commons |
The thesis of a systematic use of the camera obscura by Vermeer [120] actually
already dated back to the nineteenth century. In 1891, in fact, the American etcher
Joseph Pennell interpreted the difference in scale between the two figures,
observable in Officer and Laughing Girl,
as a consequence of the use of optical instruments [121]. Lawrence Gowing in
1952 [122], Charles Seymour in 1964 [123] and Arthur Wheelock in 1973 [124] brought
other arguments in favour of the thesis of the room. Hockney (which in truth
did not care too much to quote these studies) further strengthened the
argument, identifying 'photographic' effects in the paintings of the Dutch artist,
due to the focusing effects of the lenses: some images were too large, while
others were out of focus. On the theme, the two American scholars took different
positions, and did not hesitate to exchange poisonous considerations in front
of the audience of the conference. According to Liedtke, the thesis of the camera obscura would be "like saying Bach had a tape recorder and
recorded noises from the forest for his music" [125]. According to Steadman, Liedtke would
be a true pathological case of 'mimetophobia',
a neologism he invented to define a compulsive fear of every imitation.
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| Fig. 59) Gerard Houckgeest, Interior of the Nieuwe Kerk in Delft with the Tomb of William the Silent, 1651-1652 |
Liedtke admitted that the properties of the camera obscura were certainly known in
Delft, in the days of Vermeer. It is not excluded that there may have been
cases where painters (like Gerard Houckgeest) used lenses and mirrors to
project and trace images, especially of buildings, though probably they used
them as a source of phantasy inspiration rather than as exact reproductions. In
fact, in his opinion, the role of the camera
obscura was above all what was assigned to it by Jonathan Crary, the
already mentioned scholar: a tool to explore the world of images, to study the
effects of light, to enjoy special effects and draw inspiration from them, but
not to copy and paste images on canvas. Liedtke also claimed that the internals
reproduced by the Dutch painter were surely the result of his imagination: in
fact, in Delft at the time there were no private houses with marble tiled
floors. Moreover, the ceiling beams which supported the ceiling could not run
from the outer walls with the window openings, but had to be fixed to the much
more solid side walls, as evidenced by the architecture of the time. The play
of light, the soft edges, the velvety shadows (which Hockney considered "photographic
look") were rather entirely intentional 'special effects', and Vermeer had
the aim to assert its superiority over rivals of his age. It was a competition
between virtuous displayers of magical light effects, not among realists.
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| Fig. 60) Johannes Vermeer van Delft, The Music Lesson, 1662-64 |
In New York, Steadman explained the principal thesis
of his newly published essay: he worked at a precise reconstruction of the
interior in ten paintings by Vermeer (for example, using the Lesson of Music also of the reflected
image in the mirror), according to a method of 'reverse perspective', and
concluded that all of them were displaying a single room, which probably was in
the house of the painter and was used as an atelier. All the paintings revealed the same proportions of height, windows and tiles. There were a few pieces of
furniture that are identical in different frameworks. The objects represented
in the pictures, finally, were all and always in perfect proportion to the size
of the room. The only explanation, according to the scholar, was that Vermeer
had used a mobile camera obscura in
his atelier, in order to project the image on the opposite wall of the room,
the one where he painted the inverted image on a canvas, without the use of any
preparatory drawing.
 |
| Fig. 61) Philip Steadman, Reconstruction of the room in Music lesson after Johannes Vermeer van Delft. Source:http://www.vermeerscamera.co.uk/bookhome.htm |
Gary Tinterow, director of the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, dwelled
on Ingres, the artist responsible for originating Hockney’s studies on the
optical instruments (in this case, the camera
lucida). The original text is not available, but his considerations (in
dubitative terms) were gathered by Lawrence Weschler [126]: the art critic did
not exclude that the French painter had used the lenses in order to accelerate the
execution time of his drawings during his Roman stay, also because he recognized
a change of style as from 1807, the very year in which the tool was discovered
by William Wollaston. Tinterow did however refer to the need to find
documentary evidence (perhaps, he said, one should look in the papers of the
many English noblemen who were portrayed by him, to seek testimony on how
Ingres organized his work). He added that Ingres’ attention to drawing detail
should not be simply interpreted as the effect of the sudden discovery of a new
technology, but revealed the influence of other painters (Bronzino,
Jacques-Louis David), and of Ingres’ father himself (a miniaturist).
 |
| Fig. 62) Thomas Eakins, Mending the Net, 1881 |
Nica Gutman, finally, focused her attention to the
realist painter Thomas Eakins (1844-1916). The research she carried out on the
American artist's canvases revealed that many of his works were actually painted
on sketches that were projections of photographs (for instance, Mending the Net
of 1881). The lines below the painting, as revealed by an X-ray examination, did not indicate any hesitation and were therefore tracings; the correspondence with
the pictures must have been perfect [127]. Yet, while Eakins was a
photographer, he did not reveal his techniques, which have only recently been
discovered. In conclusion, the Hockney thesis that artists harboured secrets was
still valid in modern times.
End of Part Three
NOTES
[85] See, for instance, Lawrence Weschler, True
to Life. Twenty-Five Years of Conversations with David Hockney, Oakland,
University of California Press, 2009, 272 pages.
The complete text has been
published at:
[87] Steadman, Philip - Vermeer's camera:
uncovering the truth behind the master pieces, Oxford, Oxford University Press,
2001, 207 pages.
[88] Practice as research: approaches to
creative arts, edited by Estelle Barrett and Barbara Bolt, London, New York,
I.B. Tauris and Co Ltd, 2007, 205 pages. Quotation at page 29.
[89] Sykes, Christopher Simon - Hockney: The
Biography, Volume 2 1975-2012: a pilgrim's progress, New York, Doubleday, 430
pages. Quotation at page 346.
[90] Nayeri, Farah - David Hockney Takes a
Fresh Look at Portraiture, in New York Times, July 5, 2016
[91] The scientific report of the conference is
published at:
http://www.esf.org/index.php?eID=tx_nawsecuredl&u=0&g=0&t=1468146059&hash=9d925c5437fa5128cf3adcd99200089a2e247522&file=fileadmin/be_user/research_areas/social_sciences/documents/Optics__Optical_Instruments_and_Painting.pdf. The conference proceedings were published
in 1995: Dupré, Sven (edited by). Early Science and Medicine: Optics,
Instruments and Painting, 1420-1720: Reflections on the Hockney-Falco Thesis,
Leiden, 2005.
[93] See:
This website belongs to: http://www.webexhibits.org/, an initiative created in 1999, which defines itself as “an
interactive, online museum of science, humanities, and culture" and
certainly offers an interesting collection of writings on many issues
concerning the relationship between art and science.
[96] For a list of articles published in those
days, see
In Italy, the art historian Anna
Ottani Cavina published the article “Perché Hockney sbaglia” (Why Hockney is
wrong”) in the daily Repubblica on
December 22, 2001:
[99] See:
[100] See:
[101] Keith Christiansen,
“Caravaggio and L’esempio davanti del naturale,” Art Bulletin vol. 68
(1986): 424
[103] See:
[104] See:
[105] Perkowitz’s text is available at http://www.webexhibits.org/hockneyoptics/post/perkowitz.html. Instead there is an obvious error
on the website of the conference. The text referred to as authored by Perkowitz
(http://www.zoharworks.com/artandoptics/papers/perkowitz_fs.html) it is in fact the one by James
Elkins (http://www.jameselkins.com/images/stories/jamese/pdfs/hockney-2.pdf). It is amazing that this mistake
was never corrected.
[106] The web pages
http://spie.org/app/search/browse?Ntt=david+stork&Dy=1&Nty=1&Nrpp=20 host all writings until recently.
See in particular: Criminisi, Antonio e Stork David G. - Did the great masters
use optical projections while painting? Perspective comparison of paintings and
photographs of Renaissance chandeliers, in:
[108] See:
[109] See:
[111] Galenson David W. - Painting Outside the
Lines: Patterns of Creativity in Modern Art, Harvard University Press, 2001.
[112] No doubt, a polemic exchange of letters between
Winner, Falco and Stork cannot be missing. See:
[113] Marrow, James H. – Passion Iconography in
Norther European Art of the Late Middle Ages and Early Renaissance: A Study of
the Transformation of Sacred Metaphor into Descriptive Narrative, Kortijk, Van
Ghemmert, 1979, 369 pages and 161 illustrations outside text.
[114] Crimsini, A., Kemp, M. and Kang, S. B.
'Reflections of Reality in Jan van Eyck and Robert Campin', Historical Methods
37, no. 3 (2004), 109-121.
[115] Hanley, Stephen James – The Optical
Concerns of Jan Van Eyck’s painting practice, University of York, http://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/11052/
[116] Spike John T, Michelangelo Merisi da
Caravaggio, New York, Abbeville Press, 2001, 272 pages.
[117] Steadman, Philip - Vermeer's camera:
uncovering the truth behind the masterpieces, Oxford, Oxford University Press,
2002, p. 207.
[120] For a summary of the birth and evolution
of thesis on the use of optics by Vermeer, see:
[121] Pennell, Joseph - Photography as a
hindrance and a help to art, British Journal of Photography, no. 1618, vol.
XXXVIII, 1891, pp. 294-296.
[122] Gowing, Lawrence – Vermeer, London, Faber
und Faber, 1952, 160 pages.
[123] Seymour, Charles Jr. - Dark Chamber and
Light-Filled Room: Vermeer and the Camera Obscura, in The Art Bulletin, Vol. 46, No. 3, September
1964, pages 323-331. See:
[124] The thesis at the Harvard University in
1973 was published in 1977; see: Wheelock, Arthur K. Jr - Perspective, optics,
and Delft artists around 1650, New York, Garland, 1977, 345 pages.
[127] Tucker, Mark e Gutman, Nica - The Pursuit
of 'True Tones' " in: Thomas Eakins, American Realist, Philadelphia:
Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2001, pages 353-365.
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