Did the Old Masters secretly trace projected images? David Hockney thought so.
In 1999 the painter David Hockney noticed that some Old Master drawings looked almost photographic. With a physicist, he argued that from about 1420 artists used mirrors and lenses to project images and trace them. Many art historians remain unconvinced, and the fight got surprisingly heated.
It began in the National Gallery in London in January 1999, when Hockney was struck by how precise Ingres's small portrait drawings were, and how much they resembled Andy Warhol drawings known to be traced from photographs. He suspected a camera lucida. He then pinned up images of Western art in chronological order along a wall of his studio, and saw what looked to him like a sudden jump in naturalism around 1420, starting with Jan van Eyck.
In 2000 he teamed up with Charles Falco, a physicist specialising in optics. They argued that a small concave mirror could project a bright, sharp image into a darkened room, and that paintings bore its fingerprints: a carpet in Lorenzo Lotto's Husband and Wife that seems to slip out of focus and change vanishing point, as if the lens had been refocused; the intricate chandelier in Van Eyck's Arnolfini Portrait; strong lighting and dark backgrounds. Hockney's 2001 book Secret Knowledge and a BBC documentary made the idea famous.
The idea that some artists used optical devices was not new or controversial in itself: a Venetian writer recommended the camera obscura to artists in 1568, and its use by Canaletto and possibly Vermeer had long been discussed. What critics rejected was the claim that optics explain the whole rise of realism. The researchers Criminisi and David Stork had an artist paint the Arnolfini chandelier by eye, with similar accuracy, and Stork argued the paintings lack the distortions curved mirrors would produce. Falco accused Stork of misrepresentation; Stork rebutted.
Historians also point to the poor quality of mirrors and glass before about 1550 and the lack of written evidence. They are more open to optical aids from the late 16th century, and 17th-century painters such as Vermeer do seem to have used such devices, though not in the ways Hockney proposed. Even sceptics credit the debate with prompting more rigorous research into art and optics.
Source: Wikipedia — Hockney–Falco thesis · Text summarised from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
