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Camera obscura
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Posted
I love David Hockey's work Robert. I wonder why someone so influential and famous in the art world would think along these lines. Not just that, some people will actually believe it. Tom I read the other two articles you mentioned. That's some of the evidence I was thinking about. The tiny pin holes at the vanishing points of his interiors. There would certainly be no evidence of such if a camera obscura was used. As for Tim Jenison, his recreation of a Vermeer painting was nothing more than a lesser reconstruction using circus tricks. This to me is more evidence that the Hockey-Falco Thesis is deeply flawed and nonsense. It appears they fail to see the genius and passion behind the masterpieces painted by Vermeer. Maybe they are jealous that one man can hold so much talent. As we know, such talent is very rare.
Posted
II have read through this and for myself it”s the evidence that counts not what you may personally believe. A very insightful DVD is Tim’s Vermeer. He painted a Vermeer using all the gear Vermeer used. The task exhausted him but the outcome was amazing, and he had not picked up a paintbrush at all in his life until taking on the challenge. Beliefs are changeable science is unchangable fact. Hockney’s book Secret Knowledge is well founded and superbly research work and factual for sure. Don’t want to rock the boat but please be fair to David Hockney, please. You say no mechanical items in art, then you will say but this is allowed, but this is not. Okay put away those grids, cameras, scaling up items, projectors and so on, its paint and brush, pencil and paper only for the real true artist, no more cheating, ok a rubber is allowed.
Posted
I agree with you completely John. I very much enjoyed Hockney’s book and I think he did a fair assessment based on the knowledge he had and, no doubt, the connections he had and has with knowledgable people. I’ve just bought Andrew Graham- Dixon’s book “ Vermeer, A Life Lost and Found”. I like A. G- Dixon, he’s not arrogant or pompous, he presents well- researched facts ( his book on Caravaggio is excellent). And Denise, how can you say Hockney doesn’t see the genius and passion of Vermeer? I very much doubt that.
Posted
Exactly John, it is the evidence that counts and the evidence leans towards no camera obscura being used by Vermeer. Some critics thought Tim's Vermeer was a disaster. I personally thought it was a good effort but it's not a Vermeer is it. It doesn't come close to the quality obtained in the original piece. It's lacking in something I can't quite put my finger on. Marjorie, Gregg Kreutz article Camera Absurda,. The Case against Hockney, may shed some light. I don't presume that every big noise in the art world does in fact know what they are on about. When making such a statement you don't think to yourself, it must be true, Hockney said so. No, no, no. Both sides need to be looked at. It needs to be investigated, delved into. Hockey didn't believe the Old Masters could create these masterpieces without the aid of some sort of lens or camera obscura because of their realism. They raised the bar of what was possible. Hockey's theory pulls everyone down to a comfortable level and by trying to bring the greats down to a comfortable level, no, I don't think that is very respectful to their genius at all.
Edited
by Denise Cat
Posted
You believe whatever you want. I do not want to argue a point that science has presented. Thank you kindly Marjorie for your supportive comments. Artist use mechanical aides now and they used mechanical aides hundreds of years ago. Not all of them, but those and most were in the commercial area of selling art did use mechanical aides.. It is the same today as I have been in the business of commercial art. It’s a business like anything else unless you are just producing artwork for yourself, and thats the best and wonderful. For myself life experience is the teacher not personal beliefs.
Posted
I am open minded about Vermeer, of course he was excellent and Hockney feels the same. Indeed there are many mysteries about Vermeer, I'm looking forward to getting Graham-Dixon's book.
I have read the Secret Knowledge book cover to cover, including the large appendices of Hockney's exchanges with some well-esteemed art critics and scholars. All of whom were happy to appear in the publication and none of whom ridiculed his substantive work which is still in print.
I would recommend those who are 100% sure he is wrong, to read the book in full.
Posted
Take a look also at Professor Phillip Steadman’s lecture about Vermeer and the camera obscura. Very interesting and informative. Re the painting that non - painter Tim Jenison produced….of course it didn’t have the qualities of Vermeer’s painting, he was a brilliant artist, it was made to show that it was possible to use the camera obscura to help in achieving such a painting. And I’m not saying whether Vermeer, Canaletto et al did or didn’t use optics, we don’t know but they certainly had the means to do so.
Norette, I bought Hockney’s book some years ago, it’s excellent.
Edited
by Marjorie Firth
Posted
“For myself life experience is the teacher not personal beliefs.”
Personal beliefs are formed by life’s experiences. But that’s entirely irrelevant to the debate concerning the possibility of the use of mechanical aids and the extent to which these aids, purportedly, could actually have been employed to produce works of art by past masters.
The late authority on Canaletto, J.G. Links, had these perceptive comments to make on what is actually a debate of considerably longer standing than the half-baked notions put forward by Hockney in his book of 2001:
“He [Bellotto] was a master of linear perspective to such an extent that many, including his biographer, have found it impossible to believe that such realism could have been achieved without artificial aid. Preposterous things have accordingly been written about Bellotto’s use of the camera obscura. He is said to have set it up in the upper rooms of houses overlooking his streets, on movable platforms such as those used by park-keepers for lopping trees, anywhere in fact which would account for the high viewpoint he was inclined to prefer.
The magical effects of Brunnelleschi’s discovery of perspective are not even yet fully realised and accepted and whenever an unusual effect, or exceptional realism, appear in a painting the camera obscura is called upon to explain the mystery. (In the case of Vermeer it has even been suggested that he painted interiors with a camera obscura – and this by a practising artist of distinction.) In fact, most first-year architectural students would have little difficulty in transposing the actual viewpoint of a drawing to an imaginary one which was higher, lower or to one side or the other; to a Canaletto or Bellotto it would be child’s play. No doubt both used a portable camera obscura [Which I might add was not listed in the inventory of meagre effects left by Canaletto at the time of his death] when making complicated sketches of buildings; such sketches would often be more quickly accomplished than with the naked eye being constantly raised and lowered. Anyone who has ever used a camera obscura, however, knows that such sketches could be of no more use than as an aide memoire and that there could be no question of producing a drawing which was a work of art through its means, much less a painting . . .”
Townscape Painting and Drawing, Batsford, 1972
Denise mentions the documented fact that, under technical examination, pin holes have been discovered at the vanishing points in vermeer paintings. A clear illustration of the means actually employed by the artist in creating them. It’s an artist’s technique of antiquity—chalk covered string being attached to the pin, stretched, and allowed to snap back against the surface to produce the orthogonal. This simple fact was one of the things that immediately came to mind upon my reading of Hockney’s book—borrowed from my local library upon its publication. This, and the juxtapositions on pages 30 and 31 of Hockney’s book of portrait drawings—those on p. 31 being by Ingres, those on p. 30 by Hockney (done with the “aid” of a camera lucida) ought to be quite sufficient to raise a doubt in the mind of any reasonably sane person regarding the degree to which Hockney’s assertions should be taken seriously. My immediate reaction to viewing these two pages (incidentally shared by Brian Yoder of the Art Renewal Center): Is Hockney, in all earnestness, really suggesting that there’s some kind of correlation between these two sets of drawings—the drawings by Ingres being very fine, the efforts on p. 30, quite risible. Of course, to some persons, mundane facts such as this aren’t good enough, they then being bound and determined to invent better ones. There’s that kind of expert who “knows he’s right” and expects everyone else to know it too.
Happy days
Edited
by Tom Henshaw
Posted
Tom, there are many “ authorities “ who have “ perceptive comments” but who is the right authority? All of us here merely have opinions based upon what we have read ( or not read ). We haven’t personally conducted any research ( at least I don’t think so) . Has anyone actually said that Canaletto or Vermeer definitely used optical aids?
Posted
Anton Maria Zanetti the Younger: A contemporary of Canaletto, who in his 1771 book Della pittura venezianae delle opere pubbliche de’ veneziani maestri wrote that Canaletto “taught with his example the real use of the optical camera”.
Pierre-Jean Mariette: A French collector and dealer in drawings, documented that Canaletto “made use of the camera obscura, of which he knew how to moderate the faults”.
Antonio Conti: A Paduan priest and scientist known to Canaletto’s patron, Joseph Smith. He wrote about the artist using the camera to map the perspective of Venetian canals. An assertion probably based on a confusion. Canaletto knew full well how to employ linear perspective in his views of Venetian canals.
To name three. There are others.
According to J.G. links, in hisTownscape Painting and Drawing, “H.A. Fritzsche devoted a great deal of space in his biographyBernardo Bellotto genannt Canaletto to Bellotto’s use of the camera obscura.” A book I haven’t read.
Again, Links, in his excellent biography of Canaletto, points out something—which also pertains to Vermeer—quite fundamental to understanding the creation of an artwork:
“When composing a picture he [Canaletto] would use viewpoints, not only to the left or right of the original, but nearer to and farther from his subject. He would turn buildings round, add others which would be invisible from his main viewpoint, rearrange the curves of the grand canal, make his background closer or farther away than it should be, change rooflines and simplify architecture.[...]Almost always, having made his drawings from the ground, he would raise the viewpoint in the final picture, quite often to such an extent that the viewpoint seems to be a high, and non-existent, window.”
Canaletto, J.G. Links, Phaidon, 1982
The word “photographic” is often employed to describe both the paintings of Canaletto and Vermeer. Take Vermeer’sLittle Street. The painting would appear to be a view of a street in Vermeer’s Delft. In fact serious efforts have been made to try to establish the actual viewpoint and street, none of them very convincing. The view is, in all probability, an invention. An evocation of a quiet moment in such a street. Wonderful painter that he was, Vermeer was no architect. Observe the ground floor window of the neck-gabled house, which impossibly abuts the very edge of the wall—you could shove the building over with one push. Canaletto and Vermeer did what any artist worth his (or her) salt have always done—down through the centuries. The objective is not to document reality. The objective is to present a pleasing illusion of same.
Edited
by Tom Henshaw