Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters. - Vermeer's Camera - book review

David L. Sweet

Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters, by David Hockney, New York, Viking Studio, 2001; 296 pages, $60.

Vermeer's Camera, by Philip Steadman, New York, Oxford University Press, 2001; 232 pages, $25.

Unless you attended one of his public lectures, you probably first learned about David Hockney's new take on the history of Western painting from Lawrence Weschler's New Yorker article in January 2000, nearly two years before the publication of Hockney's book in the United States. Hockney, whose suave works chronicling the poolside hedonism of postscarcity society earned him a place at the forefront of the Pop and neo-realist movements of the 1960s and '70s, has come up with a feisty, provocative thesis. He claims that many of the great European masters probably used optical devices to facilitate the creation of their more meticulously naturalistic works. He also asserts that the use of what he calls "optics"--the projection of living images onto a flat surface via a lens or mirror--occurred much earlier than scholars previously suspected.

Though many people are familiar with the notion that Jan Vermeer used a camera obscura to capture "photographic" effects in his Dutch interiors and cityscapes, few know exactly what the implement is. But even fewer would have ever considered the possibility that Ingres, Velazquez, Caravaggio, van Eyck or even Raphael may have had recourse to such a device as an aid to drawing and painting. Numerous art historians responded to Hockney's proposal with suspicious stupefaction, as if this avant-garde upstart were accusing the old masters of painting by numbers. The New Yorker piece itself ended on a note of skepticism, with John Walsh, then director of the Getty Museum, commenting that "nobody is expecting a killer theoretical tome from Hockney." (1)

In some ways, Walsh's prediction was correct; Hockney's new book is not deeply theoretical. But it is sensationally big and beautiful, seductive yet iconoclastic. Hockney has produced a large-format, 296-page volume complete with essay, correspondence, historical records and hundreds of reproductions of works ranging from the Ghent altarpiece to his own Pearblossom Highway photo-collage. And although the illustrations take up much of that bulk, Hockney has a lot to say here and gets substantial support from other experts. In this way, he snuffs out some of the earlier criticism that his thesis lacked documentation, but he also blunts his own insinuations that the majority of historians aren't looking hard enough at their primary sources, the paintings themselves. The project began as a direct assault on the methodological myopia of academics, yet a great deal of scholarly debate and even collaboration has gone into this book, with arguments pro and con contributed by art historians and museum curators such as Martin Kemp, David Graves, Gary Tinterow, Peter Sutton, John Spike, Svetlana Alpers, Susan Foister and Helen Langdon. The list even includes a professor of optical sciences, Charles Falco.

Another one of Hockney's correspondents is the British art historian Philip Steadman, who recently published his own book about optical devices, Vermeer's Camera, a study in which visual and documentary materials are closely scrutinized to show that the master of Delft probably did utilize a camera obscura from the late 1650s on. The volume both supports and contrasts with Hockney's in terms of its methodology and historical claims. While making the case for the camera obscura, Steadman limits his investigation to a particular period and a single painter for whom a fair body of evidence that suggests use of the device has already accumulated. As we learn, camera obscuras were being produced in considerable variety by Vermeer's time; they were most commonly of the portable box type, in which light entering an enclosed chamber through a convex lens was projected onto a surface that could be viewed through an open hatch. But because such openings tended to dim the image, Steadman argues, Vermeer probably erected a room partition to create a larger booth-type camera which would allow the viewer to observe the image from within the apparatus, where scenes cast on a wall would appear much brighter and could be traced onto a prepared surface.

Through a close yet fascinating analysis of the perspective geometry of certain paintings in Vermeer's oeuvre, Steadman shows how the dimensions of an actual room--one that he speculates Vermeer used repeatedly--might be derived from represented elements (such as maps or floor tiles manufactured in Delft at the time) whose real-life sizes are known. He also demonstrates how the point of view in these works coincides with the position at which a camera obscura would transfer onto the room's back wall an image precisely corresponding to the dimensions of the painting in question. In other words, if Vermeer's perspective fidelity is based on the meticulous observation of a real space, the camera obscura provided the most effective means of obtaining the measurements one actually finds in the paintings themselves. In this way, Steadman makes a persuasive case for Vermeer as a great painter who deftly employed, as a compositional aid, the forerunner of the modern camera.

The value of Steadman's book in relation to Hockney's is that it provides an example of how the latter's broader claims might be substantiated in the future through a more disciplined kind of pictorial and historical examination than Hockney himself is able to give--though he makes an impressive first stab. In expanding the field of artists who may have employed optical devices to convey a heightened sense of realism, Hockney has signed a sort of Homestead Act for the reterritorialization of the study of painting.

Hockney's examples include both famous and relatively obscure painters, going back well before Vermeer to 1430, when the first evidence of artists using lenses can be detected, Hockney claims, in the paintings of Robert Campin and Jan van Eyck. The fact that the type of large, high quality lenses necessary to project such images were not available for almost another two centuries created only a temporary obstacle for Hockney, who soon learned from Falco that concave mirrors (which were available in the 15th century) could also project images--quite clearly and distinctly, and of approximately the same size as the portraits Hockney suspected of having been produced with the aid of optics. His enthusiasm redoubled, transforming itself into something like passionate conviction in the course of researching this book.

Hockney's interest in the subject began in 1999 after he visited an Ingres exhibition at the National Gallery in London that included some small (about 5-to-12-inch-high), remarkably detailed portrait drawings. He found it incredible that anyone, even a master, could draw with such precision on such a scale without the slightest trace of hesitation in the line. For Hockney, manual uncertainty--"groping" or "awkwardness," he calls it--typically accompanies any freehand rendering of an object from direct observation or "eyeballing," another important term in his critical lexicon. He had seen the same kind of self-assured line before in drawings by--of all people--Andy Warhol. Suddenly things clicked. Warhol, who made his career by taking artistic shortcuts, had simply traced his still lifes with the help of a projector. Perhaps Ingres had used something similar. It turned out that in 1806, several years before Ingres's drawings were produced (examples in the book range from 1812 to 1834), William Hyde Wollaston had invented a draftsman's tool called the camera lucida, a sort of "prism on a stick" as described by Hockney, which, like the camera obscura, was a precursor of chemical photography itself. In essence, Hockney was rediscovering a prephotographic optical technology that most people in the arts had all but forgotten, mostly because the artists who had used it rarely, if ever, divulged their practice. (He tells the funny story of how--"according to a contemporary account"--Giovanni Bellini disguised himself as a nobleman in order to learn, through a portrait sitting, the secret techniques of the painter Antonello da Messina. The latter is credited with introducing oil-based paints and Netherlandic styles to Italian artists, and his work, Hockney believes, was produced with the help of optical devices.)

Hockney then considered the possibility that similar devices explained curious visual details he had often noticed in some of the works of the old masters. For instance, why were certain objects set on tabletops in paintings by Lorenzo Lotto, Hans Metaling or Hans Holbein painted out of perspective when the overall work otherwise displayed considerable virtuosity in the use of perspective and in the realistic depiction of details? Why were so many portraits painted of individuals posing in a sort of window frame or behind a table in a boxed space, and why were all these portraits of roughly the same dimensions? (Consider Giovanni Bellini's The Doge Leonardo Loredan or Quentin Massys's Portrait of a Woman.) Why did patterned cloths on tables often seem to shift perspective inexplicably? And why were so many paintings of left-handed people executed from about 1600 to 1640, including two famous drinkers by Caravaggio and Frans Hals? These questions were further compounded by the fact that some of the most realistic painters, who seemed to capture the fleeting expressions of their subjects so effortlessly, left few or no preparatory drawings and were notoriously surreptitious about their methods.

Hockney surmised that many of these features could be explained by the setup required for using a camera obscura with either concave mirrors or image-reversing lenses. The perspective shifts could be caused by the altered magnification that took place when refocusing lenses or by the ad hoc methods of projecting different still-life images onto a primed canvas. The techniques might even explain the existence of partial, nearly imperceptible anamorphs (as compared to their deliberate placement in such paintings as Holbein's The Ambassadors) that may have occurred because of optical projections being cast onto tilted canvases after the other parts of the painting were completed without any distortion. Why accomplished artists would not simply have compensated for such lens-induced glitches he does not say.

But the import of some of these perspective shifts is cast into doubt when one considers that Steadman's persuasive argument for Vermeer's use of the camera obscura depends almost entirely on the absolute consistency of the angles of view. Indeed, while taking into account single-lens distortions, this constancy is precisely what enables him to determine the dimensions of the space in which he claims Vermeer actually worked while using the contraption. Other examples Hockney provides are even more problematic, particularly when he attributes to the use of lenses certain instances of painters elongating the human body. Such exaggerations are more easily explained by artists' choices prompted by esthetic considerations, including residual Mannerist tendencies.

Hockney's volume opens with an exuberantly expansive historical essay that perhaps only a painter, free of the professional constraints of the traditional scholar, would ever have dared to write. The heavily illustrated piece offers a kind of beautiful didacticism, training the reader to look closely at images according to criteria the author himself seems to be discovering as he goes along. He makes his case with zest and a passionate concern. His style is both confident and conversational, and his examples are far-ranging. By the end of the book, one comes away thinking that his investigative hunch is basically sound. Hockney convinces us that optical devices almost certainly helped increase the competitive effort among widely differing schools, from Bruges to Rome, to achieve an ever more convincing illusion of exact representation.

Such geographical references concretize a more fundamental theoretical tension in the book. During the Renaissance, Italy and the Netherlands were seemingly at conceptual odds over the relative importance of geometrical perspective and optics, over the desirability of rendering space around a single, definitive point in a totalizing system versus presenting objects and surfaces realistically but within a kind of fluid or multivalent space. Hockney suggests that the reason Northern paintings, especially the larger pictures, tend to incorporate contradictory perspectives is because artists there were creating works in a more piecemeal fashion, coordinating multiple optical projections within a single composition. Italian painters, on the other hand, tended to emphasize the overall organization of space into a coherent system.

As an example of the Northern approach, Hockney cites a Last Supper by Dieric Bouts, showing how, despite the hyper-realism of the faces, cutlery, drapery and chandeliers, the perspective is constantly shifting. Objects and surfaces, he points out, appear to pull out of the imaginary space, clinging to the picture plane like elements in a painting by C6zanne or by one of the Cubists--or even in a photo-collage by, you guessed it, Hockney himself. The author seems to want to dissociate his discoveries about a prephotographic lens-based tradition from the more comprehensively photographic, one-point perspective mode with which one might be tempted to link it. Here Hockney is again at odds with Steadman, whose method reveals no egregious inconsistency between the use of one-point perspective and the camera obscura. One would like to know precisely what effects refocusing a lens in a camera obscura would have on the perspective organization of Vermeer's interiors.

Hockney gives his theory greater complexity by suggesting that many of the artists who used optics were really striving for a kind of collagist perspective. He cites literary critic Jacques Riviere, who called geometric perspective reductive and associated it with academic painting and photography (which, Hockney says, had "taken over lens-based images" by 1870), as against a more modern art that deliberately thwarted naturalistic representation. Reality, in Riviere's view, is "a complex sum of perceptions" and thus more in keeping with the Cubist, collagist vision of his own early 20th-century era. Hockney belongs to that modern, antiphotographic tradition. His photo-collages show this by physically manipulating camera images in order to demonstrate the active intervention of the artist in an otherwise automatic process. He makes this point fairly explicit in a brief discussion of "post-lens" technique:

Cezanne's innovation was that he put into his pictures his own doubts about how objects relate to himself, recognizing that viewpoints are in flux, that we always see things from multiple, sometimes contradictory, positions. It is a human, binocular vision (two eyes, two viewpoints, and therefore doubt) that functions here, in contrast to the tyrannical, monocular vision of the lens (Velazquez), which ultimately reduces the viewer to a mathematical point, fixing him to a particular spot in space and time.

In such passages, Hockney is doggedly loyal to the vision of his choice. But he is not always consistent about where he actually sees it, since Velazquez is also one of the painters whose elongations of the body he attributes to the use of lenses.

It is ironic, then, that Hockney's ideas have been interpreted by skeptics like Susan Sontag and Met curator Walter Liedtke as just another cynical, postmodern attempt to demythologize the old masters. He is clearly in awe of these giants--not because they may have cheated by using optical projections and thus engaged in a kind of sub-rosa avant-gardism within the tradition, but because of the sheer bravura with which they intervened in and manipulated a seemingly mechanical reproduction process. Only the most skilled could have achieved these works with or without optical devices, because the real miracle was in the ability of their hands, eyes, imaginations. Thus, when Hockney makes such pithy comments as "optics don't make marks, painters do" and "high tech needs low tech," he is really affirming, along with the most entrenched academics, that nothing is more fundamental to great art than raw talent coupled with rigorous training. It is Hockney's own talent for looking and for finding low-tech solutions to visual riddles that have helped to produce this fascinating, and possibly seminal, study.

(1.) Quoted in Lawrence Weschler, "The Looking Glass," New Yorker, Jan. 31, 2000, p. 75.

David L. Sweet writes on literature and the arts and teaches at New School University in New York. He is at work on a book about French and American avant-garde poets who also produced art criticism.

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