Art Chowder November | December 2017, Issue 12 | Page 32

DÉJÀ VU ALL OVER AGAIN:
“Vermeer’sCamera”
T
he publication of artist David Hockney’s book in 2001, with the provocative title Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the
Lost Techniques of the Old Masters, set off a furor of controversy that threatened to turn received opinion of the methods
of the Old Masters upside down. The theory, known as the “Hockney-Falco Thesis,” was developed in collaboration with
physicist and optics scientist Charles Falco and asserts that, as early as the 1430s, a sudden shift toward greater visual real-
ism in the look of European paintings can be attributed to artists using optical tools: mirrors and lenses.
Hockney proposes evidence
that would seem to indicate
that artists from Van Eyck to
Lorenzo Lotto, Caravaggio,
Vermeer, and Ingres produced,
at least portions of their
compositions, not by classi-
cal drawing, but by tracing
images projected upon a flat
pictorial surface by means of
concave mirrors, lenses, the
camera obscura, and the cam-
era lucida. This sensational
revelation quickly caught the
eye of the media, which lost
no time parading it to the pub-
lic at large. Many curators, art
historians, conservators, and
scientists, however, remained
unconvinced. Scholarly and
scientific rebuttals flowed,
followed by defenses and
counter arguments, resulting
in a formidable volume of
highly technical literature that
general readers would find
very difficult to evaluate or
even access.
Johannes Vermeer
Girl with a Red Hat
c. 1665–1667
Oil on panel
9 1/8 x 7 1/8”
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
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ART CHOWDER MAGAZINE
The “photographic” look of the out-of-focus lion-head finials on the foreground chair offer perhaps the most graphic
evidence that Vermeer’s vision in this painting was informed by the image formed through the lens of a camera
obscura, In normal vision, the eye naturally puts in focus whatever one is looking at.