Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - Did Vermeer Use A Camera Obscura?

Starting point is 00:00:00 Johannes Vermeer was one of the greatest painters of the Dutch Golden Age. Unlike many of his contemporary painters, however, he didn't leave a large body of work behind. The paintings he did create have left experts in both art and technology, wondering if he didn't have a secret that helped him with his craft, a technical secret, not necessarily an artistic one. Learn more about Vermeer, and the question as to if he and other painters used optical devices to help them paint on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Do you ever climb into bed ready to sleep,

Starting point is 00:00:41 only to have your mind start racing the moment your head hits the pillow? Thoughts bouncing around, replaying the day or jumping ahead to tomorrow? That is exactly why Catherine Nikolai created Nothing Much Happens. Each episode is a gentle, cozy bedtime story where, well, nothing much happens. No drama, no tension, nothing you need to follow closely. Just soft narration, calming repetition, and soothing sensory details designed to help your mind slow down and your body relax. It's not about entertainment, it's about rest. and millions of listeners around the world use it every night to quiet their thoughts and finally fall asleep.

Starting point is 00:01:15 If you've ever struggled to shut your brain off at night, this might be exactly what you've been missing. You can listen to Nothing Much Happens wherever you get your podcasts. Episodes are every Monday and Thursday. Johannes Vermeer, hereby known just as Vermeer, was born in 1632 in Delft, Holland. He was born to a middle-class family, and as far as we know, he was born, raised, and died in Delft, never traveling beyond the Netherlands. We don't know a lot about his early life, but we do know that his father was an art dealer and the owner of an inn. And when his father died, Vermeer took over his father's art business. We know he was born a Protestant and married a Catholic woman and then converted to Catholicism before his marriage in 1653.

Starting point is 00:02:00 His career as a painter is much more ambiguous, and this is where the mystery of Vermeer begins. Most painters from this time period were members of a local Painter's Guild and would have been trained by a local master painter. While we like to think of these great painters as tortured artists, in reality it was mostly a job. Painting was a business, and they were hired by clients to paint. Perhaps the analogy isn't quite apt, but in many respects, they were like the photographer you'd hire at Glamour shots down at your local mall. A painter from this period would probably declare who trained them because that training would be part of their pedigree. It is what they would use to convince a buyer that they were worth hiring. However, we have no clue who trained Vermeer.

Starting point is 00:02:41 There's speculation as to who his master might have been, but there's nothing conclusive that proves it. We do know that in 1653, at the age of 21, the same year he got married, he joined the Guild of St. Luke, which was the Painter's Guild. The Guild of St. Luke was the name that most Painter's Guilds used throughout the Netherlands and sometimes in Italy. Here is the other odd thing about Vermeer. He didn't really paint that much, or at least there aren't as many Vermeers which are around today. A 19th century list attributed 66 paintings to him, but there are only 34 that exist today, which have been authenticated as Vermeer's. To put this into perspective, Rembrandt was a Dutch painter who was a contemporary of Vermeer, and there are 324 paintings attributed to him, almost 10 times the number. So Vermeer really took his time to create a painting, and more on that in a bit. There are other odd things about many of Vermeer's works.

Starting point is 00:03:34 Many of his 34 paintings are all set in his house. not just in his house, but in the same corner of his house, with a north-facing window on the left side of the painting. The paintings just rearrange the furniture, settings, and models. Go and look at some of his paintings online, and you'll notice immediately that they show the same corner with a window, or they look to be illuminated from the same direction if they don't actually show the window. Finally, and this is the thing that really kicked off the controversy, his paintings are very precise. Very precise. He actually painted individual threads in rugs and clothes, cloth. Very tiny elements in background objects were captured with a remarkable detail.

Starting point is 00:04:13 His paintings are almost photorealistic. Over time, many experts began to notice some very small errors in his paintings. There are some small parts of some paintings that appear to be out of focus, and there are some lines that appear to show chromatic aberration. These are problems that don't usually appear in paintings. These are problems that normally appear in cameras. The issue came to a head in 2001 with the publication of a book by British painter David Hockney and American physicist Charles Falco. They argued the level of realism achieved by some Renaissance and Baroque masters couldn't be achieved by just eyeballing a scene.

Starting point is 00:04:50 They contend that the secret to Renaissance and Baroque paintings was the use of optical devices which were well known at the time, including the camera obscura, the camera lucida, and curved mirrors. This became known as the Hockney-Felco thesis. Here I should probably explain exactly what those things are. A camera obscura is actually a really simple device. The phrase is Latin for dark room. Basically, if you're in a dark room that has a pinhole that lets light enter, that light will be projected onto the opposite wall displaying whatever scene is outside the pinhole.

Starting point is 00:05:23 However, it would be displayed upside down and backwards and usually quite faint. The camera obscure effect was documented as far back as the 4th century BC in China, and it was probably well known before that. A curved mirror is something you're probably familiar with. You might have one in your bathroom. It can magnify an image and also reverse the image depending on its distance to the object. Finally, a camera Lucida is also a very simple device.

Starting point is 00:05:47 It's just a mirror on an arm that shows the image of an object in the mirror, but you see it as you're looking down on the mirror at about a 90-degree angle to the object. By constantly moving your head back and forth, you can draw what you see in the mirror on a paper or canvas below it. There were two major critiques of the Hockney-Falco thesis. The first came from art historians, and to be honest, it really wasn't a very good critique.

Starting point is 00:06:09 It basically consisted of, yes, artists could have done this without optical tools because they were great artists, and this whole theory takes away from their greatness. It was pretty lacking in facts. The second critique was more substantial. David Stork, a professor at Stanford, noted that trying to copy a camera obscure image would be too difficult because that's upside down and because the image was too faint. Another art historian James Elkins of the Art Institute of Chicago also correctly noted, quote, The optical procedures posited in Hockney's book are all radically under tested. And no one, including myself, knows what it is really like to get inside a camera obscura, end quote. Well, enter into the story, Tim Jenison.

Starting point is 00:06:49 Genison wasn't a painter or an artist. He was a technical guy who created one of the first companies which made products that did video editing on computers. He didn't know art or paintings, but, he did know quite a bit about imagery production, albeit on computers. He read David Hockney's book and became obsessed with the idea of Vermeer and other painters using a camera obscure to create their work. Janison decided that he was going to put the theory to the test by creating his own Vermeer. He traveled to Europe to study Vermeer's paintings in person.

Starting point is 00:07:18 He talked to art experts. He even got a special audience to view Vermeer's The Music Lesson in Buckingham Palace. He then set out to recreate the scene in Vermeer's music lesson. He rented space in a warehouse in his hometown in San Antonio, Texas. He meticulously recreated everything in the painting, down to the furniture, instrument, rugs, and the floor. The only thing he cheated with was the stained glass, where he used plastic instead. He then set to work creating the optics system, which would let him paint the scene.

Starting point is 00:07:46 He found that David Stork's argument about painting directly from an image from a camera obscure was basically correct. It couldn't be done. However, he was able to create a system that did work, just using tools. that would have been available in 17th century Holland. He put a small lens in the pinhole of the camera obscura. This was known at the time to create a sharper and brighter image in a camera obscura. And guess what country was the 17th century leader in lens crafting?

Starting point is 00:08:12 That would be the Netherlands. He also set up a concave mirror on the wall that the image coming through the pinhole was reflected onto. That image was then reflected onto the camera Lucida, which sat above his canvas. He found that by using one lens and two mirrors, the image as he saw it in the camera Lucida was right side up. Moreover, by doing some small practice painting with the camera Lucida, he found how easy it was to get almost perfect color reproduction. He just adjusted the color in the painting until the edge of the mirror in the camera Lucida disappeared, and he couldn't tell where the mirror ended and the image began. While he was working on this, he happened to be in Las Vegas, where he met his friend Penn Gillette of the magic duo Penn and Teller.

Starting point is 00:08:53 Penn told him to stop everything and that they were going to make a documentary about what he was doing. And that is exactly what they did. The film is called Tim's Vermeer and it's available on Amazon Prime if you want to check it out yourself. It is actually a really interesting documentary. Genison then set

Starting point is 00:09:09 to work for eight months copying the scene he set up through his device. Again, he had no real prior experience as a painter and didn't even really know how to use a paintbrush properly or mix paints. He would spend a few hours every day painting the scene millimeter by millimeter. He basically became a human camera, slowly reproducing the image that he saw

Starting point is 00:09:29 through the mirror and the lens with paint. In the end, what he created looked astonishingly like of Vermeer. It took a really long time, but it worked, and it was done by someone with no real skill as a painter. Tim Jenison's painting showed that the Hockney Felco thesis was very plausible, and it also explained many things about Vermeer. It explained why so many of his paintings were all done in the exact same spot. It was because that is where he had set up his camera obscura. It explains why he took so long to create his paintings and how he was able to capture such details. It also explains how the small camera-like errors made it into his paintings. There was still one thing that couldn't be explained, however. How was this kept a secret, and why didn't

Starting point is 00:10:13 anyone know about it? The two people who didn't find this a mystery were Penn and Teller. As magicians, they knew all about how secrets could be kept. There were magic tricks that were passed down from magician to magician for centuries, and the public was never let in on the secret. The medieval guild system, which included guilds like the Guild of St. Luke, that Vermeer was a member of, were all about trade secrets. The guild kept trade secrets among its members, and individual members kept secrets to themselves for competitive advantage. One example of a trade secret that painters had was how to make paint. You'll find very few written recipes for how to make certain pigments of paint. Vermeer himself had mastered the creation of deep blue pigments with

Starting point is 00:10:52 Lappas-Lazoui. It was something that was passed down from painter to painter, yet we clearly know they must have used paint. So, the big question is, did Vermeer and other artists used optical tools such as the camera obscura to help paint their pictures? Personally, I think they probably did, and I also don't think it should be that controversial. Granted, there's no smoking gun, but all the evidence seems to point in that direction. Remember, painters back then thought of themselves as tradesmen, not as artis, like many art historians might think of them today. If they could use what was then contemporary technology to help them produce a better product, why wouldn't they use it? I think many people today think of it as cheating, but it's no more cheating

Starting point is 00:11:32 than a special effects artist using the latest software and computers for making a movie. So the use of optical devices by painters like Vermeer doesn't mean that they weren't great artists. It just means that they were great artists in addition to being great technical innovators. Everything Everywhere Daily is an Airwave Media podcast. The associate producers are Thorpe Thompson and Peter Bennett. Today's review comes from listener Ben Dressel over at Apple Podcasts in Germany. He writes, This is absolutely and completely beautiful knowledge in short and simple portions. The title says it all. Learn so much in a short time about things you thought you knew and stuff you never heard before.

Starting point is 00:12:12 Slice bread, the number of the beast or potatoes. It is presented in perfect rhythm with a smooth voice and with delicious facts. I love and warmly recommend it. Thank you, Ben. I think you're my first review to come from Germany. It's a country I have traveled extensively in, visiting every state and every world heritage site. And if you haven't guessed it from my name, I also have German ancestry. Remember, if you leave a review or send in a question, you too can have it read on the show.

Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - Did Vermeer Use A Camera Obscura?

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