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

Starting point is 00:00:00 The following is an encore presentation of Everything Everywhere Daily. 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.

Starting point is 00:00:47 What if your perceptions about the past were wrong? ThruLine is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed. It effectively turned day into night. And how it shaped the world now. Time travel with us every week on the ThruLine podcast from NPR. Johannes Vermeer, hereby known just as Vermeer, was born in 16, 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.

Starting point is 00:01:35 We know he was born a Protestant and married a Catholic woman and then converted to Catholicism before his marriage in 1653. His career as a painter is much more ambiguous, and this is where the mystery of the mystery of Vermeer begins. Most painters from this time period were members of a local painters 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

Starting point is 00:02:13 proudly declare who trained them because that training would be part of their pedigree. what they would use to convince a buyer that they were worth hiring. However, we have no clue who trained Vermeer. 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.

Starting point is 00:02:37 The Guild of St. Luke was the name that most painters' guilds used throughout the Netherlands and sometimes in Italy. Here is the other odd thing about Vermeer. He didn't really paint that much, 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 Vermeers. 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

Starting point is 00:03:10 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. Many of his 34 paintings are all set in his house, and 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

Starting point is 00:03:49 in rugs and cloth. Very tiny elements and background objects were captured with a remarkable detail. 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 ahead 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. They contend that the secret to

Starting point is 00:04:34 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 00:05:05 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. 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. 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

Starting point is 00:05:45 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. 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,

Starting point is 00:06:22 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. Jenison 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.

Starting point is 00:06:57 He traveled to Europe to study Vermeer's paintings in person. 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 in the floor. The only thing he cheated with was the stained glass where he used plastic instead.

Starting point is 00:07:23 He then set to work creating the optic system, which would let him paint the scene. He found that David Stork's argument about, a painting directly from an image from a camera obscura 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.

Starting point is 00:07:50 And guess what country was the 17th century leader in lens crafting? That would be the Netherlands. He also set up a concave mirror on the wall that the image coming through the picture. 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

Starting point is 00:08:27 where the mirror ended and the image began. While he was, he was a little bit of the color in the painting, he just 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. 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. Jenison then set 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 mixed paints.

Starting point is 00:09:02 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 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.

Starting point is 00:09:33 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 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.

Starting point is 00:10:04 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 lapis lazuli.

Starting point is 00:10:35 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 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 want to.

Starting point is 00:11:22 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 Thornton and Peter Bennett. Today's review comes from listener Ben Dressel over at Apple podcast 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. 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.

Starting point is 00:12:03 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 two can have it read on the show.

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

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.