David Hockney, celebrated artist, stopped painting for a while in order to pursue something that had fascinated him. How was it, he thought, that artists over the last five centuries had managed to depict thr world around them so accurately and vividly?
For the next two yers, then, he set about seeking to track down the secret of the Old Masters.
It is commonly felt that certain painters used the camera obscura and the camer lucida in their work. Canaletto, for example, and Vermeer re often cited. But it would seem that no-one until Hockney had suggested that other optical aids were used widely.
Hockney went to the National Gallery and viewed the work of Ingres, who painted? in the early nineteeenth century. He noticed how small many of the drawigns were, and yet, as he puts it "so uncannily accurate." And it was this that led him to produce his book on the subject.
Hockney found it difficult to use a camera lucida, something that Fox Talbot had discovered nearly two centuries before. Occasionally cheap versions of these are made, with wild advertisements as to how easy it will make drawing. It does not! But Hockney p[ersevered, and began to appreciate how much good lighting matters.
Hockney, like most painters, Hockney is not only interested in what the picture was saying, or why it was painted (though these matter) bu also he is interested to ascertain how the work was painted. And in his book he states that, having learned this new technique and now being able to identify optical characteristics, to his surprise, he could identify them in thre work of other artists, as far back as the 1840s!
Curiously enough, Hockney found that some people were horrified by his suggestion. To them, the fact that some might use optical aids would be some form of "cheating" - as if one were attacking their genius! Hockney's reply to this is that optics do not make marks, and that only the artist's hand can do that. He also points out, from hard experience, that using the optics does not make the drawing any easier - the opposite is the case!
The lack of documentary evidence is hardly surprising; many painters were (and indeed are) quite secretive about their methods. Perhaps they might have been even more secretive in those days, given that using lenses etc (see Barbaro) was seen as a form of sorcery!
Vermeer was thought to have used a camera obscura. Was he the first?
Comparing Giotto's paintings (1300s) with Moroni's (1550s) he suggests that the latter is so much more elaborate, and may have been using some optical device. He also pojnts to Angolo Brozino's (1540s) work. Other painters' work include van Dyck (1620s), Caravaggio (1590s), Raphael (1510s), Holbein (1530s)
© Robert Leggat, 2001.