The myth of the Renaissance artists

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

According to the official version, at the turn of the 14th-15th centuries, a sharp change took place in painting - the Renaissance. Around the 1420s, everyone suddenly became much better at drawing. Why did the images suddenly become so realistic and detailed, and in the paintings there was light and volume?

Nobody thought about this for a long time. Until David Hockney picked up a magnifying glass.

Once he was looking at drawings by Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, the leader of the 19th century French academic school. Hockney became interested in seeing his small drawings on a larger scale, and he enlarged them on a photocopier. This is how he stumbled upon a secret side in the history of painting since the Renaissance.

Having made photocopies of Ingres' small (about 30 centimeters) drawings, Hockney was amazed at how realistic they were. And he also thought that Ingres's lines reminded him of something. It turned out that they remind him of Warhol's work. And Warhol did this - he projected a photo onto a canvas and outlined it.

Interesting cases, Hockney says. Apparently Ingres used the Camera Lucida - a device that is a structure with a prism that is attached, for example, on a stand to a tablet. Thus, the artist, looking at his drawing with one eye, sees the real image, and with the other - the drawing itself and his hand. It turns out an optical illusion that allows you to accurately transfer real-life proportions to paper. And this is precisely the "guarantee" of the realism of the image.

Then Hockney became seriously interested in this "optical" kind of drawings and paintings. In his studio, he and his team have hung hundreds of reproductions of paintings created over the centuries on the walls. Works that looked "real" and those that didn't. Arranging by the time of creation, and regions - north at the top, south at the bottom, Hockney and his team saw a sharp change in painting at the turn of the 14-15 centuries. In general, everyone who knows at least a little about the history of art knows - the Renaissance.

Maybe they used the same lucid camera? It was patented in 1807 by William Hyde Wollaston. Although, in fact, such a device is described by Johannes Kepler back in 1611 in his work Dioptrice. Then, maybe they used another optical device - a camera obscura? After all, it has been known since the time of Aristotle and is a dark room into which light enters through a small hole and thus in a dark room a projection of what is in front of the hole is obtained, but inverted. Everything would be fine, but the image that is obtained when projected by a pinhole camera without a lens, to put it mildly, is not of high quality, it is not clear, it requires a lot of bright light, not to mention the size of the projection. But quality lenses were nearly impossible to make until the 16th century, as there was no way to obtain such quality glass at the time. Things to do, thought Hockney, by that time already struggling with the problem with the physicist Charles Falco.

However, there is a painting by Jan Van Eyck, a Bruges-based painter and Flemish painter of the early Renaissance - which hides a clue. The painting is called "Portrait of the Arnolfini Couple".

The picture simply shines with a huge amount of details, which is quite interesting, because it was painted only in 1434. And the mirror serves as a hint of how the author managed to take such a big step forward in the realism of the image. And also the candlestick is incredibly intricate and realistic.

Hockney was bursting with curiosity. He got hold of a copy of such a chandelier and tried to draw it. The artist was faced with the fact that such a complex thing is difficult to draw in perspective. Another important point was the materiality of the image of this metal object. When depicting a steel object, it is very important to position the highlights as realistically as possible, as this gives a huge amount of realism. But the problem with these highlights is that they move when the viewer's or artist's gaze moves, which means it's not easy to capture them at all. And the realistic image of metal and glare is also a distinctive feature of the Renaissance paintings, before that the artists did not even try to do this.

By recreating an accurate three-dimensional model of the chandelier, the Hockney team ensured that the chandelier in The Portrait of the Arnolfini Couple was drawn accurately in perspective with a single vanishing point. But the problem was that such precise optical instruments as a camera obscura with a lens did not exist for about a century after the painting was created.

The enlarged fragment shows that the mirror in the painting "Portrait of the Arnolfini Couple" is convex. So there were mirrors on the contrary - concave. Moreover, in those days, such mirrors were made in this way - a glass sphere was taken, and its bottom was covered with silver, then everything except the bottom was cut off. The back side of the mirror was not darkened. This means that Jan Van Eyck's concave mirror could be the same mirror that is shown in the picture, just from the back side. And any physicist knows what a mirror, when reflected, projects a picture of the reflected one. It was here that his friend physicist Charles Falco helped David Hockney with calculations and research.

The clear, focused portion of the projection is roughly 30 square centimeters, which is exactly the size of the heads in many Renaissance portraits.

This is the size for example of the portrait of "Doge Leonardo Loredana" by Giovanni Bellini (1501), a portrait of a man by Robert Campen (1430), Jan Van Eyck's own portrait "a man in a red turban" and many more early Dutch portraits.

Painting was a highly paid job, and naturally, all business secrets were kept in the strictest confidence. It was beneficial for the artist that all uninitiated people believed that the secrets were in the hands of the master and they could not be stolen. The business was closed to outsiders - the artists were in the guild, and the most varied craftsmen were in it - from those who made saddles to those who made mirrors. And in the Guild of Saint Luke, founded in Antwerp and first mentioned in 1382 (then similar guilds were opened in many northern cities, and one of the largest was the guild in Bruges - the city where Van Eyck lived) also had masters, making mirrors.

So Hockney recreated how you can draw a complex chandelier from a painting by Van Eyck. It is not at all surprising that the size of the chandelier projected by Hockney exactly matches the size of the chandelier in the painting "Portrait of the Arnolfini Couple". And, of course, glare on metal - on the projection, they stand still and do not change when the artist changes position.

But the problem is still not completely solved, because before the appearance of high-quality optics, which is needed to use a pinhole camera, there were 100 years left, and the size of the projection obtained with the help of a mirror is very small. How to paint pictures larger than 30 square centimeters? They were created like a collage - from a variety of points of view, it turned out a kind of spherical vision with many vanishing points. Hockney realized this, because he himself was engaged in such pictures - he made many photo collages in which exactly the same effect is achieved.

Almost a century later, in the 1500s, it finally became possible to obtain and process glass well - large lenses appeared. And they could finally be inserted into the camera obscura, the principle of which has been known since ancient times. The lens camera obscura was an incredible revolution in the visual arts, as the projection could now be of any size. And one more thing, now the image was not "wide-angle", but approximately the normal aspect - that is, approximately the same as it is today when photographing with a lens with a focal length of 35-50mm.

However, the problem with using a pinhole camera with a lens is that the forward projection from the lens is mirrored. This led to a large number of left-handers in painting in the early stages of the use of optics. As in this painting from the 1600s from the Frans Hals museum, where a pair of left-handers are dancing, a left-handed old man is threatening them with a finger, and a left-handed monkey peers under the woman's dress.

The problem is solved by installing a mirror into which the lens is directed, thus obtaining the correct projection. But apparently, a good, flat and large mirror cost a lot of money, so not everyone had it.

Focus was another problem. The fact is that some parts of the picture at one position of the canvas under the projection rays were out of focus, not clear. In Jan Vermeer's work, where the use of optics is clearly visible, his work generally looks like photographs, you can also notice places out of focus. You can even see the drawing that the lens gives - the notorious "bokeh". As for example here, in the painting "The Milkmaid" (1658), the basket, the bread in it and the blue vase are out of focus. But the human eye cannot see "out of focus".

And in light of all this, it is not at all surprising that a good friend of Jan Vermeer was Anthony Phillips van Leeuwenhoek, a scientist and microbiologist, as well as a unique master who created his own microscopes and lenses. The scientist became the artist's posthumous manager. And this allows us to assume that Vermeer depicted precisely his friend on two canvases - "Geographer" and "Astronomer".

In order to see any part in focus, you need to change the position of the canvas under the projection rays. But in this case, errors in proportions appeared. As you can see here: the huge shoulder of "Anthea" Parmigianino (about 1537), the small head of "Lady Genovese" Anthony Van Dyck (1626), the huge feet of the peasant in the painting by Georges de La Tour.

Of course, all artists used lenses differently. Someone for sketches, someone made up of different parts - after all, now it was possible to make a portrait, and finish the rest with another model or with a dummy in general.

Velazquez also has almost no drawings. However, his masterpiece remained - a portrait of Pope Innocent the 10th (1650). On the daddy's robes - obviously silk - there is a beautiful play of light. Blikov. And to write all this from one point of view, you had to try very hard. But if you make a projection, then all this beauty will not run away - the glare no longer moves, you can write with exactly those wide and fast strokes like Velazquez's.

Subsequently, many artists were able to afford a camera obscura, and this has ceased to be a big secret. Canaletto actively used the camera to create his views of Venice and did not hide it. These pictures, due to their accuracy, make it possible to speak of Canaletto as a documentary filmmaker. Thanks to Canaletto, you can see not only a beautiful picture, but also the history itself. You can see what the first Westminster Bridge was in London in 1746.

British artist Sir Joshua Reynolds owned a camera obscura and apparently did not tell anyone about it, because his camera folds and looks like a book. Today it is housed in the London Science Museum.

Finally, at the beginning of the 19th century, William Henry Fox Talbot, using a camera-lucide - the one into which you need to look with one eye and draw with your hands, cursed, deciding that such an inconvenience had to be done away with once and for all, and became one of the inventors of chemical photography, and later a popularizer who made it massive.

With the invention of photography, the monopoly of painting on the realism of the picture disappeared, now the photo has become a monopoly. And here, finally, painting freed itself from the lens, continuing the path from which it turned in the 1400s, and Van Gogh became the forerunner of all art of the 20th century.

The invention of photography is the best thing that has happened to painting in its entire history. It was no longer necessary to create exclusively real images, the artist became free. Of course, it took the public a century to catch up with artists in their understanding of visual music and stop considering people like Van Gogh to be "crazy." At the same time, artists began to actively use photographs as a "reference material". Then such people as Wassily Kandinsky, the Russian avant-garde, Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock appeared. Following painting, architecture, sculpture and music were liberated. True, the Russian academic school of painting is stuck in time, and today it is still a shame in academies and schools to use photography to help, and the highest feat is considered a purely technical ability to draw as realistically as possible with bare hands.

Thanks to an article by journalist Lawrence Weschler, who was present at the research of David Hockney and Falco, another interesting fact is revealed: the portrait of the Arnolfini couple by Van Eyck is a portrait of an Italian merchant in Bruges. Mr. Arnolfini is a Florentine and moreover, he is a representative of the Medici bank (practically the owners of Florence during the Renaissance, are considered patrons of art of that time in Italy). And this says what? The fact that he could easily take the secret of the guild of St. Luke - a mirror - with him, to Florence, where, according to traditional history, the Renaissance began, and artists from Bruges (and, accordingly, other masters) are considered “primitivists”.

There is a lot of controversy around the Hockney-Falco theory. But there is certainly a grain of truth in it. As for art historians, critics and historians, it is even difficult to imagine how many scientific works on history and art actually turned out to be complete nonsense, this also changes the entire history of art, all their theories and texts.

The fact of using optics in no way diminishes the talents of artists - after all, technique is a means of conveying what the artist wants. And vice versa, the fact that there is a real reality in these paintings only adds weight to them - after all, this is how people of that time, things, premises, cities looked like. These are real documents.

The Hockney-Falco theory is detailed by its author David Hockney in the BBC David Hockney's documentary "Secret Knowledge", which can be viewed on YouTube (part 1 and part 2 in English. lang.):