Rebuttal: Both hands are often occupied

Counter-examples with right hands used

Annibale Caracci, the Bean Eater, 1580-90

Frans Hals, Jester with a Lute, 1620-25

Hans Memling, Flower Still Life, ca. 1490Hockney claims there are at least two vanishing points, which would happen if the projection device was refocused.Rebuttal: actually, in examples like this there are often many vanishing points in the pattern – it’s very inconsistent, showing the artist “eyeballed” it.

Optical “errors” that get included: body distortions (projecting the head, doing the body separately)

Parmigianino, Portrait of a Young Lady, 1524-7Van Dyck, A Genoese Nobelwoman and her Son, 1626

Optical errors that get included: stretchingJan van Bijlert, Man in Armor Holding a Pike, ca. 1630

Real painting is on the left, stretched out image on the right. Does the right look more natural? Could the “smushing” seen in the real painting be due to optics?

Visual evidence for optical technologyJan van Eyck, The Arnolfini Portrait, 1434

Just reverse the silvering on a convex mirror like this one, and you can make a concave mirror projection system!

Rebuttal (David G. Stork, published in Scientific American, Dec 2004):•No historical documentation of such mirrors. Not as simple as reversing a convex mirror.•Calculated focal length of 61 cm for a portrait like this – would require a sphere of 2.4 meters!•Concave mirrors have poor light-gathering powers, but this is dim indoor lighting.

Visual evidence for optical technologyJan van Eyck, Virgin with the Canon Van der Paele, 1434

Lenses, mirrors, camera obscura, camera lucida – all known and written about at the time. Hockney and supporters claim their historical evidence proves artists had access to these instruments and used them.

Still, many claim the documentation doesn’t exist (or isn’t strong enough) that artists used these instruments.•Why wouldn’t it be written about?•Why would people sitting for portraits not write about the artist using optical devices?•Does the technology existing prove it was used in this way?

Photographs of artists studios that don’t show any optical devices

Contemporary artists achieve similar results without the use of optical devices

Anthony J. Ryder, Twilight, 1998

Timothy Tyler, Persimmons and Figs, 2002

What about sculpture?Can’t use optical projections, but see same trend in realism

Anonymous French artist, Virgin and Child, c. 1250

Bernini, Apollo and Daphne, 1622-1625

Donatello, David, ca. 1440

What about self-portraits?(Brian K. Yoder argues you can’t project yourself to trace)

Artemisia Gentileschi, Self Portrait as the Allegory of Painting, 1630s

Van Dyck, self portrait, after 1633

Parmigianino, Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror, 1523-24

Are other advances (anatomy, perspective, mathematics) enough to explain the leap in realism that occurred from the Renaissance on?

Da Vinci, Studies of a Human Shoulder and Arm, c. 1510 (left) and linear perspective study for Adoration of the Magi, c. 1481

Does every artist that paints “optically” have to use optical devices?Did seeing projected images cause a “paradigm shift” in the way 3D objects

were translated to 2D? Did the way optical projections look lead to a style change, without using the

optics at every instance?

Caravaggio, The Cardsharps, ca. 1594

Adam de Coster, The Card Players, 1620

Joseph Wright of Derby, Experiment on a Bird in an Air Pump, 1769

Georges de la Tour, The Fortune Teller, 1633-39