Secret Knowledge

Secret Knowledge in paintingWhat is ‘Secret Knowledge’ and how does it impact 3D rendering

• Hockney–Falco thesis

The Hockney–Falco thesis is a controversial theory of art history, advanced by artist David Hockney and physicist Charles M. Falco, suggesting that advances in realism and accuracy in the history of Western art since the Renaissance were primarily the result of optical aids such as the camera obscura, camera lucida, and curved mirrors, rather than solely due the development of artistic technique and skill.

A diagram of the camera obscura from 1772. According to the Hockney–Falco thesis, such devices were central to much of the great art from the Renaissance period to the dawn of modern art.

Secret Knowledge in paintingReasons for suspecting the use of optical devices by the Great Masters

• Sudden jump in realism in the early 15th century

– Patterns on robes– Faces improve– Very small but very accurate drawings Sudden stylistic differences– Strong lighting– Still lives with planar compositions “Hockney’s Great Wall”

Secret Knowledge in paintingReasons for suspecting the use of optical devices by the Great Masters

• Fillipino Lippi, The Crucifixion of St. Peter, Brancacci chapel, 1484-5 (Left). Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, The Crucifixion of St. Peter, 1601 (Right).

Secret Knowledge in paintingImprovements in detail

Improvements in rendering metal

Secret Knowledge in paintingImprovements in detail

• Improvements with faces• More individual• Begin to capture fleeting expressions

Secret Knowledge in painting

The Camera Obscura• The camera obscura (Latin; "camera" is a "vaulted chamber/room" + "obscura"

means "dark"= "darkened chamber/room") is an optical device that projects an image of its surroundings on a screen. It is used in drawing and for entertainment, and was one of the inventions that led to photography. The device consists of a box or room with a hole in one side. Light from an external scene passes through the hole and strikes a surface inside where it is reproduced, upside-down, but with colour and perspective preserved. The image can be projected onto paper, and can then be traced to produce a highly accurate representation.

Secret Knowledge in painting

The Hockney-Falco Thesis Advancements in realism after the Renaissance were (at least partly) due to optical devices. The camera obscura, camera lucida, and concave mirror projection devices.

Visual evidence

• Details are “too good,” “impossible” to eyeball• Errors caused by optics in the paintings• Style shows evidence of optics (lighting, staging). Historical evidence• Claim they have sources describing technology• Images of lenses, mirrors in the paintings themselves

The Camera Obscura

Secret Knowledge in painting

• What does a camera obscura projection look like?

Abelardo Morell’s photograph of a camera obscura projection of Central Park(published in the May 2011 National Geographic)

Abelardo Morell’s photograph of a camera obscura projection of St. Mark’s Cathedral (published in the May 2011 National Geographic)

Secret Knowledge in paintingHans Holbein the Younger, The French Ambassadors, 1533

• Skull has to be drawn using some kind of optics.

• Objects on shelf are “too perfect” to have been drawn by eyeballing them

The most notable and famous of Holbein's symbols in the work, however, is the skewed skull which is placed in the bottom centre of the composition. The skull, rendered in anamorphic perspective, another invention of the Early Renaissance, is meant to be a visual puzzle as the viewer must approach the painting nearly from the side to see the form morph into an accurate rendering of a human skull.

Secret Knowledge in paintingHans Holbein the Younger, The French Ambassadors, 1533

Secret Knowledge in paintingJan van Eyck, The Arnolfini Portrait, 1434

Secret Knowledge in paintingJan van Eyck, The Arnolfini Portrait, 1434

• Chandelier “perfect” but there is no underdrawing or corrections which is amazing for such a complicated foreshortened object. (it is the only object in the painting to be painted this way)

• Also, it is seen head-on, not from below as you would expect. (If you use a mirror-lens you need to be level with the objects you want to paint)

• Irregularities in perspective because of irregularities in manufacturing.

• The convex mirror in the background if you reversed the silvering and turned it around, is all that would be needed to use as an optical device.

Secret Knowledge in paintingJan van Eyck, The Arnolfini Portrait, 1434

Secret Knowledge in paintingVermeer, The Milkmaid, 1656-58

Optical “errors” that get included:• circles of confusion” – blurry

blobs on highlights, only seen in optical projections

Secret Knowledge in paintingVermeer’s Room

• Most of the literature of the camera obscura available when Vermeer was working, in the third quarter of the 17th century, describes instruments that took the form of closed rooms, tents or cubicles (like Kircher's design), which the user worked inside. It has sometimes been suggested that Vermeer might have used a camera of a rather different kind, which certainly existed in his time, but which was only manufactured in large numbers in the 18th and 19th centuries, and which took the form of a closed box, with an external translucent screen. The observer is now outside the box, not inside it. Both Canaletto's and Reynolds's cameras were of this type. One problem compared with the room-type camera is that the image is viewed under ambient light and so seems subjectively less bright. Fox Talbot and the French pioneers of photography, Niépce and Daguerre, built the first photographic cameras by modifying commercially produced camera obscuras of this general type. - BBC History

Secret Knowledge in paintingVermeer’s Room re-created in 3D

Secret Knowledge in paintingVermeer’s Room

The fact that it is possible to accurately re-create Vermeer's room’s from his paintings. To discern an original viewpoint, is evidence that optical devices where used.

Secret Knowledge in paintingHow is this important to 3D Rendering

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?

Extra: “Caravaggio was early 'photographer‘”It was already known he worked in a "darkroom" and illuminated his models through a hole in the ceiling.

But Ms Lapucci believes the image was also projected on a canvas and "fixed".

Light-sensitive substances applied to the canvas would have "fixed" the image for around 30 minutes, allowing Caravaggio to paint the image with broad strokes using white lead mixed with chemicals and minerals that were visible in the dark.

"There is lots of proof, notably the fact that Caravaggio never made preliminary sketches. So it is plausible that he used these 'projections' to paint," she said.Noting that "an abnormal number of his subjects were left-handed," Lapucci said: "That could be explained by the fact that the image projected on the canvas was backwards."

She added: "This anomaly disappears in the artist's later works, a sign that the instruments he used were improving. Also thanks to technical progress, his paintings gain a lot in depth of field over the years.“

Link to BBC

Secret Knowledge

Secret Knowledge in painting

Visit the National Gallery take a look at the following Paintings & Artists?

Hans Holbein the Younger, The French Ambassadors

The paintings of Vermeer

Jan van Eyck, The Arnolfini Portrait

Still Life with Oranges and Walnuts 1772, Luis Meléndez