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THROUGH THE
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"Yes," Hockney interrupted, "David and I had already noticed that, too, and in fact it was what first drew Charles to the image the other day. The border pattern juts back into the middle of the table there in a sort of arch, but there at the back it goes out of focus, which would have been impossible for an artist to see, let alone replicate, without witnessing the effect projected onto a flat surface by some sort of lens. After all, the moment he would have tried to attend to that out-of-focus patch, it would have gone into focus for him. Whatever we look at is always by definition in focus as we look at it." Falco nodded. "Yes, and it goes out of focus at the right spot, according to our calculations, about 22 centimeters back. And furthermore, you’ll notice that beyond that, the image is back in focus again, which means Lotto would have had to refocus his lens–either by moving the lens, or the canvas, or the table–but (think about what happens when you refocus a zoom camera, the lens telescoping either out or in)–that would have subtly affected the magnification, the two parts would not quite have jibbed, and you would expect furthermore"–he pulled out a ruler and traced over the front part of the receding pattern, and then it’s back part–"and, yes, you get it: rays receding back to two entirely different vanishing points.
This painting was obviously not accomplished according to some mathemat-ical model. Assuming our hypothesis is correct, the same sort of thing should be happening elsewhere in the picture, for example here, on the righthand edge of the table, where the receding triangular pattern at first seems to stay in focus all the way back–the band is narrower here on the edge than with that arch there in the middle of the table, and hence it would have been easier for Lotto to fudge–but if we take out our ruler, I bet you it will turn out that"–pen-swipe, pen-swipe–"yup, the vanishing points again differ for the front and the back, by the slightest but still an identifiable degree.
"That," he rose up, smiling, triumphant,
"is what in science we refer to ("You make a prediction," he would subsequently recount for me, as we discussed that day and the Lotto painting which he’d taken to referring to as "our Rosetta Stone"–"you make a prediction, and then it holds true. We like that in science. It’s strange," he went on, surveying what by then had already grown into several months of collaboration between him and Hockney, "but had either one of us maintained all of this on our own, nobody would have believed us. But together…." He let the thought trail off, breaking into another wide smile.) Hockney and Falco were almost slap-happy with excitement at this point, and I hated to be the one to throw a damper on things, but, still somewhat skeptical, I broke in, "That’s all fine and good, but what about back over here, with Van Eyck in Bruges? Isn’t the problem that there’s no good evidence of the existence, let alone widespread dissemination of such lenses, at that place at that time?" None of us was subsequently able to recall precisely what Falco said in response (as far as he was concerned, he was only repeating what every optical scientist would know, though, as I was subsequently able to determine, hardly a single art historian knows it)–but somewhere buried in the subclause of a subclause of his response, he noted how, "Of course, a concave mirror has exactly the same optical properties as a lens"–a throwaway comment that veritably stunned Hockney and Graves. Really?! "Sure," Falco continued. "Try it yourself. In the morning, in the bathroom, take your shaving mirror–you know, the one that magnifies the image of your face–you may want to narrow the f-stop a little, for maximum effect, wrap a little bagel of cardboard around the outer circumference of the mirror–anyway, when it’s bright outside and still dark on your bathroom’s inner wall, aim the lens at the world outside the window so the gathered light gets redirected onto the darkened wall, move the mirror in and out till things cast there onto the wall come into focus, and what you’ll get is a technicolor perfect image of the world outside. Upside-down, granted, but incidentally not right-left reversed, as would be the case with a lens." As Falco had been expounding, we’d all drifted on over to the 1420 section of the Wall. "You mean," asked Hockney, "a mirror like this, or this, or this?"–he jabbed at one image after another, for almost simultaneous with the proliferation of the optical look there in Flanders, there had occurred a proliferation of mirrors in Netherlandish paintings. "Well," Falco concurred, "those are all convex, bowed outward at the center. You’d need to turn them around but"–we’d come to Van Eyck’s celebrated "Arnolfini Wedding" (1434) ...
... with its mirror dead center on the far wall, at the focal point of the entire painting, the master’s ornate signature immediately above it: "Johannes Van Eyck made this" ...
... "but once you did–and remember in those days, the back side of a mirror wasn’t blackened, they just silvered the bottom of a globe of blown glass and sliced out the circular segment–you’d have a concave mirror, and in fact, the very same mirror as the one that may well have been used to construct this image. Now, of course, such a mirror would only have a sweet spot of around 30 centimeters"–a zone of focus, an invisible sphere or globe, as it were, 30 centimeters from side to side and front to back–"so that the artist would have had to move it around, refocusing, with the consequent multiple overlapping vanishing rays. I’m sure if we spent a little time studying this image we’d come upon all sorts of anomalous…." And hence, I pointed out, the lack of unified one-point perspective which, as far as the Italianists were concerned, rendered these images so "primitive." "Whereas, in fact, the visual intelligence and sophistication involved here," Hockney countered, "the way in which the perspectives are layered, one upon the next, is of the very highest order. Not in the least bit primitive." Critics of Hockney’s theory, especially its maximal Flemish claims, had been castigating him over the lack of evidence for the existence of the kinds of lenses or flat mirrors they’d imagined crucial to the process (after all, the Flemish seemed only to have those reflection-warping convex mirrors, and what good could they possibly have been?), whereas it now turned out that it was the flat mirrors that would have proved useless, and only curved mirrors, with their ray-concentrating properties (the same properties, as Falco pointed out, that had Archimedes deploying them as burning lenses to defend Syracuse from besieging flotillas) that would have done the trick. (On a visit to the library, I subsequently came upon an article in a 1982 issue of the Art Bulletin, the premier American academic art historical quarterly, in which a fellow named David Carleton, focussing on this very painting of Van Eyck’s, "The Arnolfini Wedding," had suggested that its curious "elliptical optics" could be accounted for through the painter’s deployment, in some unknown manner, of the convex mirror there on the wall in the back; the guy had been roundly ridiculed in subsequent articles in follow-up issues of the Bulletin–after all, how could a convex mirror have been of any use whatsoever? It occurred to me in retrospect how in that article Carleton had been something like Tycho Brahe, the great Danish sixteenth-century astronomer who’d almost figured it all out: he’d determined that all the planets revolved around the sun, which in turn revolved around the earth. Close, so close, but no cigar.) "For example, look at that chandelier," ...
Hockney now crowed (he’d instantaneously grasped the implications of Falco’s throwaway comment about the concave mirror), "there’s another one there, and there, and there"–he was pointing all about that 1420s Nether-landish region of the Wall. "There’s no way anybody before that could have recorded such an astonishingly accurate and assured rendition of a chandel-ier." He pointed at some earlier approximations, in Giotto and others. "Nor is there any way Van Eyck could have achieved it with one-point perspective either. But here suddenly they’re all doing it, almost as if to say, ‘Commission me to do your portrait and I’ll thrown in that chandelier for free.’" "And keep in mind who this is," Graves now interceded (he seemed to have become as encyclopedically grounded on the history of fifteenth and sixteenth century art history as Falco was on the physics of curved mirrors). "Mr. and Mrs. Arnolfini. He’s an Italian merchant, resident in Bruges--Florentine, and in fact the representative on the scene of the Medici Bank. He could easily have taken the knowledge–" "–one of the most valuable bits of knowledge of its time!" chimed Hockney. "Yes," Graves continued, "taken it back with him to Tuscany." The sweet spot of Hockney’s entire theory suddenly seemed to come vividly into vital focus. •• Falco left that evening, returning to Tucson–not a bad day’s work–but the very next morning, Hockney and Graves and Hockney’s California assistant Richard Schmidt were out alongside the outer wall of a guest cottage on the other side of the compound, building a little art-mirror shed: essentially darkness-enclosing walls with a crisp square outfacing window, and inside a standard shaving mirror mounted on an adjustable pedestal. They’d been studying a drawing Van Eyck had made on the one brief occasion Cardinal Niccolò Albergati had visited Bruges in December 1431 ...
... (a drawing that, several years later, Van Eyck would use as the basis for his celebrated painting of the cardinal.)
"Look," Hockney commented. "Look at the pupils: Little pinpricks. Quite unusual, but exactly the contracted effect you’d get if you’d sat your subject outside in the bright sun." Graves, inside the shed and adjusting the mirror pedestal, pointed out that the Bruges artists had all been members of the Guild of St. Luke’s, which, as he now recalled from his researches, happened to be the guild of "painters and mirror makers." Hockney invited a visiting friend to sit for him outside, swathed the man in a red cape reminiscent of the cardinal’s, climbed into the operator’s cockpit inside the shed, adjusted the mirror–and it was exactly as Falco had foretold: A perfect upside down image of the man outside was being cast onto the blank sheet of paper Hockney had affixed to the wall beside the window.
He worked quickly, sketching out the contours of the man’s face and noting the signposts, and then, pulling the page off the wall and flipping it rightside up onto an easel, quickly polished off the man’s likeness, in a process that was if anything even more straightforwardly efficient than the camera lucida. Back in the studio, a few hours later, marching up and down the Wall again, Hockney was pointing out the profusion of window-framed images that characterized the portraiture of the latter half of the fifteenth century and on into the sixteenth, initially in Flanders and then spreading everywhere.
"And usually with very pronounced shadows," he pointed out, "as if the sitter were outside, even when the sitter is being portrayed as if he’s the one on the inside." Through the Looking Glass continues below... ArtKrush Copyright © 2002 ArtKrush, LLC. All Rights Reserved. |
