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THROUGH THE
LOOKING GLASS |
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Presently he zeroed in on a
marvelous interior scene, a teeming "Last Supper" by Dieric
Bouts, the central panel of an altarpiece painted
"See," he said. "Another chandelier, and as with Van Eyck’s in the ‘Arnolfini,’ painted as if from head-on and not from below. In fact, the heads of each of the disciples gathered around Christ are painted as if close-up and from head-on, as, for that matter, are their feet–and actually, wait a second, wait a second: isn’t that the same fellow seen over and over again, from different angles–Christ and that disciple and that other one over there? Bouts must not have had enough models to stage a full dozen. And then, look over here, the two men in the window looking in on the scene from outside, as if Bouts were providing us with a clue as to how he’d accomplished the whole composition. I recognize this technique, because in essence, it’s the same way I built up my Polaroid collages back in the early eighties: close up and one framed detail at a time, slowly building out to a sense of wider space.
..."which in turn mimics a standard single-snap photographic shot." Meanwhile, on an almost hourly basis, Falco was chiming in by fax with his own fresh discoveries. (He subsequently told me that the session with Hockney had left him so energized that he’d found it impossible to sleep that night, and that at three in the morning he’d risen out of bed, popped back in his contacts, and begun scouring the art books he had rapidly taken to collecting.) There were any number of carpet-draped tables–Memling, fifty years before the Lotto ...
Holbein’s "Portrait of Georg Gisze" from 1532 (which had already been the focus of some of Hockney’s most intensive earlier investigations) ...
... which were exhibiting improbably multiple vanishing rays entirely incongruent with any mathematically perspectival approach. (On the lower right-hand side of the Gisze panel, as Hockney himself now noticed, the table just seemed to fall away completely: very odd. Graves, for his part, was becoming convinced that the curious little canister with the mysterious slot-opening on the table in front of Gisze’s forearm might itself be some sort of optical device: couldn’t that little highlight inside the slot be the glint of a tiny mirror?) Furthermore, Falco had been researching the Cardinal Albergati drawing and its subsequent painting. It turned out that while the drawing was 48% lifesize, the final painting was 41% larger than the drawing, the sort of thing that gets obscured in art books that reproduce the two images side by side and at the same scale. And yet, Falco noted, if you make a transparency of the drawing and blow it up to scale and place it over the painting, the lines match up almost precisely–the forehead, the pupils, the nose, the lips–far more so than could be accounted for by mere eyeballing, and impossible to have accomplished by the pinprick-and-charcoal tracing method advanced by some art historians as the likeliest technique when the drawing and painting do have identical scales (the drawing had in any case never been pinpricked). No, Falco maintained, the likeliest scenario involved Van Eyck’s having deployed some sort of prior-day epidiascope or opaque projector–and if he’d used such a thing to transfer the image, why would he not have used a similar device to make the image in the first place, especially when he’d been granted so little time with his distinguished sitter? Furthermore, as Falco related in a subsequent note, the fact that the transparency of the drawing and the painting didn’t line up perfectly was itself highly revelatory: the front half of the face did, but the ears and back of the head were off by a few degrees. On the other hand, if you shifted the transparency over two millimeters and up four millimeters, now the ears and the shoulder squared up perfectly (while the front of the face went out of whack). Wasn’t it likely, Falco surmised, that Van Eyck or some assistant had simply bumped up against the mirror, or the easel, or the worktable, in the middle of the transferring process, therefore accounting for the barely perceptible double-exposure? Falco, like Hockney, proved to be a veritable logorrheic on the fax machine: his steadily accumulating dispatches, of which I was being sent copies, would come to fill two huge binders on my shelf (with Hockney’s to Falco and Kemp and others swelling another several folders–at times I felt like I was eavesdropping on Freud and Fliess and Floss). Of all Falco’s myriad observa-tions and calculations in the months ahead, one of my favorites would involve the famously elongated smear of a skull at the bottom of Holbein’s 1533 "The Ambassadors," another of Hockney’s own most cited works.
Hockney had always admired the "marvelous accuracy of the foreshortening" in the anamorphic skull, rendered all the more palpable when subjected to computerized restoration.
But Falco noted how the compressed version had still "bothered me every time I look at it." And he’d now figured out what the problem was: "The back of the skull is far too big…. and if you look at the top of the skull, it’s clear it’s made of two curves. This happens at an appropriate depth into the scene for Holbein to have had to refocus, had he used a lens. If you slice the attached fax at this joint (ie where I drew a vertical line) and slide the back portion of the skull to the left by 1" and up by 1/2", not only does the skull take on a much more human look, but several important lines and features he painted on the two portions of the skull line up." Forget Freud and Fliess. Other days, I imagined I was eavesdropping on the earliest days of plate tectonics theory. •• During the weeks that followed, back home now in New York, I continued to listen in, mostly by way of cc’ed correspondence, on the ongoing investigation being conducted, principally, by Hockney, Graves, Falco and Kemp. Graves passed along a curious engraving he’d come upon, the frontispiece of a 1572 Latin translation of the tenth century Arab scholar Alhazan’s Optics, which featured a panoply of illustrated optical effects: a rainbow, legs refracted in water, and down there at the bottom a very odd little man bouncing the image of his face off a concave mirror!
Hockney, meanwhile, zeroed in on the Mona Lisa, of 1503...
...which he said stood out on his Wall, as the first instance of the sort of softer focus one actually gets from an image projected (either by a mirror or a lens) into a darkened chamber. (Earlier artists had aspired to more exact measurements but Leonardo seemed to be approximating the very cast of the projected image.) He also noted the bright light shining down from above (indicated by the deep shadows beneath the nose and lips)–at which point one of the others pointed out that Leonardo at any rate certainly knew of the optical properties of the camera obscura, frequent mention of which occurs throughout his notebooks (in secret-keeping reverse handwriting, of course.) (Of what didn’t Leonardo know? Hockney marveled in response.) In a similiar vein, Hockney pointed out how one of the hardest things to master with the collaged, multiple-vantage method of painterly composition was a believably realistic spatial relationship between figures. With De La Tour, for example, for all the French master’s splendors, the figures seem separately posed (as they probably were) and barely seem to inhabit the same space. They fail to make eye contact, the spaces between figures are subtly wrong. In "The Fortune Teller" (1630), for example, the girl in the rear is bigger than the young man in the foreground.
By contrast, Hockney came to see in the later Velazquez a virtual champion of the technique–again thanks to his softening of the atmospheric contours of the various figures, such that they indeed seem to be standing side by side or one behind the other. (In fact, Velazquez’s entire career can be seen as one of consistent progress toward such consummate mastery.)
Meanwhile, Frans Hals, of all people, began increasingly to consume Hockney’s attention: strange, because he of all artists seems the most slapdash and spontaneous. Precisely, Hockney countered, but look for instance at the amazing foreshortening of the out-thrust hand in his portrait of the boy with the red-feathered cap holding the skull, from 1626.
How long could a model have been expected to hold that pose? Keep in mind, there is no charcoal underdrawing, and yet the gesture retains an astonishing freshness. Could Hals merely have eyeballed this, Hockney wondered, or was some solid optical structure guiding the quick, fluid brushstrokes? Through the Looking Glass continues below... ArtKrush Copyright © 2002 ArtKrush, LLC. All Rights Reserved. |
