Memo from the World: Smoke and Mirrors

by Alberta Moraine

My aunt called from Minnesota where she is learning how to get around with a new hip. It seems she needed me to hook up with Susan, a mutual friend, and figure out an art puzzle. First I was to read an article in the 31 January New Yorker magazine. The artist David Hockney has been studying, and is trying to persuade the academic and museum art-history worlds that some of the most important "master" painters of Sixteenth-Century Europe used optical devices to capture the lifelike depths that are difficult for human eyes and hands to draw, device-free. Then after reading this article, by Lawrence Wechsler, Susan and I were to scout for art to test the theory.

It did not all go according to plan. In fact, Susan and I have not met up yet. But I expect we have each been cogitating a bit. And it is kind of interesting.

So of course you start to ask yourself if it's cheating for them to have done this, if they did. According to Wechsler, Hockney declares it is not, that it diminishes nothing, "it merely suggests a different story..." It's a story with some juicy details, too. I liked the part where it says Caravaggio - Mr. Dramatic Shadows, I like to call him - was criticized by his peers for working in cellars with limited lighting. Hockney says that is clear evidence the artist worked with the aid of a camera obscura - a darkened section of a larger room, with one light source, a room divider with one pinhole, and lenses and mirrors. Hockney himself got - at great expense - another kind of optical device, a camera lucida, invented in 1807. He said it took him months to learn how to use it. That adds weight to his view that the artists were just using a tool, like other tools - that they were still artists, not tools of their tools.

I also wonder about our perception of those Italian and other artists of the Renaissance. Are we more invested in being better, more evolved than them, or are we more attached to those earlier artists' Greatness? If the former, then Hockney's theory would be welcome; if you're into the Greatness theory, then it's more likely to be a trauma.

And another thing - doesn't it also depend on your view of computer technology? And for that matter, of the development of cameras with film - photography? If you believe that portrait painting went the way of the dinosaur when photographic printing came along in the 1840's, perhaps you are coming to believe now that the nature of photography has changed, becoming less reliable, more traditionally art-like again. So that is saying that images I can store - and tweak - with my computer are making representational photography old-hat, and no longer reliable, since you can't tell where a photo has been, so to speak, before you saw it.

If I understand this, then we're saying that high technology has had a humanizing effect on visual artists, that because all imagery these days can be added to the digital soup, a painting, actually painted with paints on an actual surface has new / old meaning. And as to whether optical devices helped some of the great European painters be great, I try not to get too upset one way or another. Didn't George Harrison remind us once that it's all Maya, anyway?

Wechsler reports that he looked at a Caravaggio with a senior curator at the Metropolitan Musem of Art in NYC. In a certain light, viewed from a certain angle, the canvas showed indentations that could back up Hockney's theory. I wish I knew which Caravaggio. If you get a chance to look at Caravaggios, or an amazing portrait of the Doge of Venice painted by Giovanni Bellini around 1500, get a copy of this New Yorker article first.

About our Correspondent:

Alberta Moraine wants to spend some time in a camera obscura.