2015 was UNESCO’s official “year of light and light-based technologies” and marked the anniversaries of a series of important milestones in the history of the science of light, including the study of optics by Ibn Al-Haytham in 1015.[1] The conference’s recognition of light-based technologies across history emphasises their continued influence on contemporary society and the significant affect they have had on artistic practices. Physicist Charles Falco opened the conference by championing the research conducted by he and artist David Hockney as they postulated a new theory of realism in renaissance art, hypothesising that the development of concave mirrors in conjunction with the humanist principles of the Renaissance parallels the sudden improvement of proportion and aesthetic realism in art. This primitive technology in the field of optics paved the way for new light capturing devices such as the lens, the camera obscura, the camera lucida, and eventually the development of photographic technology that was able to produce physical, two-dimensional artefacts of time captured. The original work of pioneering photographers such as Eadweard Muybridge, fundamentally changed the way painters understood the world and required them to reformulate their methods of painting in the two dimensional medium. The study of optics and photography lent itself to abstraction, with modernists using photography to break down scenes into their fundamental elements to form coherent life-like paintings. It is argued that the study of photography had a profound affect on bringing painting out of the rigid neo-classical to the early modern with the development of photographic studies that led to the abstract futurisms of Giacomo Balla and the “undefined” cubist modernisms of Marcel Duchamp. As photography progressed alongside painting, this initial abstraction began a third incarnation with artists such as Chuck Close dividing a photographic image into a grid and paying close attention to express every detail of each element of a photograph, eventually resulting in a photorealistic image that is now common practice in contemporary painting. This method echoes the ideals of post-modern hyperrealism that rapidly redefined our conception of artistic practice as it moved into the 21st century.
Art and Science historians universally attribute the increased realism in art during the Renaissance, at least in the Italian tradition, to the artist and designer Filippo Brunechelli (1402 - 1446) who developed the concept of linear perspective for architecture and art. It is said that this method was the foundation of aesthetic realism from the 14th to 19th centuries, with each artist of each period being held up as a master of portraying reality, having little to no mechanical aid. Though history demands that the Industrial Revolution was the boom of scientific innovation, it would be simple-minded to assume that these developments in spatial reasoning and science were founded from no previous scientific inquest, nor that they weren’t derived from a wealth of sources and inspiration.
Interesting discrepancies arise when viewing the differences between the Italian and Northern Renaissance painters. While the Italian Renaissance, was based on linear perspective, and often proportionally distorted as a result, Northern Renaissance art seemed to be determined by empirical perspective, which relies on observation and experimentation, rather than pure math. This approach would have shown the Northern painters details regarding perspective that are incalculable using the one dimensional trigonometry of straight lines, such as the effect of shapes losing their contours the further away they are from the point of sight. These pictorial anomalies could only be a result of research into the study of optics that relies on the refraction of light creating an image, the knowledge of which was documented in the classical and medieval world. The question remains, however, how was this observed?
David Hockney in 1999 began a decade-long journey that sparked widespread debate to attempt to answer this question. His answer was two-fold: That the Northern Renaissance artists must have been aware of the study of optics and that they were able to observe these phenomena through the use of a concave mirror, barring the use of other optical devices. Enlisting the help of Charles Falco, who informed Hockney of the rudimentary reflective properties of a concave mirror, the two set out to prove through computer analysis and experimentation that renaissance realism was not merely the result of linear perspective. In Secret knowledge, rediscovering the lost techniques of the old masters, Hockney outlines the evidence of his thesis, relying heavily and controversially on the Arnolfini Portrait (fig 3) by Dutch painter Jan Van Eyke and on Falco’s research into the study of optics by middle eastern philosopher Ibn Al Haytham (1015), whose work is mentioned in John Wyclif’s Lutheran manuscript “De Civili Dominio”[2] in 1376, and also in Leonardo Di Vinci’s Codex Atlanticus (1502).[3] The Arnolfini portrait holds several clues that indicate an individual study of each element of the painting, an unprecedented accuracy in the depiction of the chandelier above the Arnolfinis’ heads, and a concave mirror on the wall behind the subjects, which depicts the blurry reflection of the front of the room. After analysing the chandelier and recreating the image using 3D imaging, Hockney and Falco reverse-engineered the chandelier based on Van Eyke’s painting and found it to be staggeringly proportionally accurate. The presence of the concave mirror behind the subjects is pictorial evidence that Van Eyke, not only was aware of the properties of concave mirrors, as demonstrated through the accurate representation of the reflections in the mirror, but was also aware of the concept of the optical anomaly of focus, a concept that according to the history of science was not conceivable until the fittingly Dutch invention of the telescope in the 17th century.
Physicist David Stork, perplexed by the apparent chronological inconsistences presented by Hockney and Falco’s argument, which places the use of optical devices in painting during the mid-fifteenth century, 200 years before the documented invention of the telescope, disagrees with Hockney and Falco’s assertions, arguing that the materials and grinding techniques required to produce a visible image during the time period did not exist. Moreover, he argues that the conclusion is predicated on assumptions derived from barely any evidence such as page marks on the paintings or indeed the discovery of a concave mirror carbon dated to that time period. Hockney, a humble artist whose need for substantial evidence is diminutive, remarked in response to such criticisms in Secret Knowledge "…Optics don't make marks--they only produce an image, a look, a means of measurement. The artist is still responsible for the conception, and it requires great skill to overcome the technical problems and to be able to render that image in paint."[4] The resultant debate amongst physicists and art historians has called into question the creative processes of many prolific artists such as: Johannes Vemeer, whose use of a camera obscura is now well substantiated[5]; the polymath Leonardo Di Vinci; and even the prolific Caravaggio. In a journal attempting to coalesce these conflicting arguments, Sven Dupre is hopeful “…that the outcome of the harsh polemic will be the introduction of new methods that allow art historians to analyse such aspects of paintings.”[6] Though one thing is certain, the accumulative knowledge of optical light capturing technology was available to artists during the time of the Renaissance, a fact that must not be discounted when discussing the art practices of the early masters.
The development of photographic technologies based on the science of optics is well documented with the invention of photography attributed to Nicephore Niepce in 1826.[7] The development of the lens using concave and convex glass now firmly established, the world had turned its attention to light capturing emulsions. In the beginning, the images were so blurred and permeable that the inventors and early pioneers of photography were unsure whether it was an art or a science, a question that is still debated today. Eadweard Muybridge was one of the first photographers whose images were developed for unclear scientific purposes. Though the photographs had some applications in the field of science, they instead managed to capture the imagination of many pre-modern artist who found Muybridge’s studies in motion capture and movement (known as “chrono-photography”) to be quite useful in their own studies of bodies in motion. The images were first available in a 781 plate, eleven-volume publication called Animal Locomotion (1887)[8]. The publication depicted many kinds of animals in motion, from, racehorses and dogs to American buffalo. The study of animals accompanied an equally large yet more controversial study of human movement called The Human Body in Motion (1887) that depicted naked human bodies in what was arguably the most realistic and confronting medium. It was with these studies that Muybridge earned his fame, due to Jean-Louis-Ernest Meissonier’s attribution to Muybridge’s images aiding his pictorial study of horses, Muybridge himself claiming that he was the “…first among artists to acknowledge the value to Art design of the Author’s researches;[…], he declared how much his own impression of a horse’s motion had been changed after a careful study of its consecutive phases.”[9]
Chrono-photography was a stepping-stone in the eventual evolution of the motion picture, a catalyst for the advent of cinema that would catapult the world into the 20th century. The plates, being too large and cumbersome to be projected, were instead arranged in sequence to show an empirical understanding of the elements of movement over time. Muybridge’s work had a profound affect on the practice of artistic modernisms, particularly futurism and subsequently cubism. Futurism was concerned particularly with industrial and scientific advancements, thus movement and the moving picture were of great interest. Giacomo Balla’s Dynamism of a dog on a leash (1912) depicts the kind of movement that is invisible to the untrained eye, the pictorially scattered movement that was unheard of in the art world, as progressive artists attempted to remove themselves from the rigidity of neo-classical style. Cubism, however, was more concerned with breaking down three-dimensional structures into two-dimensional geometrical shapes, and though arguably just as influenced by photographic processes (cubist landscapes being frequently compared to periscopic aerial photography)[10], the two remained ostensibly separate, that is until, renegade artist and father of modernism; Marcel Duchamp’s depiction of Muybridge’s “Nude Descending a Staircase No.2” became a controversial entry in the 1913 Salon des Independents. Duchamp, who had quite rightly entered the painting in the cubist section was appalled to find that the organisers of the exhibition made the decision to remove Duchamp’s work from the show, with the official reasoning being that the painting was too influenced by Italian futurism, and that a “One does not paint a nude descending a staircase”.[11] The implication being that naked movement was in some way vulgar, even if presented in cubist form.
Duchamp explains in a interview with curator Katherine Kuh “When I brought the “Nude Descending a Staircase to the Independents, and they asked me to withdraw it before the opening, in the most advanced group of the period, certain people had extraordinary qualms, a sort of fear […] this nude wasn’t in the line they had predicted. Cubism had lasted two or three years and they already had an absolutely clear, dogmatic line on it.”[12]
The idea that Futurism and Cubism, though both equally influenced by optical and photographic research, were unable to coalesce in one image is an example of how the influence of photography radicalized the art world’s understanding of Art’s ability to accurately portray reality, and freed the minds of those willing to accept truthful depictions of human bodies and their movement, which had always been handled with great care and consideration by artists until the advent of photography when the line between the artistic nude and pornography began to blur.
This deafening crash into modernism escalated photography rather rapidly into the realm of the Baudrillardian hyper-reality[13] and painting held on tightly to its coattail. Photographs, by the fifties and sixties had become so commonplace that artists began to question the realities being sold to them by the media, magazines, election campaigns and television shows, all of which used photography to construct simulations of idealised realties to sell products. The artifice of the photographic image mimicked the artifice of the painted image, and painters sought to re-establish their autonomy against the fast-paced world of advertising that would use artists and photographers respectively to sell their products instead of holding them up as individual works of art. In Walther Zimmereli’s article “How Autonomous Can Art Be? Philosophical remarks on photo-realism and post-modern aesthetics”, the author remarks “This constant oscillation between being and seeming to be between reality and visible technology, between mirroring, and mirroring of mirrors, makes photo-realism an important step in the development of art at the end of modern times and makes it a material interpretation of what the formal concept of post modernity means.”[14]
One of the most prolific practicing artists of post-modern-contemporary photorealism, who now could only be categorised by contemporary art critics as an artistic generalist because he is equally a photographer as he is a painter, is Chuck Close. His phenomenal large-scale airbrushed paintings are examples of an artist working directly from photographs, concretely showcasing photography’s influence on contemporary art. Close’s portraits are broken down into grids and each section is worked on independently. One imagines the artist working methodically in the manner of an ink-jet printer, adding dots of colour along a line of grids. The result is what looks like a printed image, while the accuracy and detail leave the viewer astounded by its inconceivability. To photo-realists, the photograph is a surrogate for reality and its reconstruction in their paintings “…expresses something like meta-realism, i.e. a realism which has made the experience of the impossibility grasp reality in its self.” [15]
The evolution of photographic light-based technologies such as the concave mirror, the camera obscura and both still and moving picture cameras, which all owe their origin to the study of optics, have arguably been the backbone of almost every major artistic movement in painting. Light-based technologies have contributed to the development of painting’s aesthetic realism while also conversely contributing to its deconstruction and abstraction by early modernist artists. Photography has aided painters in their study of forms and movement while at the same time propelling art into the hyper-real post-modern staple of photorealism that is now almost expected of any current practicing painter, as the availability of photographic inspiration now exists within the palm of ones hand.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Badger, Gerry, The Genius of Photography; how photography has changed our lives, Quadrille Publishing, London, 2010
King, Margaret, The Renaissance in Europe, Laurence King Publishing, London, p302 -318, 2003
Hockney, David, Secret Knowledge; rediscovering the lost techniques of the Old Masters, Thame & Hudson, London, 2001
Falco, Charles, Ibn Al-Haythams Contributions to Optics and Renaissance Art, 2014 International year of light and light-based technologies, Opening Ceremony, UNESCO, Paris, 19-20 January 2015, Youtube, Spie.tv. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6aO10EWi2Y
Zimmerli, Walther, How autonomous can art be? Philosophical remarks on photorealism and postmodern aesthetics, Man and World 21: 191-211, 1988of r
Dupre, Sven, “Introduction to the Hockney-Falco Thesis: Constraints and Opportunites” Early Science and Medicine, Optics, Instruments and Painting. 1420-1720 Reflections on the Hockney-Falco Thesis, Vol. 10, 2005, pg 125-136
Mileaf, Janine, Poses for the Camera: Eadweard Muybridge’s Studies of the human figure, American Art, Vol. 16, No. 3, Autumn 2002, pg 30-53
Rudinow, Joel, Duchamp’s Mischief, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 7, No.4, 1981, p 747-760
On Paradigms and Revolutions in Science and Art: The Challenge of Interpretation Author(s): Robert Scott Root-Bernstein Source: Art Journal, Vol. 44, No. 2, Art and Science: Part I, Life Sciences (Summer, 1984), pp. 109-118
Baudrillard, Jean, Simulacra and Simulation, University of Michigan Press 1994
Endnotes:
[1] Falco, Charles, Ibn Al-Haythams Contributions to Optics and Renaissance Art, 2014 International year of light and light-based technologies, Opening Ceremony, UNESCO, Paris, 19-20 January 2015
[2] Falco, Charles, Optical Instruments and Imaging: The us of Optics by 15th Century Master Painters, University of Arizona, 2004 p.2
[3] Falco, Charles, Op. cit, p.3
[4] Hockney, David, Secret Knowledge; rediscovering the lost techniques of the Old Masters, Thame & Hudson, London, 2001, p131
[5] Steadman, Philip, Allegory, Realism and Vermeer’s use of the camera obscura, Early Science and Medicine, Vol.10, No.2, Optics, Instruments and Painting, 1420-1720, Reflections on the Hockney-Falco Thesis, 2005
[6] Dupre, Sven, “Introduction to the Hockney-Falco Thesis: Constraints and Opportunities” Early Science and Medicine, Optics, Instruments and Painting. 1420-1720 Reflections on the Hockney-Falco Thesis, Vol. 10, 2005
[7] Badger, Gerry, The Genius of Photography; how photography has changed our lives, Quadrille Publishing, London, 2010, p.8
[8] Badger, Gerry, op.cit., p. 38
[9] Mileaf, Janine, Poses for the Camera: Eadweard Muybridge’s Studies of the human figure, American Art, Vol. 16, No. 3, Autumn 2002,
[10] Saint-Amour, Paul, Modernist Reconnaissance, Modernism/modernity, Vol 10, No.2, John Hopkins University Press, 2003
[11] Rudinow, Joel, Duchamp’s Mischief, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 7, No.4, 1981, p 755
[12] Rudinow, Joel, op.cit, p755
[13] Baudrillard, Jean, Simulation and Simulacra, University of Michigan Press, 1994
[14] Zimmerli, Walther, How autonomous can art be? Philosophical remarks on photorealism and postmodern aesthetics, Man and World 21: 191-211, 1988, p.208
[15] Zimmerli, Walther, op. cit., p.204
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