Reverse Engineering the Technical and Artistic Genius of Painter Jan Vermeer

Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Kurt Anderson has an interesting read at Vanity Fair about Dutch painter Jan Vermeer, best known for 'Girl with a Pearl Earring,' and the search for how he was able to achieve his photo-realistic effects in the 1600s. Considered almost as mysterious and unfathomable as Shakespeare in literature, Vermeer at age 21, with no recorded training as an apprentice, began painting masterful, singular, uncannily realistic pictures of light-filled rooms and ethereal young women. 'Despite occasional speculation over the years that an optical device somehow enabled Vermeer to paint his pictures, the art-history establishment has remained adamant in its romantic conviction: maybe he was inspired somehow by lens-projected images, but his only exceptional tool for making art was his astounding eye, his otherworldly genius,' says Anderson. To try to learn how Vermeer was able to achieve such highly realistic painting, American inventor and millionaire Tim Jenison spent five years learning how to make lenses himself using 17th-century techniques, mixed and painted only with pigments available in the late 1600s and even constructed a life-size reproduction of Vermeer's room with wooden beams, checkerboard floor, and plastered walls. The result has been a documentary movie, Tim's Vermeer, by magicians Penn & Teller that may have resolved the riddle and explains why it has remained a secret for so long. 'The photorealistic painters of our time, none of them share their techniques,' says Teller. 'The Spiderman people aren't talking to the Avatar people. When [David] Copperfield and I have lunch, we aren't giving away absolutely everything.'"

Andersen

[jamesl]

Kurt Andersen. With an "e."

Evidence To The Contrary

[dynamator]

I had a chance to hear David Stork present his counter arguments to the 'Secret Knowledge' theory expoused by David Hockney and Charles Falco. He was focusing on Van Dyke, who's work is not as objectively realistic as Vermeer. His two main pieces of evidence were:
1. If you attempt to re-create the perspective in the a Van Dyke painting in the computer, it never quite lines up with spacial reality, even accounting for the distortions of the lenses or mirrors which might have been used to project the or image the scene.
2. If you put a capable artist to the task, they can create a highly realist scene, with better geometric accuracy than the 15-16th century artists using no optical aids whatsoever.

Vermeer is definitely a standout. I don't believe that any of his contemporaries were producing work remotely similar to what he was doing. So I almost believe he might have had something up his sleeve. It is know that he took a really long time to complete a painting. I wonder if he could have used optical techniques out in the open, and it would have been so unusual that others wouldn't have even understood what he was doing, and so not think it worth noting it down.

Check Out the counter-arguments at : http://www.artrenewal.org/articles/2003/Hockney_Refuted/hockney1.php [artrenewal.org]
(Warning: drawings of naked people done without optical aids)

Re:Evidence To The Contrary

[DrJimbo]

Parent:

I think the postulated optical aids are really a less interesting part of all this. What makes his paintings start out aren't that they have lots of accurate detail - they do, but that's not that rare - but that they have very accurate color. The rooms look realistic because the color values are right: they all have the same lighting temperature, to remarkable accuracy.

FTFA:

[Tim Jenison] was in no rush. His R&D period lasted five years. He went to the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. "Looking at their Vermeers," he says, "I had an epiphany" -- the first of several. "The photographic tone is what jumped out at me. Why was Vermeer so realistic? Because he got the values right," meaning the color values.

The point of using an optical aid was to get the colors right.