Reverse Engineering the Technical and Artistic Genius of Painter Jan Vermeer 70
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.'"
I'm not an artist... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:I'm not an artist... (Score:5, Interesting)
This "discovery" may not even be a "discovery" about how Vermeer actually worked. While the hypothesis has been around for a long time (this is far from a "new discovery") --- and sounds appealing to the technologically-minded --- there is also moderate counter-evidence to Vermeer having actually worked in such a fashion. While Andersen succeeded in re-creating a Vermeer-like style in this manner, this isn't a unique, unheard-of capability: any painter who goes through the traditional "classical" art education, learning techniques the old-fashioned way with lots of practice, will be able to re-create paintings in Vermeer's (or anyone else's) style. Learning to copy the "great masters" is a standard part of formal art education. Andersen was able to short-cut some of this process (of learning painting technique the "old-fashioned" way) by technological means potentially accessible in Vermeer's time, but that doesn't prove what actually happened.
Re:I'm not an artist... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Evidence To The Contrary (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Getting the color palette just right is what impresses me about paintings from Vermeer to modern artists in the same style, but the modern guys have a very mature science to work from and just need to make the colors match precisely to the calculated ideal.
Re:Evidence To The Contrary (Score:5, Interesting)
One of the points that severely diminishes the credibility of "Secret knowledge" optical theories, in my eyes, is that they are simultaneously presented as being so secret as to never be recorded and transmitted to the present day, and as being in such wide-spread use that there is evidence to be found in major works over many centuries and continents. As a closely-guarded guild secret for one small, local, and ephemeral school of painters, which died off before being transmitted to the present day, perhaps the hypothesis is plausible. However, the sheer weight and volume of "evidence" presented by Hockney et al., in which optical techniques are a ubiquitous foundation for every vaguely photo-realistic painting since the early 15th century, is impossible to reconcile with those techniques being absent from historical commentary and received tradition.
Re:I'm not an artist... (Score:5, Interesting)
Read DaVinci's work on light and optics. Once you get a field view, working out a palette is trivial.
Re:I'm not an artist... (Score:4, Interesting)
Furthermore, while it might be difficult to perfectly match light levels while standing behind the canvas, cutting-edge artists of the era (of which Vermeer was certainly an example) were quite focused on, and capable of, understanding the effects of light to the next level. Vermeer might well have walked over to the wall and closely compared brightness levels in cleverly quantitative ways in order to get the lighting right --- it's the kind of stuff cutting-edge people were really concerned with at the time, and the reason deeply insightful light and color relations appeared in the best artwork of the era. Such paintings were not slapdash works from untrained-eye impressions; Vermeer was known for painting slowly, giving plenty of time for meticulously studied naturalistic results.