Hockney-Falco thesis

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A diagram of the camera obscura from 1772. According to the Hockney-Falco thesis, such devices were central to much of the great art from the Renaissance period to the dawn of modern art.

The Hockney-Falco thesis is a controversial theory of art history, advanced by artist David Hockney and physicist Charles Falco, suggesting that advances in realism and accuracy in the history of Western art since the Renaissance were primarily the result of optical aids such as the camera obscura, camera lucida, and curved mirrors, not the development of artistic technique and skill. In a 2001 book, Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters, Hockney analyzed the work of the Old Masters and argued that the level of accuracy represented in their work is impossible to create by "eyeballing it."

Part of Hockney's work involved collaboration with Charles Falco, a condensed matter physicist and an expert in optics. While the use of optical aids would generally enhance accuracy, Falco calculated the types of distortion that would result from specific optical devices; Hockney and Falco argued that such errors could in fact be found in the work of some of the Old Masters.^[1] Hockney suggested that advances in realism throughout the history of Western art, especially during the Renaissance, mapped neatly onto the invention and adoption of optical technologies.

Hockney's book prompted intense and sustained debate among artists, art historians, and a wide variety of other scholars. In particular, it has spurred increased interest in the actual methods and techniques of artists, among scientists and historians of science, as well as general historians and art historians. Art historians have in general reacted unfavorably, interpreting the Hockney-Falco thesis as an accusation that the Old Masters "cheated" and intentionally obscured their methods; scientists and other historians reacted somewhat more favorably.^[2]

[edit] Origins of the thesis

As described in Secret Knowledge, Hockney conceived of the idea that optical aids were the key factor in the artistic realism in January 1999, during a visit to the National Gallery, London. He was struck by the accuracy of portraits by Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, and became convinced that Ingres had used a camera lucida or similar device. From there, Hockney began looking for signs of the use of optical aids in earlier paintings, creating what he called the Great Wall in his studio by organizing images of great realistic art by time period. What he saw as a sudden rise of realism around 1420, combined with Charles Falco's suggestion that concave mirrors could have been used in that period to project images, was the germ of the Hockney-Falco thesis.^[3]

In 2000, Falco and Hockney published an analysis ("Optical Insights into Renaissance Art") of the likely use of concave mirrors in Jan Van Eyck's work in Optics & Photonics News, vol. 11. In 2001, Hockney published an extended form of his argument in Secret Knowledge.

[edit] Hockney's argument

Detail of the chandelier and mirror from Van Eyck's Arnolfini Portrait, one of Hockney's key examples

In Secret Knowledge, Hockney argues that early Renaissance artists such as Jan Van Eyck and Lorenzo Lotto used concave mirrors; as evidence, he points to the chandelier in Van Eyck's Arnolfini Portrait, the ear in Van Eyck's portrait of Cardinal Albergati, and the carpet in Lotto's Husband and Wife. Hockney suggests that later artists, beginning with Caravaggio, used convex mirrors as well, to achieve a large field of view. His analysis rests heavily on a small number of examples, "a few dozen square centimeters" of canvas that seem to show signs that optical devices were used.^[4]

[edit] Criticism

Art historians, especially those that value the technical virtuosity of the Old Masters (such as those affiliated with the Art Renewal Center) have criticized Hockney's argument on the grounds that the use of optical aids, though well-established in individual cases, has little value for explaining the overall development of Western art, and that historical records and paintings and photographs of art studios (sans optical devices), as well as present-day realist artists, demonstrate that high levels of realism are possible without optical aids.^[5] In addition to incredulity on the part of art historians, some of the harshest criticism of the Hockney-Falco thesis came from another physicist, David G. Stork. Stork analyzed the images used by Falco and Hockney, and came to the conclusion that they do not demonstrate the kinds of optical distortion that curved mirrors would cause.^[6]

Leaving the technical optical arguments aside, historians of science investigated several aspects of the historical plausibility of the thesis in a 2005 set of articles in Early Science and Medicine. One scholar claimed that surviving glassware from the 15th and 16th centuries is far too imperfect to have been used to create realistic images, while "even thinking about projecting images was alien to the contemporary conceptual frame of mind." Another argued that the optical ideas of opticians at the time were somewhat incompatible with image projection, though artists might have been more receptive. Two other scholars showed that Renaissance painting treatises and Leonardo's manuscripts also lack any reference to image projection. The conclusion based on these studies was that "the Hockney-Falco thesis [is] extremely unlikely as far as its application for the period before the first textual reference to image projection around 1550 is concerned." However, the historians were more sanguine about the possible relevance of the thesis between 1550 and the invention of the telescope, and cautiously supportive after that period, when there clearly was interest and capacity to project realistic images; 17th century painters such as Johannes Vermeer and Gaspar van Wittel used optical devices in variety of ways, though not the ways postulated by Hockney.^[7]

[edit] References

[edit] External links

• FAQ by Charles Falco - a summary of the physical and historical evidence
• FAQ by David G. Stork - another physicist's response to Hockney-Falco thesis
• Why David Hockney Should Not Be Taken Seriously - a critical analysis by David K. Yoder from the Art Renewal Center