Telegraph | Arts | Hockney and the secrets of the Old Masters

Telegraph | Arts | Hockney and the secrets of the Old Masters: " Hockney and the secrets of the Old Masters
(Filed: 22/09/2001)

Has David Hockney made a discovery that will change the history of art for ever? He talks to Martin Gayford

IN 1999, there was a magnificent exhibition of Ingres portraits at the National Gallery in London. Among the many visitors was David Hockney, and he, along with everyone else, was struck by the extraordinary delicacy and precision of the portrait drawings on show by the French master. Unlike the public - and the art historians and critics - he started to ask himself specific practical questions about those miraculous little works on paper.

As someone who himself had drawn delicate and precise images of people in the tradition that stems from Ingres, he wanted to know how they were done. And the answers he came up with led to other questions and other answers, and finally to a theory, set out in his new book Secret Knowledge, that could revolutionise our understanding of art history.

What Hockney saw when he looked hard at those Ingres drawings were signs that Ingres had been using a piece of optical equipment called a camera lucida. That is, as he puts it, "a prism on a stick". "When you look through the prism from a certain point you can see the person in front of you and the paper below at the same time." In that way, as Hockney explains, a skilled artist could trace the image, "fast-forwarding" through the normal process of measuring the subject's head by eye.

Hockney suggests there are two ways of working from life. One is what used to go on in art schools in front of a model: looking, measuring, groping to find the right line. The second way is to work from an image that is already there - a photograph, a projected slide. Hockney argued that Ingres was working in the second way, using the camera lucida rapidly to establish the key proportions of his sitter's face - which he then worked over more slowly without the optical aid. Then, equally rapidly, he jotted down the lines of their clothes, which he could see apparently hovering above the paper. Thus the use of this tool would explain puzzling features of the Ingres drawings, including the speed at which Ingres had been able to turn them out, and the fact that some lines looked traced.

At the time there was some coverage of this theory. Hockney talked about it, and did a series of drawings using the same technique. Over the last couple of years there have been further hints of how his mind was working - a letter to The Telegraph, for example, suggesting that Constable used an optical aid in painting his studies of clouds. There was a predictable, dismissive response: Hockney was mad, he had a bee in his bonnet. To which the artist calmly replied when we recently spent an evening discussing the subject: "Well, I know something that they don't."

Now, with the publication of this book, he lets the rest of us in on the secret. And his contentions are pretty astounding - not merely that some artists used certain bags of tricks, but that, effectively, the photographic way of looking at the world, through optical equipment, pre-dates, by centuries, the invention of photography itself. "The spirit of photography is much older than its history," said Hockney. "That is what my assistant David Graves and I have discovered." It began, according to the Hockney thesis, not with the discovery in the early 19th century that optical images could be chemically fixed on glass and paper, but in the early 15th century. And it began in just the places where we conventionally consider the Renaissance to have started - in the Flanders of van Eyck and the Florence of Masaccio and Brunelleschi.

"We went to Florence to attend a conference on art and science," Hockney explained. "And we stood on the exact spot that Brunelleschi is supposed to have stood when according to Vasari he made one of the first perspective paintings - of the baptistry from the cathedral. And onto a panel the precise size of his panel, which is described, we projected the baptistry, perfectly though upside down, with a mirror that cost us £6." And from an image such as this, Brunelleschi could have created his painting.

This is the truly startling aspect of Hockney's thesis. It has often been suggested that some artists, Vermeer and Canaletto in particular, might have used optical equipment. But Hockney has rediscovered a simple technique by which artists could have done so from the late Middle Ages on. All that is required is a concave mirror, in everyday terms, a shaving mirror, which we know to have been something that could have been manufactured at the time. Its opposite, a convex mirror - which simply has the silvering on the other side of the glass - is frequently depicted hanging on the wall of early Netherlandish paintings such as Van Eyck's Arnolfini portrait.

"It's very easy to do," Hockney went on. "We made experiments, and we found out how they used mirrors then. Nobody before has ever made these empirical tests - which is shocking in a way." He showed me videotapes of some of those experiments, in which extraordinarily beautiful, shimmering images appeared as if by magic in his Los Angeles studio.

The secret is that a concave mirror has the optical qualities of a lens. It will project an image onto a flat surface. And it will do so vividly if the thing to be projected is brightly illuminated, and the lens and the projection are in a darker space (Hockney experimented by painting a van Eyck-style portrait in this way of someone sitting outside a window).

These optical projections, as he calls them, are fascinating things. Their use would explain many aspects of paintings by masters as diverse as Holbein, Chardin, Caravaggio and Velazquez. The swirling satins, for example, of which 17th-century painters were so fond, are also exactly the kind of effect that optical projections pick out and enhance with hyper-real clarity. In his book he illustrates how the very simple, straightforward depiction of cloth by earlier artists such as Giotto and Pisanello was suddenly transformed into the complex, and technically difficult treatment of folds, patterns and textile texture in 16th- and 17th-century art.

The use of optical devices would explain the almost supernatural accuracy with which Holbein foreshortened the various items on the table in The Ambassadors. And Hockney has detected places where it looks as though artists such as Holbein and Lotto had to shift focus because part of, say, an oriental carpet had gone fuzzy.

Similar problems could explain why the figures in Caravaggio - as people noted at this year's Royal Academy exhibition - are often strangely grouped. Hockney argues that his paintings are, in effect, collages of optical projections done at different times. Small changes of focus or positioning might result in figures being too big, or oddly crammed together in too little space.

"Interestingly, another criticism of Caravaggio," says Hockney, "was that the sacred figures looked like ordinary people. But of course, they would have been ordinary people if he was using optics - just as a photographer would have to use ordinary people. That criticism was very similar to that made against a New Testament movie in the Fifties called The Road. Everybody wanted to know who the actor would be who would play Christ, and about his private life."

By 1600 Hockney believes that the technology had advanced sufficiently for lenses to be used instead of mirrors. Indeed, his theory suggests that the methods of some Old Masters were closer to those of 20th-century film and photographic media than might have been imagined. "I've become most interested in a painter called Cagnacci, whose work I used to walk past. Now I look at it and realise how close to a Hollywood studio his workshop must have been - you know, costumes, lighting, camera, action!"

But what Hockney is not saying is that in some way these Old Masters were cheating. "Well, people say, you shouldn't destroy the mystery. But how it's done is not the deepest mystery. Because in the end nobody knows how it's done - how art is made. It can't be explained. Optical devices are just tools. Understanding a tool doesn't explain the magic of creation. Nothing can." In fact, what he is suggesting is no more shocking than the use of photography by many later painters such as Sickert, Degas and Bacon.

Nor is he saying that all Old Masters used these techniques. In the book, he draws a diagram showing the interaction of the optical tradition with what he calls eye-balling. The argument is that many painters - Rubens, for example - did not use optical devices, but that even those who didn't were sometimes affected by the optical "look".

In fact, Hockney redraws most of Western art history, because his argument is also that the history of painting since the late 19th century is in part an attempt to escape the lens-eye view of the world. Cezanne, in particular, fought heroically to see the world in a different way - the way a two-eyed, mobile person sees it, rather than the way a fixed, single lens does. And this has been Hockney's own struggle as an artist. In the past he has worked in a near photographically naturalistic idiom, but also experimented with many other modes of representation. His final view is that the Western lens-based view of the world - which is now universally dominant thanks to the media of film and television - has become a trap.

"I'm coming round to the view that there's only a personal view of the world. There isn't anything else. What we call verisimilitude turns out to be the optical projection and its descendants, which is only one way of looking at the world." In other words, we have grown used to looking at the world through the eye of a camera, but there are other ways of seeing.

It's a truly radical view of the visual world. To put it bluntly, if Hockney is right, then a lot of art history, as it has been practised over the last century and more, is going to look a bit stupid.

There will be a tendency in some academic circles to dismiss his theories flatly. But then, art history as it has been practised up to now has been just that - a branch of history. It has derived from the study of documents, not from practical knowledge of what artists did in their studios (a murky subject about which there is little information).

That is Hockney's great strength. "Until now, art historians simply haven't known enough about how pre-photographic cameras and optical projections work. It's not in the nature of historians to make experiments. Scientists make experiments. Historians would say, we don't know Brunelleschi or van Eyck knew about how to do this - which I think is untenable."

Hockney has shown exactly how these optical tools could have been used - by using them himself. And he has turned up some written references, by Leonardo da Vinci, for example, and the 17th-century Dutch writer and patron Constantin Huygens, which seem to refer to the techniques he has rediscovered. "I think," he adds, "it's quite possible for knowledge to be lost."

None the less, his thesis lacks the smoking-gun evidence that some critics will require. On the other hand, a number of distinguished artists and art world figures have remarked to me that they believe Hockney is on to something. Far from being crazy, what he is saying makes lucid sense.

'Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters' by David Hockney is published by Thames & Hudson on Oct 15, price £35. It is available for £30 plus £1.99 postage through Telegraph Books Direct. To order please call 0870 155 7222. 'David Hockney - Secret Knowledge', an 'Omnibus' special, will be shown on BBC2 on Oct 13. Hockney's designs for Strauss's 'Die Frau ohne Schatten' can be seen at the Royal Opera House from Oct 9."