(Filed: 29/07/2003)
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| Jan van Eyck's Portrait of Arnolfini and His Wife |
One of the National Gallery's most extraordinary paintings, Jan van Eyck's Portrait of Arnolfini and His Wife, is at the centre of an increasingly ugly debate between scientists over whether the Flemish artist employed optical projections to help him paint it.
Controversial perspective: David Hockney
The claim was originally made more than two years ago by the artist David Hockney, in a book called Secret Knowledge. The book, which was followed by a BBC documentary and a segment on CBS's 60 Minutes programme in the US, emerged from several years of keen observation and frenetic hypothesising, and prompted a flurry of articles, seminars, conferences and websites.
Of course, art historians had known for a long time that certain Old Masters did use optical devices. Vermeer almost certainly used a camera obscura; Canaletto used lenses; and Ingres carried a camera lucida with him when making his portrait drawings. But, until Hockney and his friend the physicist Charles Falco came along, no one had suggested that a concave mirror might have been used as a lens by the likes of van Eyck as early as the 1420s.
The claim drew dismissals from many art historians, who were unimpressed by Hockney's inability to find conclusive written evidence for the claim. (His explanation was that the knowledge was kept secret by artists, hence the title of his book.) But, since an important part of the claims comes down to optical evidence and to knowledge of the history of lenses, much of the work of rebutting the claims has fallen to experts in the field of optics. And here, in the supposedly cool and calm climes of science, things have been getting shockingly heated.
Leading the anti-Hockney charge has been David Stork, an academic at Stanford University and chief scientist at Ricoh Innovations, who has written several papers attempting to rebut aspects of the Hockney-Falco theory. The most recent (soon to appear in Optics and Photonics News, a journal that has also published Hockney's and Falco's arguments) addresses specifically van Eyck's painting of the Arnolfini wedding.
Stork's efforts have not endeared him to Hockney and Falco. Falco says his papers "are so superficially incorrect that they're useless. Everything he's written has either been wrong or irrelevant or misleading, or all three. After a while, life's just too short."
Stork's paper on the van Eyck hypothesis addresses two main points. In Secret Knowledge, Hockney pointed to the convex mirror depicted in the Arnolfini painting: "If you reverse the silvering, and then turn it around [to produce a concave mirror], that would be all the optical equipment you would need for the meticulous and natural-looking detail in the picture."
Stork's response, hingeing on a lot of impressive-looking formulae, was to calculate the focal length of the mirror depicted by van Eyck and compare it to an estimate of the focal length of the concave mirror he may have used to make his projection.
"These lengths differ by over eight standard deviations," Stork concludes triumphantly, "and thus we must reject the conjecture that the depicted mirror was so used."
Falco's impatient retort has been to say that Hockney was never saying van Eyck used the same mirror depicted in the painting; he was just demonstrating the simplicity of the mechanism. Hockney had also claimed that van Eyck's incredibly detailed-looking chandelier (which reveals no underdrawing) was in "perfect perspective", suggesting to Hockney and Falco the assistance of an optical projection.
Stork, therefore, performs various perspective analyses on the chandelier, basically by extending lines from the image to see if they meet at the horizon. Since they don't, he concludes that the chandelier is not in perfect perspective at all. He even gets a contemporary British painter, Nicholas Williams, to paint a (simpler) chandelier "by eye" alone, and, finding that it is in perfect perspective, concludes "that a skilful artist does not need projections to achieve excellent perspective".
On this point, Falco can barely contain his exasperation. He argues that an image of any complex, handmade chandelier would fail the perspective analyses performed by Stork for the simple reason that any slight imperfection in it would prevent Stork's extended lines from meeting at the horizon. Falco's own, more sophisticated (he says) tests show that indeed van Eyck's perspective is virtually perfect.
One could go on endlessly with such arguments and all their multiple rebuttals. But what becomes most fascinating is the tone of the debate.
"Stork is such a literal-minded person. I wish he would go away," said Falco, who claimed his opponent is simply using the high-profile nature of the debate to get himself known.
Stork, in turn, is highly critical of Falco's perceived arrogance, and irritated by the way the debate is being conducted. "We cannot ignore the immense public-relations advantage of Hockney," he adds. "If the same (or better justified) ideas were put forth by an obscure scholar or brilliant graduate student, no one would pay attention."
Hockney, like Falco, is dismissive of Stork ("I never took him seriously"). But he seems increasingly keen to lift himself above the melée.
"I don't want to get involved with the scientists too much. They tend not to grasp what it is actually about. What they're asking is, 'Is David Hockney right or wrong?', which is a ridiculous way of looking at it."
Hockney's argument about the use of optical devices was part of a wider thesis on photography and its relationship to art. Such questions have been at the centre of his own practice for several decades, as anyone who has seen his inventive photocollages or shifting perspective paintings will know.
Although Hockney claims pictures themselves are his historical documents, ultimately, he is not so interested in making them perform the empiricist function scientists require. Instead, his observations are constantly being fed back into his concerns as a practising artist.
None of which is to deny the significance of his claim about the early use of mirror lenses. The question is important because van Eyck has always represented something of a turning point in art history. He attained a degree of detailed naturalism that seemed a quantum leap ahead of what had preceded them.
The usual explanation for this leap invokes the invention of oil paint, as well as the application of newly discovered rules of perspective. So it's no surprise that Hockney's suggestion that van Eyck had used an optical device came as a shock.
But, when I asked him if his thesis would be demolished if his speculation about van Eyck proved wrong, Hockney said: "No, of course not. To see the optical projection is to use it. You don't need to have traced from it. So the question is when did they first see it? That's a perfectly good question. And what I'm saying is that around 1420 there was a change in painting which had to do with optics. How it happened I can't be sure, but there was."
Stork says he came to Hockney's theory with an open mind. He now disagrees with the claims about van Eyck, but, when asked whether he thought artists might have used optical devices more than we previously realised, his admission seemed to echo what most people secretly think: "This is an interesting question, worthy of further analysis."
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