"I have a chance to hear this seminar in person."
Professor Charles M. Falco
Optical Sciences Center
University of Arizona
The Science of Optics; The History of Art
Recently, renowned artist David Hockney observed that certain
drawings and paintings from as early as the Renaissance seemed
almost "photographic" in detail. Following an extensive visual
investigation of western art of the past 1000 years, he made the
revolutionary claim that artists, even of the prominence of van
Eyck and Bellini, must have used optical aids. However, art
historians insisted there was no supporting evidence for such a
remarkable assertion. In this talk, I will present a wealth of
optical evidence for Hockney's claim, evidence discovered during a
productive collaboration between an artist and a scientist. I will
also discuss the unique properties of the "mirror lens" and some
of this work's implications for the history of science and the
history of art. These discoveries convincingly demonstrate optical
instruments were in use-by artists, not scientists-nearly 200
years earlier than previously thought possible and account for the
remarkable transformation in the reality of portraits that
occurred early in the 15th century.
Acknowledgments: This work was done in collaboration with David
Hockney. We gratefully acknowledge David Graves (London), Ultan
Guilfoyle (Guggenheim), Martin Kemp (Oxford University), Masud
Mansuripur (University of Arizona), José Sasián (University of
Arizona), Richard Schmidt (Los Angeles), and Lawrence Weschler
(The New Yorker) for a variety of valuable contributions to our
efforts.
 |
||||||||
|
|
||||||||
