Reverse-Engineering a Genius (Has a Vermeer Mystery Been Solved?)
By Kurt Andersen
In the history of art, Johannes Vermeer is almost as mysterious and unfathomable as Shakespeare in literature, like a character in a novel. Accepted into his local Dutch painters guild in 1653, at age 21, with no recorded training as an apprentice, he promptly begins painting masterful, singular, uncannily realistic pictures of light-filled rooms and ethereal young women. After his death, at 43, he and his minuscule oeuvre slip into obscurity for two centuries. Then, just as photography is making highly realistic painting seem pointless, the photorealistic Sphinx of Delft is rediscovered and his pictures are suddenly deemed valuable. By the time of the first big American show of Vermeer paintingsat the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in 1909their value has increased another hundred times, by the 1920s ten times that.
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.
At the beginning of this century, however, two experts of high standing begged to differ. Why, for instance, did Vermeer paint things in the foreground and shiny highlights on objects slightly out of focus? Because, they say, he was looking at them through a lens. By itself, Vermeers Camera: Uncovering the Truth Behind the Masterpieces, by a London architecture professor named Philip Steadman, might have stirred a minor academic fuss. But a mainstream controversy was provokedconferences, headlines, outrage, name-callingbecause a second, more sweeping and provocative argument was made by one of the most famous living painters, David Hockney. Hockney argued in Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of Old Masters, that not only Vermeer but many great painters from the 15th century on must have secretly used lens-and-mirror contraptions to achieve their photorealistic effects.
Leading art historians were unpersuaded. Hockney, people said, was just jealous because he lacks the old masters skills. I dont oppose the notion that Vermeer in some way responded to the camera obscura, said Walter Liedtke, then as now the Mets curator of European paintings (including its five Vermeers), but I do oppose drastic devaluations of the role of art.
more
http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2013/11/vermeer-secret-tool-mirrors-lenses