I think they also could have hired a professional artist to paint a second image without any aids and without knowing about the true purpose of project. Just to see whether the “human vision”-theory holds water.
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Fantastic re-creation of a painting. I hope Tim’s next project requires reconstructing Las Meninas by Velásquez.
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Really wish the article did a reasonable job explaining the difference between how humans see that back wall and how a camera records that back wall.
I mean anyone who’s spent any time with a camera and fussed with metering knows that they capture light differently than we see it, but the explanation in this article is barely comprehensible.
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If you want to make an apple pie from scratch…
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To illustrate you in plain and natural light for the verisimilitude you bear towards one uncouth and unlettered and destitute of reason.
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There were some color effecst that looked like chromatic aberration, which could indicate that optics were used.
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If only he’d made a DVD of his technique. I think Vermeer missed a trick there.
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You sound like an 18th Century trolley.
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Don’t take every bit of humor and lesson of history as a troll. That sort of reaction will lead to a lifetime of embarrassing moments when you realize that the things you dismissed because you didn’t understand them were actually a thing. You can either live with the embarrassment of not knowing and needing to learn or slide into the kind of purposeful ignorance that has you calling every bit of knowledge laid on you a troll or elitism.
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The part where this whole idea of replicating the painting breaks down for me is, how do we know what the texture of that original wall was, and how was the wall painted? Not in the painting, but the wall itself. It could very well have looked that way in real life.
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This guy really takes beating a dead horse seriously.
400 years ago Johannes Kepler described the camera lucida. In 1807 William William Hyde Wollaston patented it. In 2001 David Hockney wrote about it in ‘Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters’.
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I was being boggled by the idea that this random inventor (notwithstanding being friends with Penn Jillette) had all of these resources laying around his shop and could afford not inventing for a few years to pursue this, to my mind, trivial goal until I googled him. He has a buttload of money and his own company. Aha! I get it now.
(I’m not hating on rich people. I just need a cognitive shift sometimes when confronted with the hobbies of the rich, for which I would never have the time nor money.)
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I’m not taking everything as a trolley, jumping to conclusions there are you?
And, oh come on ‘Lexicat’ doesn’t actually speak like that now does he! I was having fun.
This whole article is full of pseudo intellectualism, and lots of nice toys for the guy to play with. Bless.
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There was a kickstarter for camera lucidas inspired by the Hockney-Falco hypothesis: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/neolucida/neolucida-a-portable-camera-lucida-for-the-21st-ce
I like the idea of looking at distortions likely to be caused by optics as evidence that lens based methods were used, even if there seems to be disagreement about the strength of the evidence.
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That’s a nice idea! I know someone who would love that.
The movie goes into considerably more detail on this, but the device they are using is NOT a camera obscura or camera lucida! Those are appropriate for DRAWING, but do not work for painting, because it is impossible to use one to match colors. If red light from an object shines onto your surface, and you put red paint over that red light, it appears white - you can’t see the tone or brightness of the paint. People have tried many times to use these devices to mimic Vermeer’s paintings and failed, because you can only match shape - not color, brightness or tone.
Tim’s device is similar, but because you use a mirror to compare your painted surface to the light from the object you can get an exact tonal match - something that isn’t possible with the human eye (really, it isn’t). The previous theories weren’t wrong, they just didn’t QUITE get to a workable solution. David Hockney is in the movie and agrees that this solution gets much closer to the results expected than the original devices ever did.
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The movie goes into a lot more detail on the topic of tonal matching, chromatic aberration, and optical distortions that all point to the use of optical tools being used for the painting.
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I think this was pretty neat. Especially the part where he cut his lathe in two pieces to make a longer leg for the harpsichord.
But ultimately this is just another situation where we arbitrarily decide a historical achievement was impossible for humans of that time period (see the Pyramids, Nazca Lines, Stonehenge, etc.). I’m surprised the big hypothesis with Vermeer doesn’t involve aliens.
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The trailer won’t load for me and there’s no diagram of the lens-and-mirror setup, so I’m having a hard time visualizing how this thing works.
Also, I don’t think that’s a viola.
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I must admit I was confused by this part of the article, too, but I thought it was just me.
He invented the Video Toaster!!
This was kind of a “killer app” for the Amiga, along the lines of desktop publishing apps for the Mac.
Also, this video above is amazing. It’s like they are parodying themselves and delighting in it.
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