Great test. I just scored a 0. I’m a photographer with a background in painting. I also have the advantage of doing the test on an IPS monitor. The idea that a camera sees perfectly is a bad joke. I’d be out of a job color correcting images. Even if Vermeer used a device like this one, it’s just a tool. Vermeer himself IS the camera!
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Maybe I should have added a few thoughts other than what I did. My idea is that often I see a tendency to reduce all great things to some mere technical process. There is a desire to ‘pull back the curtain’ and expose the ‘wizard’ as just a mere mortal with fancy tools. There were others who were probably using the same methods (de Hooch comes to mind) but they lack the sensitivity. I am in awe at the use of innovative methods used by artists of the past and it only makes sense that they used them. Great art, however, is not great due to the form only but also the content.
Neat! I got 0. I had already taken this test (IRL with little coloured circles) when I got certified as a jewellery appraiser. Very slight differences in hue/tone of gemstones can make a big difference in value, so it is important to have acute colour vision. I’m an artist now, so it comes in handy as well…
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Thanks! A friend showed me it some time ago. I’ll happily admit that I rushed the test this time just so I could post a score from today (my monitor hasn’t been calibrated in far too long!). I do usually score 2 or below, and the last line is the one I tend to error on.
Cameras don’t see perfectly, but they read color without mental adaptation. Human eyes work with the brain to see the color that “should” be there. I think that’s what he was trying to talk about, but ultimately failed in describing. Here’s one article about “white balance” and correcting photos (which you know all about) for different types of light.
Basically, the human eye does see the different colors, but our brains make us believe that other colors are present (a white wall is never truly white all over, but we see it that way in passing). It’s a shortcut our brains use, and the source of several optical illusions. The problem with his argument is that trained artists have been taught to see the various colors that make up a blend in a wide swath of one shade. It’s how pointillism and realism both work.
Durer and others had figured out ray tracing by 1525 so none of this should come as any surprise. Nor were these techniques mandatory for producing accurate realism. They used what they wanted when it suited them, but didn’t rely on it.
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This is fascinating, and seems plausible, but I was disappointed by the poor description of the “optical machine”. There are a couple of photographs that seem to show this “mirror on a stick”, but I’m not sure that’s what I’m looking at. A decent photograph or (even better) a diagram would have made this a more satisfying article.
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If you were standing in the room that Vermeer painted, you would see that wall as a pretty even shade of off-white.
That simply is not true. I can look up at the wall in my room right now with light streaming in very much like in the Vermeer room, and I see something very similar to the painting. The wall, which is painted one color, has a lovely gradient.
If anything, Vermeer’s eye exceeded anything a camera obscurae was capable of doing. Painting realistic images just requires practice and talent, both of which Vermeer had in abundance.
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Well, crap, I got a 101. Don’t know how much of that is my eyes, how much of that is due to my uncalibrated monitor, and how much is due to my rushing the test…I am slightly colorblind, but (somewhat irritatingly) just in one eye.
Now’s not when I confess to “eyeballin’ it” when I calibrated monitors as an IT person, is it?
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This sort of enrages me. It’s shocking that people will take a bald-faced assertion like “Vermeer had done something humanly impossible,” and run with it before checking to see if it is even true in the first place. Maybe talk to an actual oil painter first before assuming they don’t know how light falls off across a plane?
The device he used is called a camera lucida and its the same one Hockney swears is the answer. Theres an even simpler way to match colors and it’s popular amongst old lady painters; you hold up a neutral grey card with a hole in it and then mix paint to match the color in the hole… It works perfectly. And it doesn’t matter.
It’s so frustrating when people refuse to believe that someone is just really good at what they do. There has to be some secret. It’s like trying to show that it is impossible for LeBron to be so good at Basketball. Of course he’s that good. It’s not magic. It’s just that the demand for basketball excellence has allowed a naturally gifted athlete to redefine the top of the field. In a different place or time he might be a champion cricket player or just an ordinary person. Likewise, Vermeer was operating at the pinnacle of representational painting and was the benefactor of all the knowledge of those who came before him. He was technically gifted and the climate was ripe for someone to advance the field. No magic required.
Its like the ancient aliens theories. “No way that those stupid people in the past could make the pyramids!!”
Arrgh.
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How on Earth is this even close to theorizing that aliens built the pyramids?
And how would using this technique invalidate any of Vermeer’s work? Does knowing that some of the greats were mathmematicians and used 3D projection to get their perspective right in their paintings? How does this, in any way, induce rage? Why wouldn’t a great artist use available tools to perfect his art?
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I think it was referred to in the film as a viola da gamba, which is like a cello, but built like a viol.
I initially had the same reaction, and agree with your general sentiment about refinement of skill. But first of all, this is not a camera lucida nor was Jenison testing Hockney’s hypothesis. He is using a comparator, a very different, simpler, and more likely device for this purpose. Jenison is well aware of Hockney’s ideas and even met with him to discuss this. The article has oversimplified and glossed over some key points, especially the kind of chromatic aberration that should occur in the final painting if Vermeer used such a tool, and which does in fact appear in his work. Finally, to Jenison’s credit, he clearly states this does not prove Vermeer used a comparator, only that he very realistically could have.
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One weird trick that Vermeer doesn’t want you to know about!
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Sigh. I’m nearsighted as hell but managed to get a zero on the first try. Bubble sort is most anal sort.
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Picasso was a Cubist and Sculptor, though. He was not an Impressionist, or anything resembling one. Using the right words is not “intellectualizing.” Is it “intellectualizing” to not call Picasso an eggplant or a pillowcase, or any other sort of thing which Picasso was not?
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Also, I’m kind-of amazed that no one has mentioned Terry Pratchett’s iconograph, a piece of Discworld technomancy which has featured in nearly all his books, especially in Moving Pictures.
The idea is that in the absence of chemical photography, because (al)chemicals tend to go boom with even more frequency than magical textbooks, denizens of the Discworld found it much easier to simply create and enslave tiny imps who were imprisoned in small camera obscurae and tasked with observing a scene and painting it accurately. To make a moving picture, large box-cameras are used with volatile film (cellophane was dangerous enough, adding silver nitrate and other alchemicals would have destroyed the entire city. Again; as nearly happened during the epic first and final screening of Blown Away, the romantic retelling of one of Ankh Morpork’s many civil wars.) and a chain gang of imps painting with super speed as the film speeds past.
As a result of these subtle technical differences, Discworld’s magical “clicks” (as opposed to our mundane flicks) were in color from the very beginning, with sound eluding the engineers of Untied Artists before the entire industry collapsed due to, well, the unintended consequences of tapping into too much imagination.
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My feeble brain just exploded into a million tiny pointillists.
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11? man i thought i did great and got a 38! ugh, perception is hard.
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I think it’s time for a Discworld fanfic of some retired imp, a really old one originally from the spell dungeons of Bes Pellargic, an imp whose making was so solid that he’ll never evaporate from disuse. He begins by experimenting with technique, taking in the projected scene and then closing the shutter before painting. Oh, he begins having so much fun. Shenanigans ensue, with some side adventures of hi-jinks.
Hehehe! I’m farsighted and starting cataracts, and I got a zero as well. I was a painter in my youth before musical composition took over, and, I sez it wot shouldn’t, a fairly good colourist. (Of course, I’m not any worse off now than Monet was in his twilight years, and his late paintings are gorgeous…)
The way to check is to swap pairs of tiles when you get a tile into the right area. If the tile is out of place in the gradient, it sticks out when you flip the pair back and forth - you can see it. That’s why Andy was talking about bubble sort (actually, a little more like Quick Sort when you start to get rolling). Mind you, if you have physical problems with colour perception (entirely possible, especially with males), then you may be SOL.
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