A New Master Reconsiders the Old
by Jennifer Dalton
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Earthquake
Ione Citrin
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British artist David Hockney is best known for his collages of overlapping photographs and his colorful paintings of Los Angeles life. But he has recently made a controversial name for himself as an art historian. His newest obsession is with the practices of the Old Masters.
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Hockney has become convinced that as early as the 16th century, artists such as Dürer and Caravaggio began using mirrors and lenses to project images in order to draw people and difficult foreshortened objects quickly and confidently.
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Young Woman with a Mirror
Roger-Bernard
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The Duchess' Thoughts
Roxa Smith
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In a process similar to that of modern overhead projectors, when light passes through this lens, an inverted image can be projected onto a surface behind or below it. Then, the image can be traced quickly. In photography, this same lens was adapted to cast an image on light-sensitive surfaces to fix the image there permanently. But Hockney believes that the lens itself, or others like it, was in use by artists for centuries before the invention of photography.
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Hockney believes that the use of lenses explains why painterly perspective changed so quickly around the year 1525 from the flat, distorted (to modern eyes) painting of Medieval times to a perspective that looks real to us now--real in the way photography looks real. Hockney also believes that his theory explains why there are so few surviving preliminary sketches for very
complex compositions that would seem to require them--unless the artists had the aid of this device.
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Medieval
Maria Pietri Lalor
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As art historians and scholars are researching Hockney's thesis, we can expect some heated debates. Meanwhile, Hockney insists that the proposition that revered artists like Caravaggio and Ingres used lenses to trace out their subjects doesn't diminish their achievements. After all, they still painted better than almost anyone can today, even with the use of photographs and computers.
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Hockney's work can be seen at www.msnbc.com and
metalab.unc.edu.
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Read our archived Art in the News |
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