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,

,

,

l

I

/

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9March

30 April

This

book is in three parts. The first is the visual presentation

of

a thesis I have been

developing over the past two years. The second is a collection

of

extracts

from

some

of

the documents I came across dur ing my research. And the third is a selection

of

notes,

essays and letters written to clarify my ideas as they developed and

as

part of a dialogue

with

Martin Kemp, Charles Falco, John Walsh and

other

experts.This correspondence

tells the story of my investigations.

The thesis I am

putting

forward here

is that

from the early fifteenth century many

Western artists used optics - by which I mean mir rors and lenses (or acombination of

the two - to create living projections. Some artists used these projected images directly

to produce drawings and paintings, and before long this new way of depicting the world

- this new way of seeing - had become widespread. Many art historians have argued

that certain painters used the camera obscura in their work - Canaletto and Vermeer,

in particular, are often cited - but,

to

my knowledge, no one has suggested that optics

were used

as

widely or

as

early

as

I am arguing here.

In

early 19991 made a

drawing

using a camera lucida. lt was an experiment, based on

a hunch

that

Ingres, in the first decades of

the

nineteenth century, may have occasionally

used this little optical device, then

newly

invented. My curiosity had been aroused when

I

went

to an exhibition of his portraits at London s National Gallery and was struck by

how

small

the

drawings were, yet

so

uncannily accurate . I

know

how difficult

it is to

achieve

such precision, and wondered how he had done it . What followed led

to

this book.

At first, I found the camera lucid a very difficult to use. It doesnt pro ject a real image

of

he subject, but an illusion of one in

the

eye. When you move your head everything

moves with it, and the artist must learn to make very quick notati ons to fix the position of

2

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4 8

Rob

ert Ca

mp in

7

Ican be certain

th t

Robert Campin and

Jan

van Eyck knew bout mirrors and lenses - the

two basic elements of the modern camera - for

they painted some in several

oftheir

pictures

of he 1430s and, at

th t

time, painters and

mirror-makers were

both

members

of

the same

guild). ln the Campin, the mirror s convex

easier

to

make than a flat mirror); and in the

van Eyck, Canon van der Paele holds a pair

of

spectacles. Lenses and mirrors were stil l rare

then, and artists would have been fascinated by

the strange effects they produced. s people

who

made images, they must have been

amazed th t whole figures, even whole rooms,

could be seen in

just

a small convex mirror.

Surely it is no coincidence th t such mirrors

arrived in painting at the same

time as

greater

individuality appeared in portraiture.

6

Jan

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7 < the visu l

evide 1ce

)

\

(

L

These photographs show the process in more detail. At the

top

left you

can see

the projection on the paper as I make

my

initia l marks, two stages of which you

can see

top right.

After making

the

measurements, I take

down

the paper and

complete the drawing from life (the finished portrait is

opposite). The subject,

who

sits outside throughout,

can

see

very

little

of

wh t

is

going on in the room.

He

is

not

even

aware th t the mirror is there above

nd

eft).

I

have

been

told

by some art historians th t there

are

written accounts of similar set-ups in the fifteenth and

sixteenth centuries, but as yet I

have

not located them.

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8 6

Jean -Auguste-Dominique Ingres

The portrait above right

is

one of

he

few surviving drawings by Jan

van Eyck.lt is said

to

be of Cardinal Niccol6 Albergati, and was drawn

while he was in Bruges on a three-day trip in December 1431. To me

it has the

look of an Ingres drawing, like the one above, for

the

physiognomy is perfectly accurate while

the

clothes are

less

precise,

possibly eyeballed.The Cardinal's pupils are sharply contracted, as if

he were in a strong light.

As

I discovered

with my

mirror-lens set-up,

you need a strong

light for any 'natural' projection.

Van

Eyck 'sdrawing

of

he

Cardinal

is

about 48 life

size

but

the

painting opposite)

is

41 larger than

the

drawing. What is amazing is

that

when

you enlarge the drawing by that amount and lay it over

the painting, many of

he

features line up

exactly the

forehead and

the

right cheek,

the

nose and

the

nostrils, the mouth and

the

lips,

the

eyes and

the

laughter lines - all align perfectly. Now shift

the

drawing

78