DocBug

Update on Art & Optics

Some time ago I posted about the ongoing debate between David Hockney and our Cheif Scientist, David Stork, about whether the great painters of the 15th century "cheated" by secretly using optical devices like the camera obscura. Hockney thinks the realism one suddenly sees in paintings around 1430 proves that such devices were used, even though no record of them can be found (they were secret, remember?). Stork thinks it's hogwash, and has both proposed numerous ways the realism could have been acheived using technology known to exist at the time and pointed out reasons the optical techniques Hockney proposes wouldn't have worked anyway.

Now the New Scientist is reporting that evidence of one alternative technology Stork suggested has been found:

Separate findings will be published in March by Thomas Ketelsen, a curator at the Museum of Prints, Drawings and Manuscripts in Dresden, Germany. Hockney has argued that the similarity between Jan van Eyck's drawing Portrait of Niccolò Albergati and a larger oil painting of the same name could only have been achieved using optical projections. But using a microscope, Ketelsen has found evidence of previously unseen pinpricks in the drawing - suggesting the copying method was mechanical, not optical. He suggests that a type of reducing compass called a "reductionzirkel" might have been used.

Falco points out that the pinpricks could have been made 50 years after van Eyck's death by someone wishing to copy it, or even 500 years after. "Holes can't be carbon dated," he says. But Stork thinks the mounting evidence can't be ignored. "The evidence doesn't support Hockney," he says.

"The debate is fascinating," Hockney says. "But it cannot end just because someone found pinpricks."

Hockney's argument was never strong to begin with, but it's starting to sound like he's join the ranks of creationists, alien abduction followers and conspiracy nuts. If so, he may as well have ended his last sentence after the fourth word...