Now that David Hockney’s controversial theory about the use of lenses and optical devices by Renaissance painters is being disputed again — this time by computer experts, as reported yesterday by the Sunday Herald in Scotland and today by The New York Times — it may be worth revisiting a lecture he gave on the subject at both Columbia University and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1999, two years before the publication of his book, Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters.
The lecture reminds us that his theory has everything to do with a reverence for drawing and not, as his opponents tend to assert, with its devaluation. This report is reprinted from MSNBC.com © 1999. — JH
ART AND TECH: AN INTIMATE, EARLY MIX
David Hockney gives art history a closer look, and greater relevancy to the present
By Jan Herman, MSNBC
NEW YORK, Nov. 4, 1999 — The idea that European painters from the 1500s on commonly used lenses and optical devices as tools of their trade has a special resonance for David Hockney, who believes that art must find its roots in drawing again and that drawing-by-other-means — digital imaging via computer, for example — has already begun that rediscovery.
“What’s interesting today,” Hockney says, “is what is happening to photography now that the computer has come along. Actually, the hand is coming back into the camera. What is called manipulation of photographs, I call drawing. What’s really happening is that we are beginning to draw through the camera, through the lens.”
Hockney relishes the proposition that art and technology had an intimate connection much earlier than generally asserted and that acknowledging the connection with the proper emphasis gives the history of Western art greater relevancy to the present.
In a recent lecture at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism co-sponsored by the National Arts Journalism Program with The School of the Arts and the Department of Art History, Hockney elaborated on these ideas, most of which he had outlined the previous week at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
“The whole point,” he said, “is that we have moved into a period where the photograph has lost its veracity. You don’t necessarily have to believe anything that’s happening in a photograph. We did believe it for a certain length of time, or thought we did.
“Now there’s no need to believe it at all, meaning that photography is in a sense back with drawing and painting, actually like drawing and painting. Nobody foresaw that happening. That’s why it’s interesting to look back into the history of European painting and to see how the lens was used with the hand.”
Hockney contends that the use of lenses as an aid to draftsmanship — helping artists see the curvature of space, so to speak — explains more than any other single reason why “there is no awkward drawing, none,” in almost 400 years of Western art until the late 19th century.
When Cezanne came along in 1870 and rejected the lens, his influence (especially on the French Impressionists), combined with the rise of chemical photography, altered the way painters chose to look at the world and obscured the hand-lens connection.
Moreover, the development of lenses and optical devices can be traced in paintings themselves, without reference to historical documents, simply by observing the increasingly sophisticated changes in painted or drawn perspective: They went from simple mathematical and geometric foreshortening to the more complex, purposeful distortions of telescopic and telephoto effects.
Here are some of Hockney’s remarks from his illustrated lecture at Columbia:
TWO MEN AND A LUTE In 1525 Dürer makes an engraving of two men drawing a lute. The lute is very difficult to draw, he’s telling you. Supremely difficult. … Holbein’s “The Ambassadors” is painted in 1533, only eight years after Dürer made that engraving. … Well, Holbein does a lute not bad. … His painting is made with an unbelievable accuracy for everything. … The [fabric] patterns are amazingly accurate. They tilt when [the cloth] folds. The pattern follows the folds. Geometry wouldn’t do that. So I thought, “It was lenses.” …
Then in 1590 Caravaggio paints a picture in which he not only does a lute in marvelous perspective, he throws in a violin, also in perfect perspective. You can even read all the music. Now how did he do it? … I suggest that lenses were used and that they were more advanced lenses than previously.
THE POPE AND HIS LENS I went to Caravaggio straight away, because people often thought Caravaggio did use lenses, did use optics, because there are no drawings. He didn’t make drawings. … Going back further than Caravaggio, I’m going to Raphael [who] painted [a] portrait of the pope in 1518. If you notice, very, very accurate fabrics. Extremely accurate shadows. And in his hand the pope’s got a lens the size of the diameter of a can of beans. The size of Caravaggio’s lens was two cans of beans. He had a telephoto lens. …
Well, who, you might ask would have the best lenses, the scientists or the pope? Well, I think the pope would have the best lenses then, and the image makers would have the best lenses because images were considered more powerful at that time. … This is Raphael’s pope, 1518, with a pretty good lens. This is Velazquez’s pope, 1650, probably
with an even better lens. …PRE-RAPHAELITE, PRE-LENS? [Notice] Raphael of different years. [In] 1505, not much pattern in his sleeves…. By the time he gets to 1518, there’s a very elaborate pattern following the forms. … He’s able to do it precisely. … Is it just another skill he learned? Is it just that? I don’t think so. I think it’s use of optics. That’s what I’m saying. …
Detail of Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres’ “Comtesse Charles d’Agoult, née Marie de Flavigny, and Her Daughter Claire d’Agoult,” 1849, graphite with white highlights on paper. The highly detailed rendering of the patterns and folds of fabric indicate the artist’s likely use of a lens.
Historically … after the invention of chemicals with the lens, which meant photography, painting veers off and that was 1870 in France — Cezanne and the Impressionists. … In England they had an odd movement, they called themselves pre-Raphaelites. … Do you think they were just [pre-Raphaelite] in a literary way, not in a visual way? Getting at something about pre-lens? I don’t know … I’m just pointing it out. …
It would be sad if anybody thought what I am saying [about the use of lenses] diminished anything. On the contrary, it makes it far more interesting and far more interesting to us today. The great skills took a long time. As I point out, look at Frans Hals and at his contemporaries. They had the same tool. They just didn’t have the same heart, or the hand. And that makes the difference.
