Issue of
2000-01-31
Posted 2001-11-19
In January, 2000, Lawrence Weschler published
an article in The
New Yorker about a startling theory advanced by the
artist David Hockney: that the Old Masters used lenses and other
projection devices to make their paintings—a technique, Hockney
argues, that they considered a trade secret. This December, at a
public www.artandoptics.com sponsored by the New York Institute for
the Humanities at New York University, Hockney, Weschler, Gilles
Peress, Chuck Close, and others will discuss new evidence that
Hockney has uncovered as well as the larger controversy that his
assertion has provoked. Hockney's book on the subject, "Secret
Knowledge," is available through Viking Studio. The original
article appears below.
Watch out! It looks like David Hockney is on
another one of his perceptual/conceptual tears. Or so I came to
realize several weeks ago when I happened to be in Los Angeles and,
as I sometimes do on such occasions, called him up, and immediately
found myself being ordered about. "Get up here!" Hockney
commanded. "There's something I have to show you!" Meeting
me at the door of his colorful Hollywood Hills home a few hours
later, Hockney led me straightaway up the path to his hillside
studio. Though his hearing has been deteriorating, and he now wears
an earpiece, Hockney, at the age of sixty-two, is tall and
determined, and, loping ahead of me as he opened the studio door,
seemed more vigorous than he has in years.
The wall to the left of the studio entry was covered with dozens
of recent portraits of friends—evidence of a suddenly renewed
interest in the form. Hockney allowed me a few moments to admire the
pictures, but rather quickly (and quite uncharacteristically) he drew
me away toward a wide worktable in the middle of the studio, which
was covered with art books, reference manuals, bulging folders, and
scribbled memos. One might have been excused for imagining Hockney to
be gearing up for a full-frontal assault on the entire history of the
Western painterly tradition; and, as it turned out, one would not
have been far wrong.
"The past year, as you know, was an incredible one for art
shows," Hockney began. "The Pollock in New York, the Monet
in London, and the Ingres, also, initially, in London. I spent hours
at each, and each seemed to leave me more exhilarated than the one
before. Especially the Ingres, which I went back to three times—the
paintings, but, in particular, the drawings. Now, for someone like
me, trained in the conventional Carracci tradition—you know, plumb
line, the extended thumb, gauging relative proportions, and so
forth—those pencil portraits of Ingres's were mind-boggling. For one
thing, their size—how small they turn out to be, when you get to see
them in person. The images are seldom more than twelve by eight
inches, incredibly detailed and incredibly assured. If you draw at
all, you know that's very rare and not at all easy.
"I bought the catalogue, brought it back here to L.A.,
studied it some more, read every word, blew up some of the drawings
on the copier over there, and one morning, studying the blowups, I
found myself thinking, Wait, I've seen that line before. Where have I
seen that line? And suddenly I realized, That's Andy Warhol's
line."
Hockney cited a show of Warhol's "Studio Still-Lifes" at
Paul Kasmin's gallery, in New York, the year before last. "And
Andy's is indeed the same kind of line: clean, fast, completely
assured. Now, in Andy's case we know he was using a slide
projector—Kasmin even had the original photos from which Andy had
traced his images." Hockney reached for the Kasmin catalogue,
opened the slim volume to a page featuring Warhol's 1975 arrangement
of a bowl, a can opener, and a handheld mixer, and then opened his
well-thumbed Ingres volume to the stunning 1816 portrait of Lady
William Bentinck.
"Look at that," Hockney said, "and now look at
this, especially the clothes, the fall of the draped cloak, the
ruffle around the neck, the gathered sleeve, and then her expression,
its palpable freshness: the speed of the line, its boldness, its
absolute confidence, no awkwardness, no hesitancy. Of course, Ingres
wasn't using a slide projector, but he might well have been using a
camera, a refracting instrument of some sort."
Hockney reminded me that cameras and lenses long predated the
invention of chemically fixed photography. For that matter, the
things that happen to light as it passes through a pinhole are
natural phenomena—"as omnipresent and wondrous as
rainbows," Hockney said, and went on, "People have
marvelled over them literally for millennia, tinkering with ways to
exploit the effects. And the more I looked at Ingres's drawings the
more convinced I became, on the basis of the optical evidence of the
images themselves, that Ingres had to be using some sort of device
based on those effects."
Hockney recalled how when he was in art school he'd been shown a
camera lucida, a device invented in 1807. So now he sent his
assistant down to an art-supply shop to see if he could find one.
"Turns out they're relatively rare nowadays and quite expensive:
the one he found cost over two thousand dollars," Hockney said.
"Anyway, I set up a little corner and—come here, I'll show
you."
Alongside the drawings wall, Hockney had erected
an alcove, cordoned off with screens and curtains. This cozy little
nook contained a comfortable chair propped before a flat drawing
table, on which Hockney had installed his camera lucida—a tiny prism
(barely wider than an eyeball) suspended, as if free-floating, at the
end of a flexible metal rod. He showed me how when you looked down
through the prism the image of whatever happened to be before you
seemed to be transposed onto the tabletop—or to any blank sheet of
paper that you might put there. The effect was illusory: no image was
actually being cast on the page, as with a slide projector. But one
could deploy the illusion to help capture a likeness.
"Sit there," Hockney commanded, and then spent a few
moments adjusting my pose. "Perfect," he said. "stay
like that." He fetched a sheet of paper and a cannister of
pencils, laid the page beneath the prism, and set to work.
The first part of the session lasted about an hour, but Hockney
used the camera lucida itself for only two or three minutes—quickly
and, yes, with startling assuredness, sketching out the tangle of my
hands, legs, and sleeves, and then, turning to my face, laying in the
general shape of my head. Muttering, "This is the crucial
part," he posited, with the faintest of pencil stabs, the
coördinates of my pupils, the corners of my eyes, my nostrils, the
lay of my glasses over my ears, the edges of my mouth. After that, he
reverted to a more standard posture, gazing past the hovering prism,
as if it weren't even there, and probing my face and then the page,
back and forth. His own face was becoming increasingly scrunched up
with concentration, so much so that at one point his earpiece began
to screech (he plucked it out and set it aside). Only once or twice
thereafter did he bother to look through the prism, for minor
adjustments.
At length, we took a break, and Hockney reinserted his earpiece.
The gist of the image was already well in hand. "Especially the
mouth," Hockney said, tapping the page. "It's always the
hardest to get right when you're just eyeballing it. Wasn't it
Sargent who said, 'A portrait is a painting with something wrong with
the mouth'? And a smile is hardest of all: it's not just the mouth
but, rather, the precise fleeting relation of the mouth and the eyes,
the crinkles around the eyes. I used to struggle for hours to get a
proper likeness, revising and revising so as to transcend the
drawing's inherent awkwardness, and, even so, if you look back, say,
at those meticulously realistic drawings of mine from the early
seventies, you'll notice how the sitters are hardly ever smiling:
they're stiff, poised, still—posed."
He reached once more for the Ingres catalogue. "Whereas here,
look," he said, turning the page. "And this one here, see:
absolutely no awkwardness. Not always; not every time. In some of the
studies, especially early ones, he's laid in a traditional grid, and
you can see his hand groping. But then you get another of those
amazing pencil portraits he was doing in Rome, as a kind of
sideline—visiting English gentry on their grand tours, people he was
often meeting for the first time. He just dashes the images off,
usually in a single sitting, with complete authority."
Hockney rifled among some of the other books and images spread
about his table. "The thing is, once I started seeing it in Ingres,
I began to notice lens- or mirror-based imagery, optically rendered
imagery, in all sorts of other places, including before Ingres, and
in fact well before. Hundreds of years before.
"Look here," he said, grabbing a photocopied image.
"Most painters, most artists, are highly secretive about their
methods. One of the few who were willing to divulge their secrets was
Dürer, in the early sixteenth century. In this woodcut, he's showing
how you drew a lute in perspective, without, or maybe before the introduction
of, lenses. Very complicated; very cumbersome. Takes two guys, an
adjustable sightline, a slidable perpendicular grid, a page mounted
on a hinged side panel that keeps getting swung into and out of
position to note the precise spot where the moving sightline crosses
the imaginary picture plane . . . Must have taken hours.
That's—what?—that's 1525. And now look at this." Hockney pulled
out a reproduction of Caravaggio's "Boy Playing the Lute."
"This is—what?—1595. Not only has Caravaggio rendered a lute in
complex perspective, perfectly and seemingly effortlessly, with
absolute authority, but he's thrown in a violin lying there on the
table for good measure."
Back to Dürer, 1525. Hockney showed me another woodcut, this one
portraying an artist using an intervening gridded glass plane to
block out a portrait; the artist has to keep his eye steady, peering
through an eyehole at the tip of a raised stick, and his subject is
forbidden to move. "No wonder," Hockney was saying,
"that when you paint like this you end up with faces like
this." He showed me a Cranach the Younger rendering of
"Christ and the Fallen Woman" from around the same period:
stiff, impassive faces, mouths grimly shut, expressions stilled.
"Whereas just a few years later you get faces like
these." Hockney began flipping through a nearby Caravaggio
catalogue. Almost all the faces were vividly alive, openmouthed
("You try keeping your mouth open like that for more than a few
moments, as one would have had to, using Dürer's gridded-glass method"),
and characterized above all by fleeting, evanescent
expressions—expressions, as Hockney put it, "captured on the
fly."
He went on, "Notice the constant sense of assurance. And with
no drawings, no sketches! There are no preparatory studies with Caravaggio.
At any rate, none have survived. Or, for that matter, with Velázquez.
Or Vermeer. Or Hals. Or Chardin. Hardly any." Hockney rustled
through one reproduction after another. "Suddenly, they all seem
to be able to render the image, just like that, onto the canvas
itself. And it's not just the great masters." He showed me Dirck
van Baburen's "Concert," of 1623: a lute, a violin, one
player grinning antically, another with his mouth open. Seemingly
effortless.
Of course, optics don't make paintings; artists
do. As Hockney put it, "The lens can't draw a line, only the
hand can do that, the artist's hand and eye in coördination with his
heart. And, in any case, such optical devices are quite hard to use.
You have to be a good draftsman to be able to take advantage of them
at all. It took me a good several months to learn how to use that
camera lucida. You look at somebody like Ingres, and it would be
absurd to think that such an insight about his method undercuts the
sheer marvel of what he achieves. Nobody can do it as well as he
can—the subtlety of characterization, the inner life of the
drawings—and the more I study him my admiration just goes up and up
and up. This whole insight about optical aids doesn't diminish
anything; it merely suggests a different story, a more accurate one,
perhaps—certainly a more interesting one."
With growing excitement, Hockney proceeded to lay out the broad
contours of that story as he was beginning to understand it. Coming
out of the Middle Ages, most painting, most rendering, he suggested,
was a matter of "eyeballing," of "awkward, groping
approximation," but the early Renaissance, especially in Italy,
saw the rise of various mathematical systems of perspective and
proportion—the transition, say, from Giotto to Piero della Francesca
and Uccello, and then on through the glories of the High Renaissance,
to Michelangelo and Titian. These systems of perspective were
grounded in ever more elaborate intellectual superstructures, a
virtual science of vision: tapering grids projected onto empty space,
and then filled, according to rigorous rules, with the artist's
idealized renditions of reality.
Hockney was becoming convinced, however, that during the sixteenth
century, in different places and at different rates, an alternative
way of proceeding started to emerge—one based on mirrors and lenses.
It had been widely known since antiquity (Aristotle and Euclid both
make much of the fact) that when light passes through a small hole
into a darkened enclosure a vivid if inverted image of the external
world may appear on the far wall. The effect was much discussed, in
tones of hushed and pious marvel, during the Middle Ages, and went on
to become a central motif—the metaphor, that is, of the eye itself,
and, for that matter, the mind, as a room receiving, through a
pinhole and onto a blank wall, sense impressions from the outside
world—in the epistemologies of thinkers ranging from Kepler and
Newton through Descartes, Leibniz, Locke, and beyond. With the
passage of time, the effect was deployed in a series of ever more
sophisticated boxes—cameras obscura (literally, "darkened
rooms")—with lenses to sharpen the projection and mirrors to
reverse the inversion. Inevitably, such boxes drew the attention of
artists; by the middle of the seventeenth century and into the
eighteenth, the devices were in common evidence. Canaletto, for
example, used them in his depictions of Venice.
But Hockney was increasingly certain that versions of
lens-and-mirror technology (perhaps without the rigid confines of the
camera obscura itself) were being used by artists long before
that—initially, perhaps, in Northern Europe (with Van Eyck and
subsequently the Dutch landscape artists), but rather quickly
spreading into northern Italy (and especially Caravaggio's Lombardy)
as well.
The transition to lens-assisted artistic production was not
without its controversies. Caravaggio, for instance, was regularly
attacked by his more conventionally perspectival academic
contemporaries, but, as Hockney now pointed out, "the attacks
themselves were quite revealing." He reached for Howard
Hibbard's 1983 monograph on the artist, which includes a generous
sampling of such criticism. For instance, he cited Giovanni Pietro
Bellori's slamming of Caravaggio for making "no attempt to
improve on the creations of nature" and for lacking
"invenzione, decorum, disegno or any knowledge of the science of
painting." Bellori speaks of Caravaggio's need for models,
"without which he did not know how to paint," and notes how
older painters accused him of being able to paint only in
cellars—which is to say, dark spaces—"with a single source of light
and on one plane without any diminution." Nonetheless, Bellori
goes on, "many artists were taken by his style and gladly
embraced it, since without any kind of effort it opened the way to
easy copying, imitating common forms lacking beauty."
"Well, maybe not that easy," Hockney concluded, putting
the book aside. "I mean, few artists could do it as well as
Caravaggio. But, still, it's clear from attacks like these that they
must be talking about optical devices of some sort—devices whose use
is further confirmed by the evidence of the paintings themselves. I
mean, for instance, compare the mathematical foreshortening involved
in one of the slain battle figures in a picture of Uccello's with the
uncanny rendering of the Apostle Peter's outstretched arms in
Caravaggio's 'Supper at Emmaus,' with the near and far hands almost
the same size—precisely the effect you'd get, incidentally, with
certain kinds of telephoto lens."
These sorts of optical techniques became increasingly dominant and
virtually ubiquitous in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and
clear through the first half of the nineteenth century, at which
point, according to Hockney, "suddenly something happens. And
that, of course, is the invention of photography—or, to be more
precise, the invention of various methods for chemically fixing the
sort of lens-cast image that up till then had required the
interposition of a human hand."
Hockney pointed out that photography grew directly
out of the camera lucida. Rummaging around in his pile, he read from
William Henry Fox Talbot's account of how, in 1833, by the shores of
Lake Como, he'd been attempting to sketch with a camera lucida,
though "with the smallest possible amount of success." For,
Talbot went on, "when the eye was removed from the prism—in
which all looked beautiful—I found that the faithless pencil had only
left traces on the paper melancholy to behold. . . . The idea occurred
to me . . . how charming it would be if it were possible to cause
these natural images to imprint themselves durably, and remain fixed
upon the paper!" By 1835, Talbot was experimenting with papers
soaked in silver chloride, and by 1839 he was able to publicize his
method; by 1841, he was using negatives to make multiple positives, a
marked improvement on Louis Daguerre's method, developed around the
same time, which could produce only a single image.
On first encountering a daguerreotype, Ingres's great rival, Paul
Delaroche, declared, "From today, painting is dead." But
what really happened, Hockney now argued, is that chemical
photography provoked a decisive rupture in the blending of painting
and the sort of lens-based way of seeing that had dominated it for
more than three hundred years. "By 1870, the photograph had
pretty much established itself as a cheap form of portraiture, and
artists, for their part, started to fall away," he said.
"Cézanne, for instance, starts to look at the cup before him
with both eyes, opening one and then the other, and painting his
doubts. Awkwardness returns to European painting, for the first time,
really, since Giotto. Surely this is part of why the artists of
Europe suddenly start turning toward Japan, and China, where the
lens-based methodologies had never held sway.
"Soon Cubism arises and, in this context, can be seen as an
ongoing critique of monocular photography and, by extension, I
suppose, of the entire lens-based tradition that preceded it.
Painting would now endeavor to capture all the things a photograph or
a single-lensed vantage could not: for example, time, duration,
multiple vantages, the sense of subjectively lived reality. As the
years passed, that rupture between painting and lens-based opticality
widened, though at first, I'm convinced, it was a choice. Cézanne and
his contemporaries knew about the various lens-based devices and
chose not to use them. But within a generation or two the knowledge
had been lost. And eventually you get to a generation like mine,
going to school and looking back at Caravaggio and Velázquez and
Ingres, and we honestly can't imagine how they were able to do it.
The question itself doesn't even occur to us. They loom there like
giants, preternaturally gifted, demigods, almost another
species."
I was reminded of the way the peasants, deep in the Middle Ages,
had gazed upon such antique relics as the Pont du Gard, the soaring
Roman aqueduct outside Nîmes, stumped as to how fellow-humans could
have built such things, and convinced that a species of giant must
once have strode the earth.
"Well, maybe we should finish that portrait," Hockney
now said, smiling, as he straightened his books and pages. He
escorted me back to the alcove and set to work. Over the next
forty-five minutes, Hockney peered through his camera lucida another
three or four times. The rest was steady gazing: my face and the
sheet before him.
The likeness, once he'd concluded, was indeed striking, and the
speed with which he'd rendered it even more so. Oddest of all,
though, was a strange distortion: my front arm seemed to bulge, as if
in a convex mirror—much like that in Parmigianino's famous
"Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror" (from 1524).
"Precisely," Hockney said. "But look at the size of
the image"—about twenty inches high. "If an artist wanted
to avoid such distortions, he'd have had to have his subject stand
further back, and the resultant image, in turn, would have been much
smaller. Which, for that matter, is probably why those Ingres
drawings are so small."
I'd noticed John Walsh's visage up on Hockney's
portrait wall, not terribly well rendered (the face was still fairly
stiff) but unmistakable nonetheless. Walsh, the director of the Getty
Museum, is a longtime admirer of Hockney's, and I decided to ask him
what he made of all this; in another guise, Walsh is an art
historian, especially steeped in Dutch art of the seventeenth
century.
"Well, I mean, it's quite remarkable, isn't it?" Walsh
said, laughing, when I reached him by phone. "The sheer
intensity of David's passion these days. David will often take a
sound general observation—and not infrequently, like this, a surprising
one, one that's long gone unnoticed—and then push and push it, way,
way out to the very limit and beyond. Which is fine: it's what makes
him an artist, that divine confidence of his. But in this latest
discourse, marvellously suggestive as several of his notions are, I
fear that David may well find himself sailing against the wind. For
before the seventeenth century, where's the evidence? Where's the
testimony of sitters or other contemporaries, or the treatises of the
artists themselves? We have vast inventories, often compiled for
inheritance purposes at the time of artists' deaths, every single
brush accounted for—and where are all the lenses and other devices
you'd expect to find listed, if David were right? It's pretty
dicey."
In New York, I looked up Gary Tinterow, a senior curator of
paintings at the Metropolitan Museum and one of the principal
organizers of the Ingres show, which was at the Met last fall. He had
been through the exhibit several times with Hockney, and had even
slotted the artist for an appearance at an all-day Ingres symposium
scheduled for a few weeks hence.
We met in the galleries, and I found him a bit more receptive than
Walsh. "Hockney's insights are potentially very important,"
Tinterow told me, "not only with regard to Ingres but maybe even
more so with regard to some of the others, especially those painters
for whom, as he notes, we don't have any preliminary sketches. But it
will all depend on fact finding: our work as historians is now cut
out for us, to find corroborating evidence. I mean, I think one can
already say that Ingres's drawing style does undergo a noticeable
shift after 1807, the year the camera lucida would have become
available to him; and when I'm with David I can in fact see what he
means by the Andy Warhol line, especially as it courses from one
distinct garment, say, over onto another and then back again,
seemingly oblivious of the separate volumes. Other times, though, by
myself, I'm not so sure; that kind of skating over distinct volumes
doesn't seem as evident to me.
"And the very same qualities, for that matter, could result
from other factors. Perhaps Ingres is consciously quoting from
earlier sources, and that's why you get these effects. Then again,
maybe those earlier sources—Bronzino, Jacques-Louis David—were using
optical devices of their own. As for the relative smallness of the
drawings, perhaps, as David suggests, they result from Ingres's use
of a camera lucida. On the other hand, Ingres's father was also a
painter and, in particular, a miniaturist, and maybe it has something
to do with that. Then again, as a miniaturist, maybe his father was
likewise using lenses. It would be nice if we could find an account
from one of Ingres's sitters—and there are many who left such
accounts, who mention his easels and brushes and canvases—a sitter
who described Ingres's use of such optical devices. On the other
hand, who's to say we won't yet come upon just such an account,
especially now that we know what to look for?"
Such comments were typical of the hesitations raised by several
(though not all) of the art historians I spoke with in the ensuing
weeks—and several were far more bluntly dubious. Hockney was unfazed.
"For one thing," he told me when I telephoned, "the
paintings themselves are the evidence, if you know how to look at
them—if you look at them, that is, as an artist would look at them.
Many art historians regard themselves as too lofty—too concerned with
the history of ideas, of iconography and so forth—to bother with
questions about the mere craft of a painting's making. I must say,
frankly, that I'm not all that interested in what sometimes passes
for 'art history,' though I am intensely interested in the history of
paintings.
"As for evidence," he went on, "if anything, it's
the other way around: the burden is on them. If you say I'm wrong
about the proliferation of lenses and optical devices, then you've
got to explain how you could get Caravaggio's lutes just a few short
decades after Dürer; how come those skills seem to rise up out of
nowhere, spread everywhere, and then disappear just as quickly with
the advent of the chemical process, some three hundred years later?
How come awkwardness seems to disappear completely from Western
European art for three hundred years and then just as quickly
reappear? It all just happens by itself? That
would be the loopy theory."
But what about the apparent lack of testimony on the part of the
artists or their sitters? Hockney replied, "Artists are
notoriously secretive about the specifics of their technique, always
have been, and this would have been especially so in the early modern
period, when the projection of such illusion was almost deemed a
magical gift—though in many ways it's no less so today. Does anybody
know exactly how Roy Lichtenstein created his effects? Or Morris
Louis? Were they telling?" Hockney similarly dismissed the lack
of testimony by sitters: Who's to say that they would have known what
to be looking for?
I could see why Hockney drove some art historians crazy.
"He's a nimble thinker" is how John Walsh had parsed
matters for me, his voice brimming with wry affection. "He's
seldom at a loss for answers, even if those answers might seem to
overlap in sometimes wildly contradictory ways."
"And anyway," Hockney was now saying, "who says
there isn't already plenty of evidence of precisely the sort they
seem to be demanding?" He noted how he'd recently begun a fax
correspondence with Martin Kemp, the eminent art historian at Oxford
University, whose massive 1990 study, "The Science of Art:
Optical Themes in Western Art from Brunelleschi to Seurat," was
studded with suggestive leads. "And my friend David Graves, in
London, has been spending time in the British Library, digging up all
sorts of things. For instance, here"—I could hear him shuffling
papers. "Right. This: from Giovanni Battista della Porta's 1558
four-volume treatise on 'Magiae Naturalis'—'Natural Magic'—by which
was meant seemingly supernatural phenomena that could be explained
scientifically. And here he's revealing what he calls the 'carefully
guarded secret' of receiving images on a concave mirror. 'If you
cannot paint,' he advises, 'you can by this arrangement draw (the
outline of images) with a pencil. You have then only to lay on the
colours. This is done by reflecting the image downwards onto a
drawing board with paper. And for a person who is skillful, this is a
very easy matter.' And so forth. So I really don't know what these
historians are talking about: no evidence."
I began getting faxes on an almost nightly
basis—part of a stream of such inspiration that Hockney seemed to be
sending out to an ever-widening group of correspondents (Martin Kemp,
David Graves, Gary Tinterow, and so on). The notes were invariably
handwritten. Hockney—this great student of technical wizardry—has
never learned to type, and hence shies away from E-mail. For that
matter, the fax allows him to send reproductions of imagery, too.
One morning, I found a single sheet upon which Hockney had
included, side by side, a reproduction of Vermeer's "The Art of
Painting" (the artist in his silly dark pantaloons, seen from
behind, seated at his easel, his model poised gracefully before him)
and one of Norman Rockwell's witty "Triple Self-Portrait"
(the artist, likewise seen from behind, leaning over to peer,
bespectacled, into a mirror as he completes the prettified
self-image, without glasses, on the canvas before him). As Hockney
subsequently remarked, both images were manifest fictions in terms of
their own creative process; neither artist was in fact eyeballing the
painting we see before us. Rockwell famously used photographs to
develop his imagery, and Vermeer has been shown by the National
Gallery's Arthur Wheelock, among others, to have blocked out his
canvases with the aid of a camera obscura.
Another morning, I woke to find yet another impromptu treatise on
Caravaggio's method. "The more one looks into Caravaggio,"
Hockney wrote, the more "one can figure out his tool, which had
to be a sophisticated lens." He went on to note that, as he'd
suspected, there were contemporary written references to Caravaggio's
"glass" ("I mention this for the historian of pictures
who wants everything in writing so he doesn't have to look very hard
at the pictures and deduce methods "), after which he set out,
precisely, to deduce Caravaggio's possible technique:
Good night indeed: I noticed that the fax had been sent at
two-thirty in the morning his time.
I subsequently spoke with Gary Tinterow about this particular
piece of Hockneyan speculation. We happened to be looking at one of
the Met's own Caravaggios; he crouched at the side of the canvas and
urged me to look up with him. "It's interesting about
Caravaggio," Tinterow said. "Because the fact is that, when
you look at his paintings in a raking light like this, you can indeed
still make out the marks made upon the canvas by the blunt end of the
brush or a stylus as it traced out the contours of the various
forms."
About a week after I'd got Hockney's Caravaggio
treatise, my phone rang me awake way before seven: there was a
whistling on the line. "Oh dear." Hockney's voice came
rising through the whistle. "what time is it?" It turned
out that he was calling from Canberra, Australia, where he'd gone to
deliver an early version of these ideas as a lecture. Frank Stella,
another Caravaggio enthusiast, was in attendance and, according to
Hockney, he'd said to him afterward, "I'm sure you're
right." Hockney apologized for waking me, but went on,
"Listen, love, there's a book you have got to get. The Taschen
book of 'The Portrait.' Norbert Schneider. I picked up a copy this
afternoon at the museum here, and it's incredible. The first page, in
the introduction, Schneider writes—he's talking about the late
fifteenth century—'It remains a source of continual astonishment that
so infinitely complex a genre should develop in so brief a space of
time, indeed within only a few decades.' Continual
astonishment: he's talking about the arrival of the lens, and
he doesn't even know it. But I'm absolutely convinced of it. The
plates are amazing. Get the book and we'll talk later."
I did—it is a beauty—and that evening
the phone rang again; it was Hockney, almost breathless with
excitement. "You have the book?" he asked. "Good.
Because I think Schneider's right. It happens before Dürer. Dürer is
showing an old way in those woodcuts."
He instructed me to turn to a page that featured a small color
reproduction of Giovanni Bellini's portrait of the Doge of Venice,
circa 1500—an extraordinary painting. Then he told me to turn to the
opposite page, which was filled with a detail of the Doge's face in
black-and-white or, rather, sepia. "And there you can really see
it," Hockney said. "Something about the sepia tonalities,
perhaps, but the image looks for all the world like some antique 1870
photograph of an Indian raja. Look at the detail of the tight
embroidering around the Doge's cap," he went on, "how
precisely the pattern follows the contours of the cap—your eye thinks
it's lying there perfectly. No way, absolutely no way that could have
been eyeballed, no way mathematical perspective could account for
such precision."
Hockney then had me turn to a reproduction of Holbein the
Younger's 1532 portrait of Georg Gisze. He pointed out the highlights
on Gisze's sleeve, and how precisely the geometric pattern follows
the rug as it falls over the edge of the tabletop. The glass vase,
the pestle, both perfect, rest perfectly on the tabletop. "Your
eye knows they're right," Hockney insisted, now guiding my
attention to "that curious cylindrical brass cannister on the
table between them. Because something's wrong: I mean, itself it
looks right, but something's wrong with how it's resting on the
tabletop. It's as if it had been added as an afterthought, a separate
projection, which didn't align quite right. Right?"
Hockney was warming to his theme. I realized that it must be six
in the morning for him, and I wondered whether he'd slept at all. He
directed me to turn to a Raphael painting, from 1518, of Pope Leo X.
"Look at the thick brocade of his sleeve: perfect," Hockney
said. "I was talking with a historian the other day about this
picture, and he stopped me cold. What was I talking about? There
couldn't possibly have been any lenses in 1518. Galileo doesn't
happen till 1609, Leeuwenhoek is more like 1660. 'Oh yeah,' I
countered. 'What do you think that is in the Pope's hand?' "
Sure enough, Pope Leo was holding a magnifying glass. "And, of
course," Hockney said, "it stands to reason that lenses
would first have been prized by popes and kings, the wielders of
power, and, in turn, their court painters—accurate portraiture being
such an important aspect of their rule—and only later, maybe even
much later, by scientists and academics and their lowly like."
He paused for air, but not for long. "And, by the way, look
at which hand the Pope's holding his lens in." The left. "I
was talking with another historian the other day, and he assured me
that no left-handed person would ever have been allowed to become
pope in those days: the left was the devil's hand. Sinistra. But that's the effect you would get, in
the early days of lens projection, if you hadn't yet learned to
compensate for the reversal caused by the lens. For that matter, look
through the rest of the book: Lorenzo Lotto's 'Man with a Golden
Paw'; he, too, appears to be holding the object in his left hand.
Doesn't it seem to you there are an inordinate number of left-handed
people in this book?" He paused again before positively
exulting, "I'm right. I'm right. I'm more certain of it every
day." Whereupon he rang off.
A few weeks after that, Hockney was back in New
York, addressing the Ingres symposium at the Met. His presentation
was the last of the day, following public talks by such art
historians as Thomas Crow (on Ingres and David), Jack Flam (on Ingres
and Matisse), and Robert Rosenblum (on Ingres's progeny, from Gérôme
to Picasso).
During his slide show, Hockney went over much of the material he'd
been rehearsing with me and others over the previous several
weeks—Ingres, Warhol, Caravaggio, Bellini, Raphael—but he added some
newer material as well. For instance, he devoted more time to Velázquez,
Van Dyck, and Rubens (an oddly anomalous eyeballer). He'd developed a
charming riff on early modern Spanish still-lifes, especially the
work of Juan Sánchez Cotán (1561-1627), a master of sliced melons
("the lutes of the vegetable world") and cabbage heads. How
long do you think a cabbage like that one would have lasted in those
days, prior to refrigeration, in a strong light like that?"
Hockney challenged his audience.
Later, someone asked the historians what they made of Hockney's
theory, a question that drew a long, somewhat embarrassed silence,
though whether the embarrassment was for themselves (at never having
noticed such a thing before) or for Hockney (how could anyone
publicly champion such ridiculously grandiose claims?) was not
immediately apparent. One of the historians hazarded the predictable
"But there are no documents." To which Hockney responded
with his growing arsenal of ripostes, culminating in the faux-modest
"I mean, I'm only speaking from my experience as an artist,
though surely that must count for something"—which brought down
the house.
Hockney returned to Los Angeles, and his fax and phone updates
resumed apace. "Heresy," he announced one evening over the
phone. "It turns out that della Porta got himself arrested,
playing with these effects. Earlier, in the thirteenth century, when
Roger Bacon wrote to the Pope about lenses, he was told to shut up
and get himself back to Oxford. And, of course, Galileo. The
Inquisition. Lenses were still dangerous things, highly suspect at
the dawning of the scientific age. No wonder they aroused so much
secrecy. No wonder there's so relatively little written evidence
about them."
"America!" he announced on another occasion.
"Doubtless it won't have been lost on you that the lens begins
to proliferate across Europe almost simultaneously with the discovery
of the New World, a discovery that, in turn, required its own
breakthroughs in lenses and optical measuring and navigational
devices of all sorts." And the transition to optical techniques
had other revolutionary implications. "In Caravaggio and early
Velázquez, the street urchin down the lane becomes a god, an angel,
an apostle," Hockney said, "because he's the only one with
the time and willingness to pose. Or, anyway, the only one the
painter can afford to pay."
Then, just the other day: "But of course it's all coming back
together again nowadays. I mean, the rupture between photography and
modernist painting. What else is one to make of the news these days?
All the revelations about the ease with which journalistic photo
editors are regularly altering their digitally based images. The
computer changes everything: pixels rather than negatives, the hand
back inside the camera! That's what the Guardian's picture editor must have meant when he got found
out in one of those mini-tempests: 'Ah,' he said, 'we've been caught
with our fingers in the electronic paint box.' From this day forward,
one might want to say, paraphrasing Delaroche, chemical photography
is over! The monocular claim to univalent objective reality is
falling away once and for all, and we are being thrust back on
ourselves, forced to take responsibility for the way we make and
shape our realities, with eye and hand and heart. Who knows where it
all will lead? But it's a very exciting time."
It had been an exciting couple of months for me,
at any rate, trying to keep up with the pace of Hockney's rampaging
discoveries. Sometimes I wasn't sure. Some of his arguments verged on
the tautological: if the rendering was assured, the methodology had
to have been lens-based; if it was groping or awkward, it couldn't
possibly have been lens-based; therefore, assured rendering proved
the presence of lenses. Weren't his claims perhaps too broad? I mean,
all art over a three-hundred-year swath
founded on lens-based techniques? Might it not, rather, have been a
case of perceptual hegemony—that a sort of lens-based look came to be
deemed real, and that artists, through a variety of techniques, were
now required to hew to that standard? And what of virtuosity?
Mightn't certain artists who began by using lenses eventually have
graduated beyond them, having got the proportions and the vantages
into their very bones, so to speak? And couldn't one imagine visual
prodigies, individuals who might never have required such aids? One
speaks of a musician having perfect pitch. Might not it be possible
for an artist (say, Velázquez) to have had a photographic eye, as it
were, for everything he saw?
At other times, however, such hesitations seemed like quibbles. It
was as if Hockney had laid a camera lucida across five hundred years
of art history, projecting the entire expanse in vividly novel
detail. And who cared, finally, if Hockney's version of history was
to actual history what Hockney's version of a pool is to an actual
pool? Which would one rather look at?
One day, I asked John Walsh what he made of the general arc of
Hockney's theory. "Oh, I don't know about vast historical
arcs," he said. "Maybe there is such a thing. But it seems
to me history is far more circuitous, filled with starts, stops,
backsliding, lurches forward. In the end, though, none of that really
matters, because in the end nobody is expecting a killer theoretical
tome from Hockney. What one awaits, with ever mounting anticipation
and excitement, is how he's going to interweave all these fresh
insights into his own ongoing work—what fresh new art all this is
going to provoke." 
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