Photography and Painting
In the history of European painting, there is a shift in pictorial representation that occurs around the year 1420 CE. As a result of this shift, paintings became more realistic and vivid. Subjects appear in much brighter light, which is depicted in a photographically 'correct' manner. Up until recently, there was no satisfactory art historical explanation for how, all of a sudden, painters began to see light in a different way, but it is now widely believed that 400 years before the invention of photography, painters were using simple cameras to reproduce realistic images on canvas.
If an artist wanted to paint a perfectly proportional image of an object today, she would likely take a slide or photograph of the image, and then project it onto a canvas in order trace its outline. Much before the development of photographic technology, however, artists were performing a similar task with what is known as a camera obscura, which is Latin for 'dark room.' A camera obscura is literally a dark room in which the only source of light is a piece of glass, or lens. The light from outside the room enters through the lens, and, if the light is strong enough, forms an exact, although inverted, replica of the outside scene onto the wall opposite the lens inside the camera obscura. An artist can then trace the image in perfect proportion, and can objectively view the interplay of light and shadow on a subject.
The 15th century Flemish master painter Jan van Eyck was one of the earliest painters art historians believe made use of optics in his compositions. And it was his work which was an obstacle in the popular acceptance of camera obscura theory. Critics of the theory pointed out, quite accurately, that the lens technology in the early 15th century was not sufficiently advanced to allow for the construction of a quality camera obscura. Indeed, these critics were correct. But even though van Eyck did not use a camera obscura, he did, in fact, make use of optics in the form of mirror projections. Although the lens technology was at the time rudimentary, mirrors, specifically concave mirrors, were widely available, and could be made to produce a similar result if the mirror's reflection of a brightly lit scene was projected onto a dark surface.
Paintings made from mirrors were limited, however, to a certain size as a result of the difficulty of focusing a mirror's reflected image. The ideal focal threshold - that is, the size at which the image achieves the sharpest focus and thus clearest image - is approximately thirty centimeters by thirty centimeters. It is no coincidence, then, that around 1420 many of the portraits that historians believe made use of optic technology are found to be about 30 centimeters squared.
The differences between paintings produced using a mirror and those using a camera obscura are significant, despite the fact that they both result in a more true-to-life depiction of their subjects. Paintings produced using a camera obscura, for example, vary in size. The size of the projection is limited only by the size of the room. Also, for a relatively short historical period, an uneven amount of figures in camera obscura produced paintings were left-handed. This is a result of painters tracing the inverted image directly onto a canvas: the subjects, which would have likely modeled right-hand dominant poses, became flipped on the canvas. When painters realized that so many of their models were turning out backwards, they remedied the situation by reflecting the lens projection of the camera obscura off a mirror and onto the canvas.
In 1870, forty years after the invention of photography, painting began to move away from realistic, 'correct' representation. Artists like the French painter Paul Cezanne and the Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh rejected verisimilitude as a primary motivation for painting, choosing instead to obscure their images for artistic purposes. Photography, with its light-sensitive chemicals, made optics-based painting irrelevant, but served to open up many new paths for painters to follow into the twentieth century. |
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