F. Stedman, "Vermeer's Camera: Solving the Mystery of Light and Space" Summary and Comments - Recommended to learn what the ancestor of the photographic machine, the camera obscura, was!
This time we would like to introduce "Vermeer's Camera: Solving the Mystery of Light and Space" written by Philip Steadman and translated by Kotaro Suzuki, published by Shinyosha in 2010.
Let's take a quick look at this book. In this article, I will introduce the sections written in the "Introduction" of this book.
Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer (1632-75) painted with a camera obscura. In this book, I will attempt to show exactly how he used it. A camera obscura is the predecessor to the photographic camera, a simple device with a pinhole or lens. The image of the scene is projected onto a screen so that it can be traced.
That Vermeer seems to have used some sort of optical device as an aid or hint to the composition and drawing techniques of his paintings has become a widely shared view among art historians, as we will see later.
Until now, researchers have had a hard time accepting the idea that an artist of Vermeer's outstanding skill, who made extensive use of the camera obscura to trace most of the contours when creating his paintings.
This hesitation is related to the age-old debate about whether or not photography can be an art form - a debate that some may think has long since been settled. In his overview of the aids to painting in 17th-century Dutch art, Martin Kemp writes: "The use of devices to capture the image produced appears, by pre-modern standards of artistic skill, to be a dubious and dishonest method resorted to only by the incompetent.
Art historians, in general, were reluctant to examine the implications of this evidence. Perhaps it was because they felt that it was not a good thing that their favorite artists relied on what they considered to be a kind of cheating.
I think that in the case of Vermeer, these views are off the mark and not historically appropriate.
The camera obscura allowed artists to enter the newly revealed world of optical phenomena and to explore how to record them pictorially. It is important to keep in mind that in the mid-17th century, creating a picture with the help of a lens was in itself a novel and privileged practice. To liken it to modern photography, which captures the moment, is in any case a mistake.
Using a camera obscura to paint a picture does not mean that it will shorten the production time or make it technically easier. Rather, it requires careful observation and analysis over time. Furthermore, when capturing an indoor subject, the camera obscura does not impose compositional constraints on the artist. On the contrary, it can be used as a device to aid the process of composition itself. He can place the model or furniture, adjust its position, and judge the resulting effect on the two-dimensional image.
Kemp states. "The use of the camera obscura does not at all dictate the artistic choices made at each stage of the picture's conception and production."
What I show here is that Vermeer's obsession with light, tone, shade, and color, which makes his work so remarkable, is inseparably linked to his observation of the qualities of the optical image.
Shinyosha, Philip Steadman, translated by Kotaro Suzuki, Vermeer's Camera: Solving the Mystery of Light and Space, P1-2
Some line breaks have been made.
As the title suggests, this work is about Vermeer and the optical machine known as the camera obscura.
Although all the books I read about Vermeer's relationship with the camera obscura, I have to admit that it was difficult to understand what the camera obscura actually was and how it was used.
In this context, this "Vermeer's Camera: Solving the Mysteries of Light and Space" provides a fairly detailed look at the camera obscura. There are numerous diagrams and photographs, and it also explains clearly how the artist used this machine. I appreciated this.
The author then goes on to argue, as he did in the introduction to the book above, that Vermeer was tracing images projected by the camera obscura to create his paintings.
However, as mentioned above, this argument has been refuted by many in the past.
The author, Steadman, responds to this trend by theoretically developing a "camera obscura trace theory" titled "Against the Counterargument.
As a non-expert, it was tough for me to understand, but Steadman goes into quite a bit of detail in his explanations. The book has a persuasive power that makes you say, "Oh... I see.
However, the issue is not so simple, and there are further objections to this "rebuttal to the rebuttal".
by Laura J. Snyder, which we have previously featured on our blog.Vermeer and the Scientific Genius: The Revolution of "Light and Vision" in Seventeenth-Century Holland."The following is what was written. It is a bit long, but it seems to me to be an important point, so I will read it carefully.
Vermeer did not paint the illusionist circles as he saw them with his camera obscura. Although the only surface that would produce a circle of confusion is the one that glistens in the sunlight, Vermeer freely painted grains of light on other parts of the painting as well. He also used them on objects that do not reflect light or have no luster, such as the dark shadows in "View of Delft," the bread in "Woman Pouring Milk" and the threads in "Woman Weaving Lace. This use of light grains is not realistic, but rather an optical illusion. The surfaces of the glossy objects do not actually reflect light, but by using light grains to make them appear to reflect light, the artist has created a sense of realism.
Vermeer observed the natural world with a camera obscura and learned about its light and shadow, its colors and tones. However, he did not blindly and obediently paint exactly what he saw through the camera.
Da Vinci had this to say. A painter who paints what he has learned and what he sees with his eyes, without thinking, is like a mirror. The mirror does not know or try to know what it is reflecting, but only reflects what is in front of it. Vermeer sometimes adhered to optical principles to the letter, and at other times he ignored them in favor of the compositions he wanted to express and the emotions and sentiments he wanted to convey. (omitted).
On the other hand, others claim that Vermeer was copying the very image of the camera obscura. They say that Vermeer directly projected the image onto canvas and traced it as is. In a book published in 1950, the scholar Pieter Swillens claimed that some of Vermeer's works were copies of images from the Camera Obscura.
Twenty years later, Daniel Fink came up with a theory that 27 works, almost all of which were made after 1657, were traced from camera obscura images.
Recently, Philip Steadman, in his book "Vermeer's Camera: Solving the Mystery of Light and Space" (translated by Kotaro Suzuki, 210, Shinyosha, Inc.), wrote in 2001 that Vermeer suddenly refined his perspective around 1657 and began to show various optical features, and that he began to use a room-type He is certain to have begun tracing images projected on canvas with a camera obscura, and he has described as many as ten works painted in this way.
This analysis by Stedman has remained influential in the controversy surrounding Vermeer since its publication. Let's delve a little deeper into this Stedman claim.
Hara Shobo, Laura J. Snyder, translated by Akito Kuroki, Vermeer and the Scientific Genius: The Revolution of "Light and Vision" in 17th Century Holland, p212-215
Some line breaks have been made.
The last part of this quotation is exactly what appears in Stedman's "Vermeer's Camera: Solving the Mystery of Light and Space," which is introduced in this article.
Laura J. Snyder responds to Steadman as follows. We cannot present all of it, so we will quote excerpts.
Stedman concentrated on the ten paintings. They all look as if they were painted in the same room, and all have black and white marble tiles on the floor, although the patterns are different. The same is true of the open window on the left as seen from the viewer's perspective. Assuming that the marble tiles in all ten paintings are the standard size, 29.3 centimeters on a side, Stedman says that this gives us an idea of the size of the room.
Next, he identified the "theoretical viewpoint" of each work, that is, the position from which the scene could only be depicted as it was depicted. Everything depicted in each work must fall within a "visual pyramid" with the viewpoint at its apex.
Stedman claims that the square formed by the intersection of the four lines extending from the top of the pyramid with the wall behind it (i.e., the base of the pyramid) is approximately the same size as the painting in six of the ten works. This "remarkable geometric coincidence," according to Stedman, can be explained by a single hypothesis: he used a room-shaped camera obscura to project the image onto the canvas and trace its contours.
Stedman's analysis is in many ways a masterstroke. Above all, he has brought to the attention of many people and art historians the fact that Vermeer used the camera obscura in one way or another.
However, Stedman's research has taken a strange turn as a result of over-interpreting exactly what Vermeer's paintings convey.
Paintings are mirrors that reflect the times, and this was especially true in the 17th century, but it is not sufficient to read such paintings as accurate depictions of life in the Netherland at that time.
It is true that Vermeer created these 10 paintings in his studio on the second floor of the house where he lived with his mother-in-law. However, it is too early to say that Vermeer painted realistically the exact same scene in his studio.
That Vermeer did not paint his studio upstairs exactly as he saw it is evident from the black and white marble tiles - it would have been impossible to lay such in his studio.
Many interior paintings of private homes of the time depict black and white marble tiles, but these paintings do not depict the actual scene as it was. In the 17th century, marble tiles were expensive and were mainly used to add dignity to public buildings. One of the few examples of their use in other buildings was in the residence of Prince Oranje in Rijswijk, a neighboring city of Delft, where they were laid in several rooms.
Even the wealthy merchants of Delft rarely had marble-tiled floors in their homes, and if they did, it was only in the entrance halls where they entertained guests. In the cold and humid climate of the Netherland, marble tiles were comfortable to the soles of the feet.Wooden floorwere preferred, and even the wealthiest people had their living areas covered with wood rather than marble. (omitted).
Vermeer's studio could not have had expensive marble tiles laid in it. Especially when it was a room used by the owner's son-in-law, who was a poor earner. In other words,It wasn't actually laid out.It makes no sense to "survey" Vermeer's studio based on a square tile.
Moreover, Steadman's claim that the only logical explanation for the "remarkable geometric coincidence" of the six works is that the size of the square formed by the intersection of Vermeer's visual pyramid at the top and the wall behind it coincides with that of the six works is The only theory that could logically explain the "remarkable geometrical coincidence" of the six pieces is misleading. In fact, five of the six paintings themselves are nearly the same size, with a difference of only about three centimeters in height and width. Furthermore, Vermeer used a standard-sized canvas. It is more reasonable to assume that Vermeer painted his studio to match the size of the canvas.
Hara Shobo, Laura J. Snyder, translated by Akito Kuroki, Vermeer and the Scientific Genius: The Revolution of "Light and Vision" in 17th Century Holland, p215-218
Some line breaks have been made.
And Snyder makes a very important point right after this.
Vermeer did not just trace images from the Camera Obscura and paint in the dark. That said, the camera obscura paints a picture.toolThere is no need to imagine that you were trying to see if it would be useful as a "good" or not, or this and that.
The only thing that is certain is that Vermeer, like a natural philosopher, experimented with light using a camera obscura in an attempt to determine the properties of light. His true purpose was to investigate the "reality of pretense," or as we would call it today, "the reality of light.VRThe goal was to master the art of creating a VR space that looked like the real thing. He was also trying to master the art of making the VR space look like the real thing.
Through experimentation, Vermeer investigated the concept of sight. True to Leonardo da Vinci's teachings, Vermeer, like Löwenhoek, had to "train to see. The painters of the 17th century Netherland, with Vermeer at the top of the list, began to train themselves to see with the help of optical instruments. They learned to translate their vision, which was itself a painting, into the language of paint, and to express it on canvas.
Hara Shobo, Laura J. Snyder, translated by Akito Kuroki, Vermeer and the Scientific Genius: The Revolution of "Light and Vision" in 17th Century Holland, p219-220
Some line breaks have been made.
Vermeer, like Löwenhoek, had to "train to see."
I suddenly thought of Buddhism when I read these words.
Buddhism is also a "step toward seeing the world with new eyes" by deeply studying and mastering the Buddha's words. This is why those who live the Way of the Buddha do "ascetic practice.
We may think we are "seeing the world," but in fact we are not seeing it at all. How vaguely we see the world. How we see the world the way we want to see it. It is difficult to realize this on our own.
That is why we use tools like those of Löwenhoek and Vermeer, or train ourselves daily like Buddhist practitioners to "cultivate the discipline to see.
This is a very interesting point, I thought as I read this book. I felt unexpected parallels with Buddhism, and I was very excited about it.
Now, Laura J. Snyder has this to sayVermeer and the Scientific Genius: The Revolution of "Light and Vision" in Seventeenth-Century Holland."I criticize Steadman's theory in the following paragraph, but I am not an expert, so I do not know which one is correct in the end. Personally, I find Snyder's view more persuasive, but I will leave that to the experts to decide.
In any case, Stedman's "Vermeer's Camera: Solving the Mystery of Light and Space" provided me with the details about the camera obscura that I wanted to know. This was very much appreciated by me.
This work is highly recommended for those who want to learn more about this optical instrument used by Vermeer.
This is "F. Stedman, "Vermeer's Camera: Solving the Mystery of Light and Space" Recommended to learn what the ancestor of the photographic machine, the camera obscura, was! was.
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