The most explicit
17th century description in English of the camera obscura was
sent by Henry Wotton, diplomat, to Francis Bacon, philosopher,
scientist and devious politician, in 1620, 12 years before Vermeer
was born.
It was of
"the little black tent" that enabled Johannes Keppler, mathematician
and astronomer to Emperor Rudolf II, to make a topographical survey
of astonishing accuracy (and, by revolving the tent, to make a
panorama), but he concludes with the observation that to paint
landscapes with such a device would be "illiberal, though surely
no painter can do them so precisely".
Some of us
must quarrel with his use of the word illiberal, for surely, in
the context of the seven liberal arts, of which all serious painters
of the century were more than peripherally aware, theirs then
a learned profession, to paint a landscape of absolute accuracy
must have been for some the highest possible achievement, logical,
arithmetical and geometrical.
Surely this
is exactly what Vermeer did when he painted his View of Delft,
the one picture that above all his others convinces some of us
that he had at his command some optical device, so serene and
still, so ordered and so orderly and yet so uncomposed and arbitrary
that any one of us could, with nothing better than a Kodak Brownie,
have captured this segment of a panorama.
No doubt the
painter's sensibility came into play, as later it did with Canaletto,
a building moved from here to there or changed in scale and emphasis,
particular falls and qualities of light chosen above others and
retained in his mind's eye, a particular cloud formation preferred
for its enhancement of a barely perceptible perspective, so obscured
is it by the buildings on the waterfront.
The view is
now so much changed that Philip Steadman, professor of architecture
and town planning at University College, London, scarcely deals
with the picture in his study of Vermeer and the camera obscura,
but it has long nudged the sceptic ignorant of geometry and optics
into the almost unwilling recognition that Vermeer was neither
sitting on the quayside in the wind and rain dabbing at a damp
canvas, nor standing in a warm, dry studio concocting a composition
from a set of townscape sketches, but exercising some kind of
scientific magic - the effect, it must be admitted, much reduced
by recent cleaning, its surface now raw and flayed of subtleties.
Vermeer studies
of the past have not been entirely blighted by the unwillingness
of art historians to recognise the possibility that he used optical
aids in the construction of his compositions - such factors as
his training as a painter, the development of his independent
aesthetic sensibility, his changes in style and the handling of
paint have all been worth a moment's thought and our views of
these are not necessarily affected by Steadman's 20 years of study
concentrated solely on Vermeer's use of the camera obscura.
Steadman has
been to extraordinary lengths to prove his point, reconstructing
Vermeer's studio and the interiors and furnishings of his painted
rooms, taking the angle and strength of light's fall into account,
considering every possible argument for and against his hypothesis,
even to pondering the reasons for Vermeer's failure to reproduce
a hanging picture by Baburen to its known proportions. His photographs
of reconstructed interiors compared with the paintings prove his
hypothesis, but they also demonstrate, with absolute clarity,
that Vermeer the painter made significant adjustments to the work
of Vermeer the semi-scientist.
This is a
necessary book. It does not reduce to dust all others on Vermeer
and one might argue that it merely tidies away a minor mystery
- but it does more than that, for it is, as it were, an introductory
history of the camera obscura long before it was used and perhaps
perfected by or for Vermeer, opening our eyes to its wide spread
in his day. Written in clear and simple terms, illustrated with
diagrams that even the purblind idiot can comprehend, this is
exegesis at its most intelligent; at last we understand what some
had always instinctively suspected and maintained - that both
the manifest distortions of Vermeer's interior spaces and his
dextrous use of minute blobs of paint as highlights where we hardly
expect them were commanded by ground glass lenses and the camera.
In the realm
of imaginary conversations, the fanciful may care to think of
Vermeer and his exact and almost as short-lived contemporary Spinoza,
philosopher and lens-grinder extraordinary, discussing the construction
of the perfect camera obscura, for in 17th century Holland - indeed
the whole of Europe from Prague to Copenhagen - the lens was a
thing of serious enquiry and application, a thing with which to
educate even the eye of genius.
© Associated
Newspapers Ltd., 19 March 2001
