Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Reverse Engineering the Technical and Artistic Genius of Painter Jan Vermeer

Posted by timothy on from the now-just-reconstruct-his-time-machine dept.

Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Kurt Anderson has an interesting read at Vanity Fair about Dutch painter Jan Vermeer, best known for 'Girl with a Pearl Earring,' and the search for how he was able to achieve his photo-realistic effects in the 1600s. Considered almost as mysterious and unfathomable as Shakespeare in literature, Vermeer at age 21, with no recorded training as an apprentice, began painting masterful, singular, uncannily realistic pictures of light-filled rooms and ethereal young women. 'Despite occasional speculation over the years that an optical device somehow enabled Vermeer to paint his pictures, the art-history establishment has remained adamant in its romantic conviction: maybe he was inspired somehow by lens-projected images, but his only exceptional tool for making art was his astounding eye, his otherworldly genius,' says Anderson. To try to learn how Vermeer was able to achieve such highly realistic painting, American inventor and millionaire Tim Jenison spent five years learning how to make lenses himself using 17th-century techniques, mixed and painted only with pigments available in the late 1600s and even constructed a life-size reproduction of Vermeer's room with wooden beams, checkerboard floor, and plastered walls. The result has been a documentary movie, Tim's Vermeer, by magicians Penn & Teller that may have resolved the riddle and explains why it has remained a secret for so long. 'The photorealistic painters of our time, none of them share their techniques,' says Teller. 'The Spiderman people aren't talking to the Avatar people. When [David] Copperfield and I have lunch, we aren't giving away absolutely everything.'"

16 of 70 comments (clear)

  1. Andersen by jamesl · · Score: 4, Informative

    Kurt Andersen. With an "e."

  2. I'm not an artist... by thephydes · · Score: 4, Interesting

    and don't pretend to be one, but I don't believe this "discovery" in any way belittles the talent of Vermeer. He was the artistic nerd of his time and his discovery is quite extraordinary - how many people today would think to do that?

    1. Re:I'm not an artist... by femtobyte · · Score: 4, Interesting

      This "discovery" may not even be a "discovery" about how Vermeer actually worked. While the hypothesis has been around for a long time (this is far from a "new discovery") --- and sounds appealing to the technologically-minded --- there is also moderate counter-evidence to Vermeer having actually worked in such a fashion. While Andersen succeeded in re-creating a Vermeer-like style in this manner, this isn't a unique, unheard-of capability: any painter who goes through the traditional "classical" art education, learning techniques the old-fashioned way with lots of practice, will be able to re-create paintings in Vermeer's (or anyone else's) style. Learning to copy the "great masters" is a standard part of formal art education. Andersen was able to short-cut some of this process (of learning painting technique the "old-fashioned" way) by technological means potentially accessible in Vermeer's time, but that doesn't prove what actually happened.

    2. Re:I'm not an artist... by Darth+Cider · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Then too, there are savants like Alonzo Clemons, whose sculptures are strikingly realistic but made entirely without tools, just his two bare hands. We know this because we have film of him doing it. Was Vermeer a savant? He certainly could have been. Finding a way to fake the work of a master using mechanical means does not prove the master used the same techniques, even if he could have. Penn Jillette, ever the blowhard, is merely hyping the documentary he helped finance. Unless someone finds Vermeer's camera obscura in an old barn, nothing has been proven so far.

    3. Re:I'm not an artist... by Impy+the+Impiuos+Imp · · Score: 4, Insightful

      It's like the scientists who figure out practical ways the pyramids could have been built, or ancient stone flake knives chipped, or the gears of the ancient Antikythera Mechanism cut, I suppose. Reasonable techniques, but just a guess without more evidence.

      --
      (-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
    4. Re:I'm not an artist... by Jmc23 · · Score: 4, Interesting
      No, it doesn't suggest that. There are ordinary people from which statistics are derived and which have no real information about our limits, and then there are people who learn how to use their senses properly or are fortunate enough to have been born that way.

      Read DaVinci's work on light and optics. Once you get a field view, working out a palette is trivial.

      --
      Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
    5. Re:I'm not an artist... by femtobyte · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Furthermore, while it might be difficult to perfectly match light levels while standing behind the canvas, cutting-edge artists of the era (of which Vermeer was certainly an example) were quite focused on, and capable of, understanding the effects of light to the next level. Vermeer might well have walked over to the wall and closely compared brightness levels in cleverly quantitative ways in order to get the lighting right --- it's the kind of stuff cutting-edge people were really concerned with at the time, and the reason deeply insightful light and color relations appeared in the best artwork of the era. Such paintings were not slapdash works from untrained-eye impressions; Vermeer was known for painting slowly, giving plenty of time for meticulously studied naturalistic results.

  3. Evidence To The Contrary by dynamator · · Score: 5, Informative

    I had a chance to hear David Stork present his counter arguments to the 'Secret Knowledge' theory expoused by David Hockney and Charles Falco. He was focusing on Van Dyke, who's work is not as objectively realistic as Vermeer. His two main pieces of evidence were:
    1. If you attempt to re-create the perspective in the a Van Dyke painting in the computer, it never quite lines up with spacial reality, even accounting for the distortions of the lenses or mirrors which might have been used to project the or image the scene.
    2. If you put a capable artist to the task, they can create a highly realist scene, with better geometric accuracy than the 15-16th century artists using no optical aids whatsoever.

    Vermeer is definitely a standout. I don't believe that any of his contemporaries were producing work remotely similar to what he was doing. So I almost believe he might have had something up his sleeve. It is know that he took a really long time to complete a painting. I wonder if he could have used optical techniques out in the open, and it would have been so unusual that others wouldn't have even understood what he was doing, and so not think it worth noting it down.

    Check Out the counter-arguments at : http://www.artrenewal.org/articles/2003/Hockney_Refuted/hockney1.php
    (Warning: drawings of naked people done without optical aids)

    1. Re:Evidence To The Contrary by Jeremy+Erwin · · Score: 2

      They seem a bit too passionate to be taken that seriously.

    2. Re:Evidence To The Contrary by khallow · · Score: 2

      It is know that he took a really long time to complete a painting.

      And that he specialized in painting interior scenes which would be more accessible to optical aid techniques.

      I have to say that given how precise his paintings were, it's not a surprise that they took so long, with or without optical aids.

    3. Re:Evidence To The Contrary by lgw · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I think the postulated optical aids are really a less interesting part of all this. What makes his paintings start out aren't that they have lots of accurate detail - they do, but that's not that rare - but that they have very accurate color. The rooms look realistic because the color values are right: they all have the same lighting temperature, to remarkable accuracy.

      Getting the color palette just right is what impresses me about paintings from Vermeer to modern artists in the same style, but the modern guys have a very mature science to work from and just need to make the colors match precisely to the calculated ideal.

      --
      Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
    4. Re:Evidence To The Contrary by DrJimbo · · Score: 3, Informative

      Parent:

      I think the postulated optical aids are really a less interesting part of all this. What makes his paintings start out aren't that they have lots of accurate detail - they do, but that's not that rare - but that they have very accurate color. The rooms look realistic because the color values are right: they all have the same lighting temperature, to remarkable accuracy.

      FTFA:

      [Tim Jenison] was in no rush. His R&D period lasted five years. He went to the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. "Looking at their Vermeers," he says, "I had an epiphany" -- the first of several. "The photographic tone is what jumped out at me. Why was Vermeer so realistic? Because he got the values right," meaning the color values.

      The point of using an optical aid was to get the colors right.

      --
      We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.
      -- Anais Nin
    5. Re:Evidence To The Contrary by femtobyte · · Score: 4, Interesting

      One of the points that severely diminishes the credibility of "Secret knowledge" optical theories, in my eyes, is that they are simultaneously presented as being so secret as to never be recorded and transmitted to the present day, and as being in such wide-spread use that there is evidence to be found in major works over many centuries and continents. As a closely-guarded guild secret for one small, local, and ephemeral school of painters, which died off before being transmitted to the present day, perhaps the hypothesis is plausible. However, the sheer weight and volume of "evidence" presented by Hockney et al., in which optical techniques are a ubiquitous foundation for every vaguely photo-realistic painting since the early 15th century, is impossible to reconcile with those techniques being absent from historical commentary and received tradition.

  4. Not just an artist by reboot246 · · Score: 2

    Vermeer makes some damned fine heavy equipment - the digging Dutchman!

    Just kidding - I know the difference.

  5. One sort of exists by Ralph+Spoilsport · · Score: 2

    And it's pretty cheap. Go here: http://neolucida.com/

    --
    Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
  6. You never took an art class? by Alcanazar · · Score: 2

    I am Appalled at the lack of art knowledge at Slashdot! Certainly camera obscura has been know for centuries but many artists can do as well without it. In second grade, I had a friend with who could copy any picture by hand from memory. He had a game where he would see how long it would take for someone to figure out which picture it was while he drew the lines randomly. He had a photographic memory and the ability to freehand a straight line or circle. . . . Now he's a dentist.