Professor reveals shortcuts, techniques of painting

Charles Falco set out to prove to an audience in Alumni Hall Monday that what they thought… Charles Falco set out to prove to an audience in Alumni Hall Monday that what they thought they knew about Renaissance painters is largely wrong.

The professor of optical science at the University of Arizona argued that it was projection techniques, and not pure artistic genius, that led to the improvements in painting in the Renaissance.

“The reason why we got it wrong is we didn’t know the optics,” Falco said in a question-and-answer segment that followed his lecture.

Falco said that a Renaissance artist could have used a mirror to reflect images upside down on a canvas. The artist could then trace as many details as he or she needed and fill in the rest using skill.

Not everyone was convinced.

“What he’s presenting is a rather clumsy way of transferring a visualization onto a flat surface,” Ann Harris, a professor in Pitt’s history of art and architecture department, said in an interview Tuesday.

Harris said that Falco’s method could “produce only a rather fuzzy image,” and not the intricate masterpieces commonly associated with painters of that era.

She also took issue with his presentation of the time span Falco gave for the development of superb realism in painting. Falco described the increase in quality as a “sudden transformation” and showed a slide that compared Renaissance paintings to some earlier works with decidedly less realistic qualities.

“He didn’t really show us the transition visually in Northern Europe in the decades immediately preceding Jan van Eyck,” Harris said. “Even the Greek and the Roman artists managed to create convincing illusions of perspective depth.”

Nonetheless, Falco insisted that, since the technology and knowledge of projection methods existed at the time, he could prove through analysis of paintings that optics were in fact used.

Falco has been collaborating on this project with British artist David Hockney – who he said is good at “seeing things in paintings that had not been seen by other people.”

Falco was not arguing that every artist used this technique. He said that after examining all of Leonardo da Vinci’s paintings, he could not find any evidence of the use of optics.

He spent a large portion of the evening discussing the work of 15th century painter Jan van Eyck – one of the men he believes used the projection technique.

Falco said that, though he believes van Eyck used optics to assist in painting, he didn’t want to belittle the skill and intelligence needed to do such a thing.

“If you thought he was a genius, you underestimated him,” he said.

Falco began his talk Monday with a primer in optics.

“This is the part of my talk when you can’t take a nap,” he joked.

Falco argued that there are several physical properties found in the paintings that back up his theory.

The first is vanishing points – points in a drawing or painting where perspective lines seem to converge on the horizon.

In the Renaissance paintings Falco examined, the artists were able to realistically represent many different vanishing points, as opposed to some earlier works where every line converged to one single spot. Falco said this development could be credited to optics.

“If it’s too good to be true, it’s not optical,” he said.

Falco also pointed out certain properties of magnification and projection that could be seen in the paintings – for example, parts of the paintings are focused and other parts are not.

He said that if you had never seen a projected image, you would never have seen focused and unfocused material together because of the way our brains interpret human sight.

At the end of the program, Falco fielded questions from an audience that included some skeptics. People asked what became of the mirrors and why was there no mention of the projection technique anywhere historically.

Harris echoed this sentiment.

“No such lenses or description has come down from these periods,” she said.

For a more thorough explanation of Falco and Hockney’s theory, visit http://webexhibits.org/hockneyoptics/post/intro_hypothesis.html. For a scathing critique, visit http://www.artrenewal.org/articles/2004/Hockney/yoder1.asp.

Falco said that he was only able to present one sixth of his total evidence during the lecture, and that there are still “tons” of paintings to be analyzed.

“We’ve just barely scratched the surface of this,” he said. “It’s wide open.”