Technology and Art

Did you think that using technology to create images started with Photoshop and other photo editors on your PC? Guess again. It happened as far as back as the 1600’s!

Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, because of his improvements to the microscope and being the first to observe and describe single celled organisms, was considered to have been an expert on gadgets that used light.

Jan Vermeer, a painter world-famous for his use of light and considered one of the Old Masters, was considered a good (but not great) artist until the mid 1660’s. Then Vermeer met van Leeuwenhoek, and soon his career took off. Which led some to suspect that van Leeuwenhoek gave Vermeer high quality lenses to make a camera obscura, a device that allows an artist to simply trace (or paint) an exact copy of an image. Like take The Girl with the Red Hat:


Notice the light on her nose, earrings, eyes and parts of the chair? That brilliance with light was Vermeer’s speciality. And also what a camera obscura could do!

But did Vermeer really use a camera obscura? Nobody can say for sure. But the fact that the executor of Vermeer’s estate upon his death was van Leeuwenhoek, who could have taken back any lenses he might have loaned his friend, was “proof” to some. And once you have a story going, then even the feeling that the man in a couple of Vermeer’s paintings (The Geographer, The Astronomer) was van Leeuwenhoeck suggests that they were close friends, which in turn fuels the story further.

Whether or not Vermeer used a camera obscura, many who saw the output of a camera obscura were so impressed that they felt this was the end of paintings. Huygens even said, “The art of painting is dead, for this is life itself: or something higher, if we could find a word for it.”

So if you curse technology for ruining art, don’t blame the tools on your PC. It’s been happening for ages!

Comments

  1. KumarDecember 27, 2011 at 8:19 PM

    I always liked Vermeer.

    I have not seen this painting before. The master deserves full praise for this painting with its lovely light effect. Sure, of all the aspects of the light in this painting, the shine on the girls nose is a master stroke.

    No matter what one might feel, what the artist can produce, no mechanistic device can beat! [If it does, you can be sure there was a man with aesthetic sense doing his work through the mechanistic device! QED :-)]

    ReplyDelete

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