University of Arizona professor of optical sciences Charles Falco speaks about the use of optics in Renaissance art to a full house in the Physics Building Auditorium. Shown on the screen is Lorenzo Lotto's, "Husband and Wife" from 1543, an example of Renaissance painting that shows how artists of this period may have employed optics in the creation of their artwork. Photo by LeRoy N. Sanchez, Public Affairs Were Renaissance artists gifted geniuses or did they have a little help from science? Charles Falco, Professor of Optical Physics at the University of Arizona and artist David Hockney think they may have the answer. Falco presented his thoughts on optics and renaissance art last Thursday in the Physics Building Auditorium.
Falco's interest in art and optics began in 2000 after reading the New Yorker magazine article, "The Looking Glass." In the article, artist David Hockney put forth the idea that as early as the 15th century, some artists may have employed the use of optics as a tool in the execution of their artwork. Hockney's thesis was met with considerable skepticism and considered by many art historians and others in the art establishment to be heresy.
Intrigued by the article, Falco talked with Hockney about his ideas.
"Here is David Hockney, who along with Picasso has been proclaimed one the greatest artists of our time," said Falco. "He has been looking at the Renaissance masters for sometime and there is something in their work that had him questioning their technique. I figured with my knowledge of optical physics, I could help provide the scientific evidence he needed to prove his theory.
"In March of that year, I walked into David's huge studio which had been built over an old tennis court and on the walls were all these images of Renaissance art, laid out chronologically and in an orderly fashion, very much like a scientist would do it," said Falco. "Here was an artist employing scientific methods.
"After several hours talking, we began what would be the start of the most intensive scientific collaboration of my career," he said. "In the process we exchanged over 500 pages of correspondence."
Thus the scientist came to the aid of the artist.
Falco used slides to illustrate his research. The first was the "Arnolfini Wedding" from 1434 by the Flemish painter Jan van Eyck.
He noted, " When I first started giving this talk many argued that optics didn't exist during the period I was referring to, but here we have a painting from the early 1400's with a convex mirror in it, proof that indeed the tools did exist."
Another slide of a frescoe by Tommaso da Modena circa 1352, which depicted monks using optical devices including 'spectacles" or eyeglasses and magnifying glasses, emphasized his argument.
"We have even found references to mirrors in 13th century literature, 200 years before van Eyck," said Falco.
He showed an excerpt from a book called the "Romance of the Rose" written around 1230, in which the word mirror is mentioned several times.
"Further evidence that optics were around during this time," he said.
Then Falco showed a slide of Lorenzo Lotto's painting, "Husband and Wife" from 1543. In it he pointed to a detail in the red tapestry in the painting. As he put up another slide, a magnification of that detail, he pointed out how soft and out of focus that part of the tapestry had been rendered, something that an artist with his own eyes would not normally see.
"An artist wouldn't deliberately do that unless of course he were using a lens of some sort," he said. "This became our Rosetta Stone."
With one image after another, Falco presented further evidence of the use of lenses, including paintings of subjects with unusually small heads and larger bodies, women with abnormally large foreshortened arms and even one women who if she were to stand up would have been eleven feet tall. None of the subjects in the paintings were sideshow freaks, but the artists by virtue of the optics they employed had dramatically altered their perception of the real world.
During a question-and-answer period afterward, one audience member asked that, given the geometric simplicity of the pattern in Lotto's painting, the artist didn't just paint it without the aid of optics?
"It's a painting of wealthy patrons and the tapestry may have cost $50,000 or more and therefore it would have been very important to the patron that the artist render it accurately so that those seeing the painting would be impressed by this couple's wealth and good fortune," he said.
Another asked, Why haven't any mirrors from that period been found?
"Some in fact have survived. The trouble is accurately dating them. How do we determine how old they really are?" he replied.
Why weren't there any texts or writings from that period about the use of optics by artist? asked another audience member.
"Whereas a scientist would run out and publish his findings, artists are smarter. They don't give away their trade secrets," he quipped.
Falco's career path has taken some interesting turns, crossing back and forth from science to art, and has included his varied interests in optics, motorcycles and renaissance painting.
In addition to his detective work concerning renaissance art, Falco has also been co-curator of the exhibit "The Art of the Motorcycle" at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City. He helped choose the motorcycles for the exhibition. The show traveled to other museums becoming one of the most popular industrial design exhibitions ever.