Layout Tricks

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Layout Tricks
« on: June 11, 2010, 01:18:52 PM »
 Layout Tricks of the Old Masters
By John A Burton Platinum Quality Author


Imagine it's a sunny day, and you are in a room looking through a window at a scene outside that you wish to paint.

Take a heavy blanket and black out the window, save for a single small hole, and if the sunlight is bright enough, you will observe the scene outside, projected upside down and back to front on the wall opposite the window. Congratulations: you have turned your room into a pinhole camera.

You could fix a piece of paper to the wall where the image has been projected, and trace around the outline of the key features. It will be tricky working in the gloom, but getting down an accurate outline will be achievable.

Now imagine it is the early 1800s. The painters of the day are the likes of Vermeer, Ingres, Caravaggio, Rembrandt, and so on. They were not just artists but also men of learning, and they knew about lenses, and that if the right type of lens were added to the hole in our blackout it would enlarge, brighten, and sharpen our projected image.

It would have been a small step for a resourceful artist of the day to create a pinhole camera within a studio. By using the artificial lighting sources of the day, and/or a bright window to illuminate people elsewhere inside the room, they could project their subject's images on to a canvas too.

You may, at this point, like to consider why the lighting in many portraits of the time was intense and highly directional? And, why did the sudden leap forward in "photographic" realism occur?

So there you have it in a nutshell: the Old Masters, whose work was almost "photographic", probably used a form of camera/projector, and image tracing to get their scale, perspective and proportion so very perfect.

How do we know this speculation to be true? There are no documents recording the working method of the day, but there is plenty of evidence in the paintings themselves.

Lenses have a number of optical problems. Consider a simple magnifying glass. We all know that it works best when we look through the centre of the lens. Performance falls off at the edges. Every lens has the same problem as a magnifying glass. Lenses also induce many other anomalies. They tend to bend straight lines, particularly at the edges; they can foreshorten or elongate; they can be incorrectly focused.

Study some Old Masters and you may start to notice things you have not seen before. Why are so many people left-handed? Could it be they are mirror images of the subject; the same mirror image that a simple camera projects. Why are some parts of the painting slightly out of focus? Why do subjects appear to gaze into space, rather than directly at each other? Could it be that the painting was a composite of many projections, necessary due to the inadequacy of achievable lighting levels necessary to capture a large scene? Why do such otherwise perfect paintings contain imperfections?

I am convinced, that the Old Masters used cameras to layout their work. It isn't cheating: it's ingenious, and demands a whole additional set of skills. As an artist myself, it reassures me that my skills of draftsmanship do not need to be superhuman. I can legitimately use a few tricks to help me perform a demanding task.

I cannot take credit for this theory. Research and documentation is largely attributable to David Hockney, but I am appreciative of, and persuaded by his hypothesis.

Portraits by John Burton

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