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Mystery of Vermeer's technique uncovered

The Guardian: Thursday, May 31, 2001 


Fiachra Gibbons Arts correspondent

For centuries art experts have attempted to solve the riddle of how Vermeer
painted canvasses of such sublime realism that Proust said he wanted to die
under one. Now one of the great mysteries of art history has finally been
solved - Johannes Vermeer's delicately composed snapshots of Dutch 17th
century domestic life look so like photographs because he used a camera.

A study by Philip Steadman, of University College London, has proved beyond
doubt that the Dutch master, whose reputation now ranks with that of
Rembrandt, used a camera obscura to trace out the scenes he later painted.
What is more, like all the best detective stories, Vermeer left one teasing
clue of his 'guilt' so a clever investigator might one day rumble him.

Professor Steadman, who has spent nearly 30 years poring over his canvasses,
said it had long been suspected that Vermeer, who was all but forgotten for
200 years after he died in penury in his home town of Delft in 1672, had
been up to something.

Even the Victorians, who were largely responsible for reviving his fame, had
noticed something odd, and puzzled about why the paintings displayed similar
qualities to their new fangled photographs. 'An article in the British
Journal of Photography in 1890 picked this up in The Soldier and The
Laughing Girl,' said Prof Steadman. 'It looks like a snapshot grabbed by a
modern camera, and this sort of perspective was very unusual in Vermeer's
time, an effect which becomes even more intriguing when you consider the
precision of the maps in the background. These, I discovered, were real maps
which were copied with quite astounding accuracy. The Victorians also
noticed that the blurring of some of the objects in his paintings seemed to
mimic the out-of-focus areas of photographs.'

But no one could quite prove that he had used a camera obscura, primitive
forms of which had been around for a century. Even Leonardo da Vinci had
toyed with these relatively simple contraptions that used lenses and mirrors
to reflect images on to tracing paper inside darkened booths. But, according
to Prof Steadman, the images they produced were too dim - even in the
sunshine of the Mediterranean, never mind the marsh mists of Holland - to be
any good to an artist.

He began his remarkable investigation by making detailed geometric analyses
of a series of paintings which he suspects Vermeer painted in the front room
of his mother-in-law's house in Delft towards the end of his life. X-rays
had already shown that unlike most artists before and since, Vermeer did not
bother with under-drawings or sketched outlines and appeared to have painted
straight onto the canvas.

The mathematics, using the grid pattern of the black and white marbled
titles of his mother-in-law's floor, and the comparisons taken from the
chairs Vermeer painted, which Prof Steadman found in the attic of Delft
museum, suggested strongly that he was using some sort of lens.

However, in The Music Lesson, where a mirror reflects the image of the part
of the room the artist is sitting in, an easel but no painter is shown where
the mathematics says the camera obscura should be.

Prof Steadman, who revealed his findings at the Hay-on-Wye festival,
believes this was a deliberate tease. 'You can see the easel and the canvas,
even the foot of the stool where the artist might have sat, but not Vermeer
himself. In putting the tools of his trade at the precise point where you
would expect to see a camera, I suggest, Vermeer is laying a deliberate
false trail.'

Prof Steadman reconstructed the room for his new book, Vermeer's Camera, and
found that a camera positioned where the artist's camera obscura might have
been produced an almost identical picture. 'The only major difference was
the shadow behind the mirror, which I think Vermeer exaggerated for effect,'
he said.

It was another mirror in another painting from the The Mother-in-Law's Front
Room series - soon to go on show at the Vermeer exhibition at the National
Gallery in London - that provided Prof Steadman with the clinching proof. In
Allegory of the Faith, much of the left foreground is masked with a curtain.

But close inspection of three blobs reflected in a sphere in the extreme
background revealed the reflection of the three windows that appear in the
other paintings, the last of which is itself shut tered off as it would have
to have been if there was a camera obscura there.

'That is exactly where the camera would have to be, and at precisely that
point, Vermeer with his own hand has painted a mysterious black box - his
camera obscura.'

Further mathematical analysis, he said, showed that the projected image was
exactly the same size as the painting, another telltale trait of the camera
obscura.

But Prof Steadman is adamant that the discovery does not devalue the worth
of any of Vermeer's paintings or show that he was in some way cheating.

'It may seem to be a form of cheating, but what he did was no shortcut by
any means.' he said. 'He would have pricked the outline of what he was doing
out with a pin in a piece of paper and then covered it with ground charcoal
so it left a stain on the canvas.'








Copyright Financial Times Information 2001. All Rights Reserved. Published
by OneSource Information Services, Inc., May, 2001.


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