Tim's Vermeer

I saw this story over at http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Hollywood/2014/02/24/GUTCHECK-PENN-TELLER-S-FINISHING-SCHOOL

It's the story of Tim's 10 year odyssey to discover just exactly how Vermeer painted his masterpieces.
http://www.sonyclassics.com/timsvermeer/

Synopsis
A Penn & Teller Film
Produced by Penn Jillette, 2013

Tim Jenison, a Texas based inventor, attempts to solve one of the greatest mysteries in all art: How did 17th century Dutch Master Johannes Vermeer ("Girl with a Pearl Earring") manage to paint so photo-realistically -- 150 years before the invention of photography? The epic research project Jenison embarks on to test his theory is as extraordinary as what he discovers.

Spanning eight years, Jenison's adventure takes him to Delft, Holland, where Vermeer painted his masterpieces, on a pilgrimage to the North coast of Yorkshire to meet artist David Hockney, and even to Buckingham Palace to see a Vermeer masterpiece in the collection of the Queen.

The Mystery of Vermeer
During the late 1650s, Vermeer and other Dutch artists began to place a new emphasis on depicting figures within carefully composed interior spaces. Vermeer’s works are small and rare. Of the 35 paintings attributed to him, all of them are admired for the detail in which he rendered the effects of light and color. Little is known for certain about Vermeer's career. His earliest signed and dated painting, The Procuress(1656), is thematically related to a Dirck van Baburen painting that Vermeer owned and that appears in the background of two of his own paintings. After his death Vermeer was overlooked by all but the most discriminating collectors and art historians for more than 200 years. Only after 1866, when the French critic Théophile Thoré-Bürger rediscovered him, did Vermeer's works become widely known.

Tim’s Vermeer is not the first look into Vermeer’s likely use of optics in his works. Professor Philip Steadman (seen in the film) caused a sensation in the art world in 2001 when he published his book Vermeer’s Camera. Steadman investigated the suspicions of art historians who suggested Vermeer used a camera obscura, an optical device that could project the image of sunlit objects placed before it with extraordinary detail. However, Steadman’s experiment used a technique known as “reverse perspective” which produced startling results. He found that six of the Vermeer paintings he analyzed depicted the same room, the painter’s studio in Delft, and the geometry of the six was consistent with their being projected on to the back wall of the room using a lens and then traced.

These findings were not intended to challenge Vermeer's genius but rather to show how, like many artists, Vermeer was able to use technology to paint his extraordinary compositions more accurately. Nevertheless, Steadman’s book caused a storm of controversy, dividing art historians while convincing many scholars in the history of science, technology, optics and photography.
Explore the Mystery Further

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johannes_Vermeer

Johannes, Jan or Johan Vermeer 

(Dutch: [joˈɦɑnəs jɑn vərˈmeːr]; 1632 – December 1675) was a Dutch painter who specialized in domestic interior scenes of middle-class life. Vermeer was a moderately successful provincial genre painter in his lifetime. He seems never to have been particularly wealthy, leaving his wife and children in debt at his death, perhaps because he produced relatively few paintings.[3]

Vermeer worked slowly and with great care, using bright colours and sometimes expensive pigments, with a preference for lapis lazuli and Indian yellow. He is particularly renowned for his masterly treatment and use of light in his work.[4]

Vermeer painted mostly domestic interior scenes. "Almost all his paintings are apparently set in two smallish rooms in his house in Delft; they show the same furniture and decorations in various arrangements and they often portray the same people, mostly women."[5]

Recognized during his lifetime in Delft and The Hague, his modest celebrity gave way to obscurity after his death; he was barely mentioned in Arnold Houbraken's major source book on 17th-century Dutch painting (Grand Theatre of Dutch Painters and Women Artists), and was thus omitted from subsequent surveys of Dutch art for nearly two centuries.[6][7] In the 19th century, Vermeer was rediscovered by Gustav Friedrich Waagen and Théophile Thoré-Bürger, who published an essay attributing sixty-six pictures to him, although only thirty-four paintings are universally attributed to him today.[2] Since that time, Vermeer's reputation has grown, and he is now acknowledged as one of the greatest painters of the Dutch Golden Age.

Theories of mechanical aid[edit]

Vermeer's painting techniques have long been a source of debate, given their almost photorealistic attention to detail, despite Vermeer having had no formal training, and despite only limited evidence that Vermeer had created any preparatory sketches or traces for his paintings.

In 2001, British artist David Hockney published the book Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters, in which he argued that Vermeer - among other Renaissance artists including Hans Holbein and Diego Velázquez - used optics, and specifically some combination of curved mirrors, camera obscura and camera lucida, to achieve precise positioning in their compositions. This became known as the Hockney–Falco thesis, named after Hockney and Charles M. Falco, another proponent of the theory.

Working independently, in 2001 British architecture professor Philip Steadman published the book Vermeer's Camera: Uncovering the Truth behind the Masterpieces, which specifically claimed that Vermeer had used a camera obscura to create his paintings. Noting that many of Vermeer's paintings had been painted in the same room, Steadman found six of his paintings that are precisely the right size if they had been painted from inside a camera obscura in the room's back wall.[20]

Supporters of these theories have pointed to evidence in some of Vermeer's paintings, such as the often-discussed sparkling pearly highlights in Vermeer's paintings, which they argue are the result of the primitive lens of a camera obscura producing halation. It was also postulated that a camera obscura was the mechanical cause of the "exaggerated" perspective seen in Lady at the Virginals with a Gentleman (London, Royal Collection).

In 2008, American entrepreneur and inventor Tim Jenison developed the theory that Vermeer had used a camera obscura along with a "comparator mirror", which is similar in concept to a camera lucida but much simpler, and allows for easily matching color values. He later modified the theory to simply involve a concave mirror and a comparator mirror. He spent the next five years testing his theory by attempting to re-create The Music Lesson himself using these tools, a process captured in the 2013 documentary film Tim's Vermeer.[21]

This theory remains disputed. Aside from the accurately observed mirror reflection above the lady at the virginals, there is no historical evidence regarding Vermeer's interest in optics. The detailed inventory of the artist's belongings drawn up after his death does not include a camera obscura or any similar device.