Tim's Vermeer Page #4

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but my lathe only goes

about 34 inches.

I mean, I could make the leg in two pieces.

But I think what I'm gonna do

is I'm going to cut the lathe in two.

Generally, you don't take a fine

precision machine tool and saw it in half,

but power tools are made to be jury-rigged.

Yeah, it's a big guitar.

Viola da gamba is called a "viola da gamba"

because "gamba" means leg,

and you play it between your legs.

I like it.

I don't know much about woodworking.

So I'm doing this, not out

of love for woodworking,

but out of necessity

because you just can't buy these

stupid chairs anywhere,

and I need one.

David Hockney is one

of Britain's greatest artists.

He's famous for paintings like this.

Since his optical theory got

Tim started on this journey,

he seemed the ideal person

for Tim to talk to.

Hockney invited us to visit,

so we all went to England.

What I knew about David Hockney

was that he was a famous artist.

But, reading his book, I could see

that he wasn't a typical artist,

that he was somewhat a scientist.

Philip Steadman and David Hockney,

to my mind,

to the mind of a sceptic,

prove that Vermeer used

some sort of device.

But Secret Knowledge,

and all the Philip Steadman work,

are this wonderful, exciting, tingly

whodunit, that never tells you who did it.

Hockney showed

that artists were using lenses.

Steadman argued that

Vermeer was using a lens.

I believed that Vermeer must have

been using more than just a lens.

The reason to go see Hockney was

to bounce this idea off him

and see if he thought it was plausible.

How did you figure this out?

What are you, a...

Well, I started thinking about it

after I read your book, and...

Are you an optical... I mean...

I design television equipment.

- That's my job.

- I see.

So I know a bit about colour and imagery.

And I suspected looking at these

old pictures from the Golden Age,

Caravaggio, Vermeer, van Eyck,

that there must have been

a way to copy the tones.

Because that's what's quite remarkable,

actually. Yes, it is.

I need to stand on that side

of the table for a second.

So it's a mirror on a stick.

All right.

This is what I saw when I was painting,

if you look straight down.

And of course I started with a blank...

I see, yes. Yeah, yeah.

And you can move your head up and down and

you can see different parts of the image.

And that's how you work your way

from one part to the other.

Now right at the edge of the mirror,

where you see both images,

you can do a direct comparison of the tone.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And your eye can instantly see,

because they're together,

can see any contrast, and the edge

of the mirror basically disappears.

When you have the right colour

and only when you have the right colour.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I see.

This is very ingenious.

So you notice that there is no parallax

when you move your head,

there is no shifting.

- That's it, no.

- The two images stay locked together.

- Why is that?

- Want to look through it?

- How is that?

- I know, it's very clever.

I must say, the idea that the Italians,

when you think about the Italians,

they love pictures,

the idea that they didn't use this

because this would have been cheating,

I find childish, absolutely childish.

There's also this modern idea that

art and technology must never meet.

You know, you go to school for technology

or you go to school for art

but never for both.

But in the Golden Age,

they were one and the same person.

Yeah.

The interesting thing is that

if this was around then,

we are seeing photographs.

If they were using this

and exactly copying that colour.

Yeah, well, I mean...

- It's a photo.

- Yeah.

After seeing this, I mean,

it's not a complicated piece of equipment,

but how likely do you think it is

that they may have done this?

- I think it's very likely.

- Really.

Very likely. Yeah, yeah, absolutely likely.

I mean, I'm pretty positive optics...

I mean, there's no explanation

for the paintings without optics.

But, you know, historical evidence,

it'd be great to find a lost letter

from Johannes Vermeer...

Wait a minute.

I put a joke letter in Secret Knowledge.

You did?

A joke letter.

This is what historians were looking for.

From Hugo van der Goes to van Eyck.

"Could you go to ye

Brugge Mirror Supply Company

"and get one of those makeup mirrors

for my wife, you know what I mean?"

Well, I said,

"You'll never find a letter like that."

- Yeah.

- They never wrote down...

Van Eyck would not write down

the formulas for the paint

for the simple reason

that somebody might read them.

And there were other people

that wouldn't write 'em down.

People were sworn to secrecy,

oaths that they took very seriously.

You won't, you never...

It's naive to think you'll find something.

Paintings are documents, aren't they?

Aren't they telling you a lot?

Paintings are documents.

They contain the story

of their own creation.

Every brushstroke, every layer of colour,

every shadow

represents another piece of information.

To the trained eye, a painting can be read

as accurately as any written text.

And you don't need a trained eye

to see that Vermeer's look different

from his contemporaries.

They look like video images.

He painted the way a camera sees.

Ever since photography was invented,

people have been noticing optical things

about Vermeer.

On the Girl with the Red Hat,

there's this lion's head

in the foreground that's fuzzy.

Your eye naturally refocuses

on whatever you're looking at,

so something in the foreground

is not going to appear to your eye

as out of focus.

But it could be out of focus

if the image was projected with a lens.

The so-called pointilles,

these little circles of paint,

look similar to what you get in a bad lens.

You look at the back of her jacket

and there's a faint blue line.

And that looks a lot like chromatic aberration

which is what happens in a crude lens.

The edges of objects can develop

this rainbow fringe around them.

This falloff of light from the window

to the opposite corner

is something that an artist really

cannot see the way a camera sees it.

It's impossible to see it.

But Vermeer painted it

the way a camera sees it.

Is it possible that

some people can see absolute brightness,

and most people, can't?

You know, the way a musician

might have perfect pitch?

You know, that's a question for a doctor.

I'm Colin Blakemore.

I'm a professor at Oxford.

Or a scientist

that specialises in human vision.

And I've spent most of my career studying

vision and the functions of the brain.

Is Vermeer maybe some sort of a savant

that's different

from the rest of the human race?

What if someone said,

"Maybe there's a savant who is so smart,

that he could figure that out."

Well, he's not smart. I mean,

he'd have to have a very strange retina.

Our retinas are made the way they're made.

The retina is an outgrowth of the brain.

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