When David Hockney visited a 1999 exhibition at London's National Gallery of paintings by the early 19th-century French neoclassicist Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, the uncanny accuracy of Ingres's portraits startled him. He began to wonder: Had Ingres used some sort of optical aid to render minute facial features so precisely? Hockney subsequently examined paintings by other masters and surmised that artists began using rudimentary forms of optical devices as early as the 15th century, nearly 200 years before Galileo and the emergence of the telescope.
In his new book, Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters, Hockney explores the revolutionary implications of his theory. The early use of optical aids by artists—earlier, even, than their use by scientists—could account for the sudden, dramatic improvements in the rendering of perspective and proportion and for the remarkable transformation in the realistic appearance of portraits that occurred at the beginning of the ...
