DAVID HOCKNEY-Onward And Upward With The Arts, Lawrence Weschler

Lawrence Weschler, Onward and Upward with the Arts, "The Looking Glass," The New Yorker, January 31, 2000, p. 64

ONWARD AND UPWARD WITH THE ARTS about David Hockney's theory that the Old Masters of the early sixteenth century made extensive use of optical devices to achieve their results... Tells how Hockney first noticed the possibility when comparing Andy Warhol sketches he knew had been produced with the aid of a slide projector, and sketches by Ingres, which had the same line... He theorized that Ingres could have been using "a camera, a refracting instrument of some sort.” Hockney reminded writer that cameras and lenses long predated the invention of chemically fixed photography. Describes Hockney's own camera lucida—a tiny prism (barely wider than an eyeball) suspended, as if free-floating, at the end of a flexible metal rod...Hockney draws writer using the prism... Hockney shows writer a woodcut by Durer with a cumbersome pre-lensed optical measuring device... Of course, optics don’t make paintings; artists do....The transition to lens-assisted artistic production was not without its controversies. Caravaggio, for instance, was regularly attacked by his more conventionally perspectival academic contemporaries... Hockney pointed out that photography grew directly out of the camera lucida. Rummaging around in his pile, he read from William Henry Fox Talbot’s account of how, in 1833, by the shores of Lake Como, he’d been attempting to sketch with a camera lucida, though “with the smallest possible amount of success.” For, Talbot went on, “when the eye was removed from the prism—in which all looked beautiful—I found that the faithless pencil had only left traces on the paper melancholy to behold....The idea occurred to me...how charming it would be if it were possible to cause these natural images to imprint themselves durably, and remain fixed upon the paper!”...Mentions Hockney's example of Giovanni Bellini’s portrait of the Doge of Venice, circa 1500—an extraordinary painting. Then he told me to turn to the opposite page, which was filled with a detail of the Doge’s face in black and-white or, rather, sepia. “And there you can really see it,” Hockney said. “Something about the sepia tonalities, perhaps, but the image looks for all the world like some antique 1870 photograph of an Indian raja...." Hockney also points out that there are an unusual number of left-handed people in portraits from the era—a circumstance easily explained by the reversing effect of the lens... Writer interviews Gary Tinterow, a senior curator of paintings at the Metropolitan Museum about Caravaggio and Ingres... A historian attempts to correct Hockney by pointing out that Galileo doesn't happen until 1608... Hockney points out that a 1518 painting depicts the Pope Leo X holding a magnifying glass...