notes from lecture 7

Ingres was a French Neoclassical painter. Although he considered himself to be a painter of history in the tradition of Nicolas Poussin and Jacques-Louis David, by the end of his life it was his portraits, both painted and drawn, that were recognized as his greatest legacy.

A huge number of changes took place in art and society in the 19th C which we will be coming back to next semester. The most significant of these changes in the early part of the 19th C was Romanticism; Ingres furiously resisted Romanticism and its ideals; he painted in what was known as an Academic style, that is a style approved by the French Academy, which was very conservative and dogmatic about what kind of painting could be shown. Ingres assumed the role of a guardian of academic orthodoxy. He said of himself “ I am a conservator of good doctrine, and not an innovator” and he saw himself working in a line desceded from Raphael.

He studied with David, and followed his master's neoclassical example but according to David he had "a tendency toward exaggeration in his studies”. He spent a number of years working in Rome, with his work much criticised in France for these same exaggerated tendencies. Not until 1824, with this work, was he really accepted as a painter in France. From this time on he was seen as the standard-bearer of classicism against the romantic school. He received a lot of state commissions; in 1830, following the fall of Napoleon, the monarchy was restored in France, although it was a constitutional monarchy, meaning that it had little enough power.

This work was exhibited in 1832 at the Salon; the public found its realism spellbinding, but some of the critics declared its naturalism vulgar and its colouring drab.  It depicts the journalist Louis-François Bertin; the portraits from this time demonstrate the rising economic and political power of the bourgeoisie.

Ingres’ paintings were always characterized by a firmness of outline, reflecting his view that drawing was the essence of Art. You might remember this is a very Floretine idea, as we saw in the early Renaissance.

3rd duc de Broglie

This is called the Hockney-Falco thesis, because it is advanced by artist David Hockney and physicist Charles M. Falco. This thesis is disputed – but in a way, it doesn’t matter whether it’s true, or some of it is true. What is important is that there is a relationship between art and technology that goes back a long way.

Some people interpret this as an accusation that the Old Masters "cheated" and intentionally obscured their methods. Others have argued that the technical claims that Hockney makes don’t stand up to scrutiny.

Hockney was not the first to suggest this use of optical aids. The camera obscura is a natural phenomenon. The term 'camera obscura' means 'dark chamber', because the instrument up until the 16th century typically took the form of a closed room, the windows shuttered, with a small hole in a blind or door. Light entering the room through the hole then cast an image onto a screen or onto the wall opposite the door. One problem is that the image in such a 'pinhole' camera, even of a sunlit summer landscape, is very dim. The one object that is clearly visible is the sun itself. Indeed this remained the only real application of the camera up until the 1550s: for astronomers to make solar observations without . damaging their eyes. The first published illustration of a camera (of this or any type), is in a book from 1545, by the Dutch mathematician and astronomer Gemma Frisius.

For well over a hundred years, it has been suggested that the great 17th-century Dutch master Johannes Vermeer made use of the camera obscura as an aid to his painting. There is absolutely no documentary evidence to support this idea. The only source of information is the paintings themselves. The first person to make the suggestion, as long ago as 1891, was the American graphic artist Joseph Pennell, who pointed to what he called the 'photographic perspective' of Vermeer's Officer and Laughing Girl. The two figures sit very close across the corner of the table. But the image of the officer's head is about twice as wide as that of the smiling girl. The perspective is perfectly correct in a geometrical sense: the discrepancy arises because the viewpoint of the picture is close to the soldier.

Scholars have however pointed to effects in Vermeer's canvases that seem to carry more distinctive marks of an optical way of working. For example, it is significant that there are several passages where Vermeer seems to paint in very soft focus, as in his portrait of the Girl with a Red Hat.

Vermeer has a very characteristic way of showing highlights on reflective surfaces like pottery, polished wood or - in this case - polished brass. In reality a highlight takes the shape of the light source that it reflects. Since Vermeer is painting indoors, the sources of light would be the windows; and so the resulting highlights would in reality be rectangular in shape, perhaps distorted into four-sided shapes with curved edges where they are formed on curved surfaces. Here, however, Vermeer has tended to paint the highlights on the lions' heads as true circles. It has been suggested that what he is doing is imitating accidental effects of slightly unfocussed optical images.

It is well established that in the 18th century some other famous painters employed the device, the best-known being Canaletto, whose own camera obscura survives in the Correr Museum in Venice. The English portrait painter Sir Joshua Reynolds owned a camera; and the device was widely used by landscape artists, both professional and amateur, up until the invention of chemical photography in the 1830s.

Wollaston invented the camera lucida in 1807 adding another lens-based instrument to the artist's toolbox. Ways of chemically fixing the image were simultaneously invented by Daguerre and Fox Talbot's around 1839.

Turin Shroud: The image on the cloth has been proven to be a hoax and is possibly worthy of being called a Da Vinci Invention. Is it by coincidence that ghostly figure looks remarkably like a Leonardo Da Vinci image? The shrouds’ ghostly image is believed by a minority of academics to have been created with photographing technology dating from the high Renaissance period. 

In 1988, the cloth was carbon tested. Three separate institutes proved the cloth material dated from the 12th to the 14th century. Though the cloth is considered to be before Leonardo's birth, Leonardo would have acquired a cloth considered old to add to the further illusion of its age to convince people that it came from the time of Christ.