Hockney–Falco thesis

The Hockney–Falco thesis is a controversial theory of art history, proposed by artist David Hockney in 1999 and further advanced with physicist Charles M. Falco since 2000 (together as well as individually).

It formed the basis for the 2002 BBC documentary David Hockney: Secret Knowledge,[1] with some new ideas and experiments that in turn inspired additions to the second edition of the book (2006).

[6] The 1929 Encyclopædia Britannica contained an extensive article on the camera obscura and cited Leon Battista Alberti as the first documented user of the device as early as 1437.

Scharf notes in his introduction that in 1568 Daniele Barbaro, the Venetian writer on architecture, recommended the camera obscura as an aid to artists: "By holding the paper steady you can trace the whole perspective outline with a pen, shade it, and delicately colour it from nature.

[8] In 1994, Roberta Lapucci proposed that Caravaggio's well-known use of mirrors evolved into the use of the camera obscura to reproduce the whole figure of a model, rather than the details and parts that the mirror-technique was used for.

[9] Aaron Scharf's Art and Photography is referred to by Hockney in his 1977 painting My Parents (Tate, London) in which his father is depicted attentively reading the volume.

Falco figured that the painting contained sufficient data to allow him to calculate an appoximation of the properties of the lens that would be used for projection, which he considered the "smoking gun" that would provide scientific evidence for the theory.

They also measured the distances between pupils in 12 examples of portraits with a "photographic quality" from between 1450 and 1565 and found that the pictures all had a magnification of ~90%, and the depicted heads and shoulders all stayed within a circumference of 30 to 50 cm, which corresponded with the sizes of sufficiently clear images projected with the mirror lens.

Secret Knowledge recounts Hockney's search for evidence of optical aids in the work of earlier artists, including the assembly of a "Great Wall" of the history of Western art.

While such subjects would be extremely difficult to paint even with technical aids like the frame and chord method known from a 1525 woodcut by Dürer, it is much easier with optical projections (Hockney 2001 p. 36–57).

When lenses became large and good enough for wider projections with camera obscuras, artists would have recognised the advantage and Hockney believes this explains the very influential style of Caravaggio's paintings (p. 112).

The consecutive projections of the different parts sometimes seem to have caused distorted proportions that are not immediately obvious, but would not as soon occur if the master would have sketched out the composition by eye (pp.

Falco said that his and Hockney's examples of Renaissance art "demonstrate a continuum in the use of optics by artists from c. 1430, arguably initiated as a result of Ibn al-Haytham's influence, until today.

Stork analyzed the images used by Falco and Hockney, and came to the conclusion that they do not demonstrate the kinds of optical distortion that curved mirrors or converging lenses would cause.

In his introduction to the volume, Sven Dupré claimed the Hockney–Falco analysis rests heavily on a small number of examples, "a few dozen square centimeters" of canvas that seem to show signs that optical devices were used.

Indeed, his feats of lens making were not matched for a considerable time as he kept aspects of their construction secret; in the 1950s, C. L. Stong used thin glass thread fusing instead of polishing to recreate Leeuwenhoek design microscopes.

[27] Don Ihde called the hypothesis being 'hyped' and referred to clear evidence about the use of optical tools by, e.g., Albrecht Dürer and Leonardo da Vinci and others.

As well the 1929 Encyclopædia Britannica[4] contains an extensive article on the camera obscura and cites Leon Battista Alberti as the first documented user of the device as early as 1437.

[30] Although experts mostly recognised little new or convincing evidence in the Hockney–Falco thesis, the publicity surrounding it increased the attention to the relation between optics and art, and several more rigorous, scholarly studies on the subject have since been published.