The other day I was fooling around and clicked on the “Drafts” section on the blog’s “Settings” toolbar. There were 359 drafts. That’s a lot of drafts. The oldest one was “Knowledge Obscura” below.
My current interest in China China
This draft is from sometime in 2002. My—“Often wrong, Always certain”—prediction was true but my comment, that Dr. Falco would “dismiss” the evidence is too dismissive. He looked at the Chinese paintings and, from memory, did get back to me to advise that he didn’t see the artifacts in the paintings that would signal to him that optics had been used.
KNOWLEDGE OBSCURA
In early 1999 the contemporary artist David Hockney began research on a provocative and controversial thesis, that some of the great Renaissance artists had used optics--lenses, mirrors, a device known as the camera obscura--as an aide in their painting. Hockney further theorized that the camera lucida, a 19th century invention, was used by, among others, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres.
Hockney's work first appeared in Royal Academy New York University
Hockney's prominence and the perceived sacrilegious nature of his thesis made the subject a popular, scholarly, and scientific cause célèbre. The symposium itself was covered before and after in The New York Times and the book was reviewed in all the major reviews.
Hockney's renown and, no doubt, his desire to avoid acute professional embarrassment were he to be wrong, led him to enlist the aide of experts in art history and even science. His most important consultant was Dr. Charles Falco a PhD in optical physics at the University of Arizona who appeared with him at the NYU symposium, as did the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, art critic Michael Fried, some physicist from Stanford University
Hockney's case as presented in the book and at the symposium was compelling. The visual evidence of the paintings themselves was enough to make it of the "case closed" variety, the science was (or seemed to this non-scientist) solid and the treatment of the literature seemed thorough. Optics were a Chinese invention and "Secret Knowledge" even included a reference to an eleventh century Chinese scholar's detailed description of the use of what was clear was a primitive camera obscura. Hockney wrote a paragraph summary of the use of the camera obscura in China, saying that "Interest in it seems to have died out by the twelfth century."
Ever since I took an introductory course in Chinese history in college I have maintained a fascination with that civilization. When my interests turned to art about ten years ago I included some reading on Chinese art as part of my interest but even at that I have only read three or four books. My entire reading in art doesn't amount to ten more books. Even with my scratch-the-surface exposure to art and less than that to Chinese art I was immediately struck by the extent to which there appeared to be so little knowledge by Western art scholars of Chinese art.
Arthur Gombrich's "The Story of Art" is the most popular art history book of all time. It is a staple of all Art 101 courses in college. But it is not "the story of art;" it is the story of Western art. It has a--one--chapter on the art of the non-West: Islam, Hindu, Africa, etc. Uno.
Perhaps the most prominent contemporary art critic, Arthur Danto, has written many books on art theory, one of them called "Art after the End of Art." Again, art is equated with Western art. No mention of the art of any other culture.
Even getting books on Chinese art is a challenge. On Amazon and Barnes and Noble.com the standard references have to be ordered from specialty stores.
The most noteworthy general interest Chinese art book of the last many years is a big, beautifully illustrated, coffee-table type called "Three Thousand Years of Chinese Painting," the first in what is to be a series on Chinese art by a collaborative team of American and Chinese scholars sponsored by Yale University. I picked up a copy at the MET on my trip to the NYU symposium.
One of the introductory essays in "Three Thousand Years" is written by James Cahill, the dean of American scholars on Chinese art. In his essay Cahill laments the inattention, the ignorance really, of American art scholars to Chinese art. He specifically chastises Gombrich and Danto for dismissing recent centuries of Chinese art as "performance art."
Last Friday night I was re-reading portions of "Three Thousand Years" and decided to look again at the chapter on the Ming dynasty, one of the glorious eras in all of Chinese history. The author of the chapter is Yang Xin, the deputy director of the Palace Museum in Beijing
To my surprise Yang wrote about the use of optics in Chinese art at a time that corresponded to their use in the West. Yang's treatment of the subject is extremely brief but from context there appears no doubt as to their use. He describes the portraits painted by Zeng Jing (1564-1647):
"His portraits were described as breathtakingly real,
as though they were reflections of the sitter in the mirror.
The facial expressions were said to be exactly like those
of the real person." (243)
...
"Zeng painted portraits which captured each sitter's reflection
as in a mirror. He made no optical adjustments, kept his viewpoint
level, and painted with lines and very few shadows, thereby
preserving the natural protrusions and sunken parts of his subject's
face. What are known in painting as the 'three white spots' (the
brow, nose, and lips) stand out." (245)
These are passages that could have been lifted nearly verbatim from "Secret Knowledge." Additionally, Yang attributes Zeng's achievement to Western influence. A Madonna and child-like composition was painted by Ding Yunpeng (1547-1621) and Yang writes:
"One factor that may be responsible for this is that when the Italian
missionary Mateo Ricci came to China in the mid-sixteenth century;
He visited the Nanjing
engravings of Madonna’s. Ding Yunpeng may have seen the engravings;
If so, this work would represent the earliest Western influence on Chinese
painting." (236)
...
"Many critics consider Zeng Jing's portrait painting significant because of his assimilation of the illusionistic concave and convex method of Western oil painting." (243)
Reading these passages I put aside "Three Thousand Years" and virtually re-read "Secret Knowledge" to see if I had missed this crucial link. Surely, if Hockney had been aware of the use of optics in Chinese art he would have mentioned it, especially since there seemed to be a strong suggestion of a contemporaneous influence by Western art. Nothing. Only the afore-mentioned reference to the eleventh century scholar and the conclusion that interest seemed to have died out. I had attended the NYU symposium and knew for a fact that it was not mentioned there.
I then made a hubristic decision. I decided to contact Hockney. I spent about 45 minutes on Google trying to get his email address but in vain. I then tried to contact Falco and easily got his email address from the University of Arizona
Dear Benjamin,
We haven't found any evidence in Chinese painting of the use of optics. However neither of us has examined Chinese painting in anything like the depth we have Western art. Basically, as far as our kind of work is concerned, it's largely an untapped area of study.
Charles
I then emailed him the above quotes and he responded,
"This sounds very interesting. However, I'm going to have to track down those paintings and see them for myself. Too often I've found written descriptions by others not to correspond all that well with what I see for myself...thank you very much for the reference to it. I'm anxious to see the paintings."
I have seen the paintings, as well as those in “Secret Knowledge.” Zeng's portraits are nowhere near as detailed, as "photographic," as those painted by Western artists using optics. And so I am going to make an "Often wrong, Always certain" prediction. Dr. Falco will dismiss the evidence.
Photo: "The Arnolfini Wedding" (1434), Jan van Eyck
