According to Jenison, the painting he digitally deconstructed shows just such a diminution from light to dark.īut still, exactly how did Vermeer do it? One day, in the bathtub, Jenison had a eureka moment: a mirror. Much later, he did a computer analysis of a high-resolution scan of a Vermeer interior, and discovered “an exponential relationship in the light on the white wall.” The brightness of any surface becomes exponentially less bright the farther it is from a light source-but the unaided human eye doesn’t register that. He paid for translations of old Latin texts on optics and art.
He traveled to Delft again and again, scouting the places where Vermeer had painted. And since he had no training or experience as an artist whatsoever, he figured he was the ideal beta user of whatever he rigged up. As the nay-saying historian James Elkins (of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago) observed in 2001, “the optical procedures posited in Hockney’s book are all radically undertested,” and “no one, including myself, knows what it is really like to get inside a camera obscura”-a lens projecting a perfect image of one side of a room onto a surface equidistant on the other side-“and make a painting.” Jenison decided to construct a version of a device that Vermeer himself could have built and used. However, the Hockney-Steadman theories were just that-theories, experimentally undemonstrated. “And Steadman,” Jenison says, “really got me thinking hard.” As a guy who has spent his whole career reproducing and manipulating visual images, and contemplating the deep nuts and bolts of how our eyes see differently than cameras do, Jenison had a strong hunch that Hockney and Steadman were right. Curious, careful, soft-spoken, and comfortably schlumpy, he comes across more as a neighborhood professor you might see at Home Depot than as a guy who owns his own jet.īut in 2002, one of his daughters, then a student at the Rhode Island School of Design, recommended he read Secret Knowledge. He is a nonstop tinkerer in the rest of his life as well, building giant model airplanes and battle robots, and learning to fly helicopters.
#Vermeer used equipment software
Jenison, now 58, is the founder of NewTek, where he has made a fortune inventing hardware and software for video production and post-production. Meanwhile, in San Antonio, Texas, Tim Jenison knew nothing of the brouhaha. “I don’t oppose the notion that Vermeer in some way responded to the camera obscura,” said Walter Liedtke, then as now the Met’s curator of European paintings (including its five Vermeers), “but I do oppose drastic devaluations of the role of art.” Hockney, people said, was just jealous because he lacks the old masters’ skills. By the time of the first big American show of Vermeer paintings-at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in 1909-their value has increased another hundred times, by the 1920s ten times that.ĭespite occasional speculation over the years that an optical device somehow enabled Vermeer to paint his pictures, the art-history establishment has remained adamant in its romantic conviction: maybe he was inspired somehow by lens-projected images, but his only exceptional tool for making art was his astounding eye, his otherworldly genius. Then, just as photography is making highly realistic painting seem pointless, the photo-realistic Sphinx of Delftis rediscovered and his pictures are suddenly deemed valuable. After his death, at 43, he and his minuscule oeuvre slip into obscurity for two centuries. Accepted into his local Dutch painters’ guild in 1653, at age 21, with no recorded training as an apprentice, he promptly begins painting masterful, singular, uncannily realistic pictures of light-filled rooms and ethereal young women. In the history of art, Johannes Vermeer is almost as mysterious and unfathomable as Shakespeare in literature, like a character in a novel.
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