Copycat Masters?

What an instructive and inspiring contrast: A few months ago the Taliban’s religious Nazis blew up ancient Afghan artworks because stone statues were a threat to their cloaked worldview. Last weekend at a New York seminar, artists, writers and historians collided over an almost sacrilegious theory: The Old Masters might actually have traced parts of their finest paintings. (Not shocking perhaps to those who slip lined paper beneath stationery to keep the writing straight.) But artist David Hockney’s outraged critics threw only rhetorical explosives. Their open debate, taken for granted in America, is grand for the wider appreciation of art and fascinating to ponder.

A significant part of appreciating anything--gazing at a Rembrandt, listening to an Andrea Bocelli or watching the exquisite moves of a pro athlete--is thinking: How do they do that? Some of us are even amazed at good mimics. Hockney wondered how the Old Masters did what they did. The Los Angeles artist found details too perfect for freehand work, and he found too many left-handed drinkers, causing him to suspect that images had been reversed in a mirror. He replicated crude lenses and prisms to project images onto canvases for tracing. Then he wrote a book, “Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters.”

Some art historians were furious, claiming Hockney’s theories implied artistic cheating, which he denies. As an artist, Hockney professes mere intrigue with the creative process, although, fact is, controversy never hurts book sales.

What’s the big deal anyway? There’s only one original of anything; everything else is a tracing or adaptation. Most of us couldn’t trace a tracing without help. Our Crayola reds spill outside the lines. Our human heads resemble carved pumpkins. If some bearded guys in Belgian lofts used lenses or crude cameras to project images onto canvas centuries ago while creating masterpieces from oils and pigments that live on grandly today, let’s ask the teacher to award extra credit posthumously for bringing science to art.

Like the Amadeus story that put flesh and feelings onto one-dimensional composers, this debate excites the imagination about art and artists, about history, about science, about the evolution of human knowledge. Could art actually be fun? Now we can move to another unanswered question: How did all those nearly nude models in Renaissance paintings hold their languorous poses so long without goose bumps and central heating?