Did the Old Masters Cheat?

All trades have their secrets and their tricks. When the magician conjures eggs from the audience’s ears and rabbits from empty hats, the quickness of the hand deceives the eye. No longer necromancers with supernatural powers, magicians have become teasing jesters. Among themselves, we may be sure, they talk more of new techniques than of how to summon monsters from the vasty deep.

As for art, its reputation derives, not unlike that of magicians, from a time when the graven image was either taken to be so potent that it could be forbidden entirely--as it remains, to greater or lesser degrees, in Islam and Judaism--or, like Byzantine icons, charged with sublime powers. The image of Athena created by Phidias for the Parthenon was taken by worshipers in some sense actually to be the god. Phidias was at once venerated for his skill and suspected of sharp practice. The Greeks had no word for art: They spoke only of techne--from which our “technique” derives. It connoted skill, professionalism and, perhaps, a certain sleight of hand. “Secret Knowledge” by David Hockney, one of the most admired--and successful--of contemporary artists, is a professional’s account of how the Old Masters may have procured their rarest effects.

Until now, Hockney argues, it has been generally assumed that Raphael and company had such rare coordination that they could somehow transcribe reality freehand. Given the veneration to which genius was entitled, it was heresy to suggest that artists could possibly have reproduced intricately patterned brocades--or Georges de La Tour-like lighting effects--with the help of optical machinery. Hockney claims to have discovered that, in fact, Renaissance genius was systematically crutched by “mechanical aids”: the new science of optics enabled many of them, even the greatest, such as Velazquez, Van Dyck and Vermeer, to use lenses and other means to project their “set-ups” onto flat surfaces.

By such “artificial” methods, they could render three dimensions in unprecedented “realistic” and innovative two-dimensional paintings. This accounts for why faces were suddenly being reproduced, by a whole slew of painters, with a precision not found in earlier, unassisted art. There is, it is eventually hinted, loudly, more than a little in common between Hockney’s Polaroid montages and, for instance, Caravaggio’s lurid compositions, which were allegedly spliced together from a sequence of dramatically posed images.

There is no more scandal in what is revealed here--despite the brouhaha among unsettled art historians at last week’s two-day conference in New York--than in finding that great chefs use their fingers or act differently in the kitchen than when taking fastidious bows among their gourmet clients. Hockney’s greatest sin may simply be exaggerating how dependent genius was on optics.

Does “outing” their trade secrets dissipate the magic of Renaissance masters or detract from their iconographic genius? Hockney denies any such intention. He emphasizes that even to work from projected optical images required extraordinary skill. The process could distort perspective and proportions. But its existence would explain why a number of great painters (Frans Hals among them) left no drawings. They did not need to do preliminary “studies” because their subjects were set out in front of them, thanks to the use of mirrors and lenses, as well as the camera obscura and the camera lucida. The existence of the latter--which allows a virtual image of an object to appear as if projected upon a plane surface so that an outline may be traced--was never a great secret, but lenses procured sharper images and hence led to “photographic” brilliance to be seen, for instance, in Van Dyck’s rendering of armor or in Cotan’s still lifes.

The much later invention of the photographic plate allowed a set-up to be preserved and also, very soon, to be marketed as a “work of art” in its own right. The advent of photographic prints coincided, Hockney argues later, with the explosion of Modernism. Artists had to find a way of painting that veered violently from “reproductive” imagery and so issued in such celebrated (and willfully unrealistic) styles as abstract expressionism. This is hardly news, but it is indeed consistent with the thesis that painting and optics were in furtive collusion until the “fixing” of photographic images required painters to, so to speak, come out of a new hole: hence Modern Art.

Hockney denies that he ever implies that using lenses was no better than painting by numbers, still less that it was “cheating.” However, who can deny the tone of debunking in the “detective” work that he chronicles so excitedly? Yet surely technical invention has always modified and even sponsored fine art: quickly worked fresco rendered mosaic not only “dated” but, literally, uncommercial. It has been said that modern architecture amounts to finding new ways to use steel and concrete (and today, other man-made compounds and building materials).

Whether aesthetics need to take such mundane considerations into account, and how, are quite other questions. The philosophical distinction between demeaning means and sublimely achieved ends may account for the excited surprise of Hockney’s academic buddies, such as professor Martin Kemp and art historian Helen Langdon. Perhaps the most important consequence of Hockney’s book is that it makes us look again, and closely, at things we might have missed unless instructed by his astute scrutiny.

Hockney begins with Ingres, for whom he has the greatest admiration, not least for the speed with which he could complete a portrait drawing in a single day. “Over the years, I have drawn many portraits and I know how much time it takes to draw the way Ingres did. I was awestruck. ‘How had he done them?’ I asked myself.” Are we to infer that Hockney considers that he draws like Ingres? His own appended portraits, using Ingres’ alleged methods, prove only that he draws like Hockney. If he does not mean to denigrate the master by accusing him of using a camera obscura, at least to “fix” the key elements of, for instance Madame Leblanc’s face, Hockney does assert that it would have been impossible to do such quick, accurate work without such an aid. I doubt this.

Of Raphael, Hockney says, “As a professional painter, he had a job to do and would have used all the tools at his disposal.” There’s a down-to-earth, none-of-your-nonsense Yorkshireman for you! It is certainly true that, in his portrait of Pope Leo X of 1518-19, Raphael produced a “realistic marvel.” Leo’s clothes “are depicted ‘naturalistically’ and with convincing volume.” Another sign of “optics” being widely used is the dark backgrounds, which suddenly figure so frequently in Renaissance art. By way of a teasing clue, perhaps, Hockney points out how Raphael’s Pope is holding a magnifying glass: the artist’s wink to the wise?

Judging from the protracted correspondence with art historyand scientific pundits which, with ostentatious modesty, Hockney appends to his colorful text, the use of lenses and mirrors has not been widely acknowledged. Is this because of previous ignorance or--as some critics of Hockney’s “discoveries” have suggested--because there is nothing very surprising about it? For centuries, the Catholic Church was at once the greatest patron of the arts, and of innovation in them, and the most vigilant custodian of dogmatic orthodoxy. The Inquisition did not hesitate to threaten Galileo with the instruments of torture if he did not retract the heretical view--confirmed by his use of telescopic lenses--that the Earth moved around the sun. The artists’ use of lenses was a form of commerce with the devil, which it was prudent not to advertise.

The value of Hockney’s claims on behalf of his “discoveries” lies in requiring us to take a fresh look at specific masterpieces, for instance Van Eyck’s Ghent altarpiece. Hockney anatomizes that unsettling composition by “proving” that it is an amalgam of images seen through discrete “windows.” These were then, imagines Hockney, made into a bafflingly unified montage somewhat in the manner of Hockney’s own Polaroid panoramas. Van Eyck’s work is no more a cheat than was the apparent seamless “solidity” of Phidias’ gold plating on his Athena. The altarpiece’s range of perspectives makes coherent sense only when perceived as a quilted collation. Each panel can have been, and probably was, separately posed before being harmonized with the others.

All that we “lose,” if we accept Hockney’s deconstructing theory, is the art historian’s conceit of a platoon of Renaissance artists--from Holland to Italy to Spain--being suddenly blessed with a simultaneous “divine” afflatus which enabled them all, within a few years, to create a new style and achieve coincidental miracles of unprecedented verisimilitude. Is it not more reasonable, asks Hockney, to conclude that they had quiet access to the optical aids which came, for the most part, from Holland, where the Inquisition’s writ did not run with the same repressive force that it had in Italy?

As long as Hockney and his fulsome correspondents--goodness how excited they are to be sent love by a major celebrity!--concentrate on the specifics of the painter’s trade, “Secret Knowledge” is a fascinating, if arguable, revision of great Western art.

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Frederic Raphael has written widely on philosophy and aesthetics and is the author of 20 novels as well as many story collections, biographies, screenplays (including “Eyes Wide Shut”) and translations from ancient Greek and Latin. His most recent book is “Personal Terms,” edited notebooks, 1950-69.