
Hockney–Falco thesis - tosh
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hockney%E2%80%93Falco_thesis
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krrrh
The film _Tim’s Vermeer_ has a nice exposition of this theory, including a few
good scenes with David Hockney himself. Great Look the intersections of art,
technology, and personal obsession.

[http://www.sonyclassics.com/timsvermeer/](http://www.sonyclassics.com/timsvermeer/)

~~~
greglindahl
I wish people would be a lot more focused on Tim's experiment than Hockney's
theory. Great documentary, and Tim is a great hacker and a participant in the
community.

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StavrosK
Tim's experiment was _very_ convincing for me, a layman. Especially the fact
that it reproduced details that the brain can't really process well enough to
draw (e.g. the subtle changes of color of the wall) and the fact that the
paintings exhibit optical defects such as lens blur, aberration, vignetting,
etc, is pretty stong evidence to this theory.

~~~
greglindahl
Yeah, the problem with it is that while it's proof that you can do that with
Vermeer's technology, there's no proof that Vermeer did it that way. And there
are no artifacts like those lenses and mirrors found in illustrations of
painting workshops or artifact collections, and no books or other documents
that talk about that technique.

It would be awesome an art historian would look at a bunch of paintings for
those defects, or if someone could work out how many portraits are 1:1 scale,
like Tim's second "Claire with a Pearl Earring" experiment.

~~~
StavrosK
Yeah, very true. However, isn't the color aberrations in the paintings a dead
giveaway that a lens was used? You can't really get aberrations any other way!

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greglindahl
Yeah, I like that one. I also like the argument about the brightness gradient
in the white wall being super accurate. But these sorts of arguments aren't
considered strong by critics.

Now imagine that we found a half-burned-down painter's workshop in the
countryside, with a bunch of artifacts. Or a woodcut or drawing of a painter's
workshop with these devices in use. Those would be very convincing to a
critic. But we don't have those.

~~~
StavrosK
Yeah, fair enough, I guess I just disagree with critics there because
chromatic aberration is a very specific defect, and not just "random colors
gone wrong". Art critics will know more than me on this, though, so they must
have their reasons.

Hopefully we _will_ find a workshop somewhere with a bunch of photographic
equipment and crack this puzzle.

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igravious
Yeah, [http://www.yeahyeahyeahs.com/](http://www.yeahyeahyeahs.com/)

~~~
mysterypie
What's with the spam link? You have a really good comment history, so I'm
thinking either your account has been penetrated or somehow your "yeah" was
autocorrected to a bogus hyperlink, or you meant to link something else.

~~~
igravious
Thank you for the compliment about my comment history. There is an alternative
explanation. A surfeit of eggnog. Luckily I didn't post this link:
[http://flaminglips.com/history/songs/the-yeah-yeah-yeah-
song...](http://flaminglips.com/history/songs/the-yeah-yeah-yeah-song/)

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YeGoblynQueenne
This is an interesting idea, but it's impossible to know for sure if it's true
or not. It's unfalsifiable, basically.

The reason -and it's a technical, not a philosophical reason- is that theories
like this are really trying to determine a process from examples of its
output, where the output in this case is some behaviour of a living organism
(a human artist creating a painting). Unfortunately, for a sufficiently
complex behaviour there may be any number of processes capable of reproducing
it to the same degree of fidelity- "any number" as in _an infinite many_ [1].

The best you can hope to do then, is to approximate the target process to some
arbitrary measure of error. You can easily measure the error by comparing
examples of the target process with examples of an approximator. However, you
cannot prove that an approximator _is_ the target process- not even given 0
error in the reproduction, because finding one approximator is more of a hint
that there are more approximators possible than any sort of proof that the
approximator you found is the only process capable of reproducing those
examples with that error.

So the problem with the Hockney-Falco idea is that there is no way to tell
whether a work of art _was_ created using an optical device, rather than
without. Only that it _could_ have. And that's really the strongest claim that
one can legitimately make: "the Old Masters could have used optical devices to
create their masterpieces". From there to "... and they actually did" is a big
leap- of faith, not reason.

____________________

[1] There's maths on that- learnability results, particularly related to
automata induction and so on. I'll dig out the refs if anyone is curious. But
oh god, please don't :)

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tfha
Well, you could prove it by digging up texts and commentaries from the time
that mention these devices. Diary entries, etc.

It's unlikely that so many masters would use this technique without leaving
some evidence of it behind. So, in the absence of that kind of evidence, I
think it'd be okay to dismiss it as a primary force of innovation during the
renaissance, especially if other techniques exist that were more readily
discussed.

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Q6T46nT668w6i3m
I love David Hockney, but _Secret Knowledge_ is an extraordinary work that I’d
recommend to everyone regardless of their interest in art criticism. Most
people frame the work as using science to comment about art criticism but I
think that’s backwards. Hockney, instead, uses the program of art criticism to
evaluate scientific discovery (and progress). By the end I felt that science
became slightly more humane.

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petters
I once attended a lecture by Stork that very convincingly disproved this
thesis. But Hockey was not there to defend it.

At least it allowed a lot of non trivial math (computer vision).

~~~
greglindahl
> David Stork, an imaging scientist and former Stanford professor with a side
> career in computer-aided art analysis, was the major scientific critic of
> Hockney and Steadman a decade ago. One of his main counterarguments was
> that, using only a camera obscura, Vermeer would have had to paint upside
> down and the projected image would be too dim to be useful. Jenison figured
> out that using a second mirror solves both problems. So in his apparatus,
> the image is projected through the 4-inch lens onto a 7-inch concave mirror
> on the opposite wall, and then onto the 2-inch-by-4-inch mirror he’d have
> right in front of his face as he painted.

[https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2013/11/vermeer-secret-
to...](https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2013/11/vermeer-secret-tool-mirrors-
lenses)

