Start Reading
About Eye of the Beholder
About Laura J. Snyder
Reviews
Table of Contents
www.headofzeus.com
For John
Study the science of art. Study the art of science. Develop your senses—especially learn how to see.
—LEONARDO DA VINCI (1452–1519)
Painting is a science and should be pursued as an inquiry into the laws of nature. Why, then, may not a landscape be considered as a branch of natural philosophy, of which pictures are but experiments?
—JOHN CONSTABLE,
“The History of Landscape Painting” (1836)
Hold, as ’twere, the mirror up to nature.
—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE,
Hamlet, III, II (ca. 1600)
Contents
Cover
Welcome Page
Frontispiece
Dedication
Epigraph
PROLOGUE
More Than Meets the Eye
1
2
3
4
5
PART 1
Counterfeiter of Nature
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
PART 2
From the Lion’s Corner
1
2
3
4
5
PART 3
Fire and Light
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
PART 4
Learning to See
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
PART 5
Ut pictura, ita visio
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
PART 6
Mathematical Artists
1
2
3
4
5
PART 7
A Treasure-House of Nature
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
PART 8
Year of Catastrophe
1
2
3
4
5
PART 9
The Invisible World
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
PART 10
Generations
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
PART 11
Scientific Lion
1
2
3
4
5
6
PART 12
New Ways of Seeing
1
2
3
4
5
EPILOGUE
Dare to See!
Picture Section
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
About Eye of the Beholder
Reviews
About Laura J. Snyder
An Invitation from the Publisher
Copyright
EYE OF THE BEHOLDER
PROLOGUE
More Than Meets the Eye
* * *
-1-
IT IS A bright day in August of 1674. In the small Dutch city of Delft, Antoni Leeuwenhoek*1—a former cloth merchant, now a local bureaucrat and self-taught lens maker—sits by the large window in his study. Like most of the windows in Delft, this one is fitted with shutters that are doubly divided; each half has an upper and a lower part that opens separately, so light entering the room can be precisely regulated. Today, the entire shutter has been thrown open. If any of his neighbors happen to glance into the ground floor room as they pass by, perhaps on their way to the nearby Market Square, they might remark to each other that the “curious dabbler” is at his peculiar pursuits again.*2
Leeuwenhoek is staring through a flat, oblong brass holder about three inches long. In the center of the holder is a tiny glass bead he made himself—how he did so, whether by grinding the lens or by blowing it from molten glass, is a secret that Leeuwenhoek has jealously guarded. Attached to the back of the strange device is a thin metal rod supporting a small glass tube that contains a drop of water taken from the Berkelse Mere, an inland lake located a two hours’ walk from Delft. Pressing the metal holder closer to one eye—so that it is almost touching his face—in order to peer at the water in the tube through the glass bead, Leeuwenhoek is shocked to see not a clear pool, but a veritable aquarium filled with minuscule, swimming creatures—about a thousand times smaller than the tiniest cheese mites, he reckons. Some of these “little animals” are shaped like spirally wound serpents, some are globular, others elongated ovals; he records that “the motion of … these animalcules in the water was so swift, and so various, downwards, and round about, that I confess I could not but wonder at it.” Leeuwenhoek has just discovered a new world never before even imagined: the microscopic world.
-2-
In an attic diagonally across the Market Square from Leeuwenhoek’s house, another of Delft’s geniuses is at work. Like his neighbor, Johannes Vermeer was secretive about his methods, so we cannot be certain how he painted his mature works of exquisite luminosity, works that show an exciting intimacy with optical effects seen only through lenses. But given the evidence we may reasonably imagine that, on this fine day in August, Vermeer is bent over a table, looking at a wooden box with an open hinged top, while holding his long, dark robe over his head. On one end of the box is a short tube holding a piece of glass ground to the shape of a lentil—hence its name, a lens. At the top of the box sits a piece of flat glass. Vermeer has placed the tube with the lens in the direction of a scene he composed next to the room’s large window, which also has its shutters thrown wide open. Vermeer has draped a curtain between himself and the window, which blocks a little of the light flooding in. A young woman, in a yellow satin skirt, a white bodice, and a brilliant blue overdress, sits at a virginal, an instrument popular with the rich merchant class in Delft (and probably borrowed by Vermeer for the occasion). Her fingers rest on the keys while her face turns to Vermeer, as if waiting for him to tell her to begin to play. On the wall behind the woman hangs a large picture of a brothel scene by another painter, a picture that is owned by Vermeer’s mother-in-law, as is the house we are in now.*3
Under his robe, Vermeer gazes at the flat glass on the top of the box. The entire scene is visible on the glass, including its precise proportions and correct three-dimensional perspective rendered in a two-dimensional image. Vermeer is as astonished as ever to observe that the colors on the glass are even more jewel-like than they appear to the naked eye, the areas of shadow even more strongly contrasted with the patches of light, the contours of figures beautifully softened. He pays particular attention to the way the foreground and background a
re out of focus when the rest of the scene is sharp, the way the highlights appear brightly where the sun hits reflective surfaces, and how the relative tonal values—the way different colors look under different light conditions—are represented fully, more so than they are by the naked eye.
Vermeer is looking through a camera obscura, an optical device that, in earlier versions, had long been known to natural philosophers and natural “magicians”; it was employed in the past to observe solar eclipses safely and to amaze and delight audiences with “living pictures.” A precursor to the photographic camera, but without the light-sensitive film, the box-type camera obscura is a light-tight wooden chamber with a hole or lens on one side. It projects an inverted and reversed image of the scene either upon a glass plate or oilpaper on the top of the device or onto a nearby wall or canvas (by the use of a mirror the image can be made upright). Earlier versions were simply a dark room—thus the name, Latin for “dark chamber”—with a tiny aperture of five to ten millimeters letting in light from the sun outside. The spectator, sitting inside the room, would see the inverted and reversed image of the outside scene projected on the wall opposite the hole. These whole-room cameras were followed by versions in which a tented-off area or booth could be created inside to view a scene that was set up within the room. The invention of the box-type camera obscura came next.
Vermeer is looking through the camera not to trace its image onto translucent paper placed on the glass at the top of the box, or to angle the mirror so that the image is projected onto his canvas, but to experiment with the optics of the scene. By rearranging the composition, he can manipulate the type of light effects he has learned to exploit so masterfully. Vermeer sees that if the light hits the virginal just so, he will need a highlight of lead white paint there, on the right front leg. But the geometry of the picture seems to him to require another highlight on the front of the instrument, depicting a reflection of the woman’s forearm, where the light is not causing a reflection. Vermeer is no slave to the optics of the camera obscura.
By looking through the camera obscura, Vermeer has become expert in the way that light affects how we see the world. He has seen the world as we do not normally see it, revealed in surprising new ways invisible to the naked eye. Like the microscope, the camera obscura disclosed to its seventeenth-century users truths about the natural world otherwise inaccessible to the senses. As the diplomat, natural philosopher, and art enthusiast Constantijn Huygens—an acquaintance of both Vermeer’s and Leeuwenhoek’s—put it, with the advent of the camera obscura, “all painting is dead by comparison, for this is life itself, or something more elevated, if one could articulate it.”
-3-
At that moment, the scientific world was in the midst of a revolution. This so-called Scientific Revolution, today associated with the names Copernicus, Kepler, Bacon, Harvey, Galileo, and Newton, was brought about in part by a new emphasis on empirical methods—making careful observations of the natural world—as opposed to the nonempirical, logical methods preferred by many medieval followers of Aristotle. No longer would the reliance on ancient texts, or on armchair philosophizing about the world from a scholar’s study, be considered adequate. The clarion call of natural philosophers (for they were not yet called “scientists”) became “See for yourself!”
The new scientific societies of the age embodied this quest in their names and mottoes, from the Lyncean Academy of Florence, whose members aimed to “examine with lynx-like eyes those things which manifest themselves,” to the Royal Society of London, which defiantly claimed Nullius in Verba—on the words of no man. The Moravian philosopher and educator John Comenius, who inspired the founding of the Royal Society through his English disciple Samuel Hartlib, commanded, “Everything should, as far as it is possible, be placed before the senses. Everything visible should be brought before the organ of sight.… The truth and certainty of science depend more on the witness of the senses than on anything else.”
This newly pervasive interest in observing, representing, and measuring nature demanded new instruments, and inventive minds of the seventeenth century obliged; the thermometer, the barometer, the air pump, and the pendulum clock were all devised during this period. Most thrilling of all were two other novel devices: the telescope and the microscope. Never before had instruments extended the reach of the human senses. Telescopes and microscopes allowed their users to see parts of the world that were previously unseen, because they were too far away or too small. Inevitably, some investigators of nature, such as Robert Hooke in England, began to wonder about the extension of the other senses: “As Glasses [lenses] have highly promoted our seeing, so ’tis not improbable, but that there may be found many Mechanical Inventions to improve our other Senses, of hearing, smelling, tasting, touching.”
But these new visual capacities were problematic. To say that what was seen through the telescope and microscope accurately revealed parts of the world invisible to the naked eye was not a straightforward matter. With his telescope, for example, Galileo had claimed to see the impossible—at least, what was considered impossible by most astronomers at the time: new bodies orbiting Jupiter, a rough and pockmarked surface of the moon, and Venus cycling through “phases.” How could the astronomer be certain that the telescope did not create artificial images, deceiving him—that it did, in fact, allow the perception of what really existed outside the range of the naked eye? Many astronomers were skeptical—and so were authorities of the Catholic Church, who were not pleased that Galileo was using his telescope to gather evidence in support of Copernicus’s heretical theory that Earth was a planet going around the sun. How much more strange would be the discovery of a whole realm of tiny creatures wriggling in the water we drink and the fluids that course through parts of our bodies: blood, saliva, semen. Leeuwenhoek, like Galileo before him, would be accused of “seeing more with his imagination than with his eyes.” New optical and visual theories proposed by men such as René Descartes and Johannes Kepler were deployed in the attempt to explain how these devices worked in conjunction with the human eye so that observers could trust what they saw through microscopes and telescopes. Indeed, these new devices were often compared to the human eye, suggesting that they were as reliable as the familiar bodily instrument.
The widespread acceptance of optical instruments in science required not only optical theories explaining how they worked but also—and especially—the willingness to accept that there is more than meets the eye, that the world is not simply the way it appears to us. Behind the phenomena we see with the naked eye is an unseen world, and in this invisible world lie the causes of the natural processes we observe. This period in history is distinguished, above all, by the rampant realization that the world is not—or not only—as it seems to be.
Although glass spectacles had been worn for centuries, they had been considered means to enable the feeble-sighted to see what was visible with “normal” vision. Now, suddenly, glass lenses were being used to see more than what could be seen with normal vision—more even than Adam could have seen with his perfect, prelapsarian vision, as some theologically minded writers noted with varying measures of excitement and dismay. Hooke optimistically proclaimed, “There is a new visible World discovered to the understanding.” This newly visible world revealed for the first time that we could have direct sensory access to the hidden causes of phenomena in the natural world. The eccentric Jesuit priest and inventor Athanasius Kircher pointed to the more disconcerting aspect of this shift, noting in 1646 that the telescope and microscope revealed that everything we see with them is very different from the way it had seemed. These instruments revealed a world that was not only new but strange. Science began to be understood as a means to uncover and explain this strange new world.
During the Scientific Revolution natural philosophers accepted this task of exposing the hidden processes and causes of the natural world, and they understood that the new optical devices could help them do so. Aristotle, it is true, had
made careful observations of the natural world, going so far as to open up fertilized chicken eggs every day to record the stages of development of the chick embryo. But he had no microscope to help him see beyond the realm of naked vision. Surely he would have used one if it had been available! It was time for the natural philosopher to put aside Aristotle’s texts and see for himself (or, sometimes, herself), often by means of the new optical instruments. Accordingly, in this period, tiny insects were peered at through microscopes, distant planets were examined through telescopes, and human bodies were cut open in civic anatomical theaters to discover what lay inside.
A new idea of what it meant to see emerged: one that allowed that there was more to nature than meets the naked eye, and that lenses, and other optical instruments, could help us see a part of nature that was otherwise hidden. This new idea of what it meant to see went hand in hand with a new idea of science, one in which enhanced sense perception—not ancient texts, not logical deduction, not even raw visual experience—was the foundation of knowledge of the natural world.
The transformation of scientific ideas in astronomy, physics, biology, anatomy, and chemistry now associated with the Scientific Revolution came about in large part because of the new optical instruments, the new theories that provided the groundwork for using them, and the startling ability to see beyond what was available to the naked eye. For the first time the question of how we see assumed a central place in science, and what it meant, precisely, to see, was radically reconceived. And in the midst of this upheaval of thought, science and art came together in a small city in the Dutch Republic to shed light on what it really meant to see the world around us.
-4-
The new way of seeing transformed not only science but also art, especially in the Dutch Republic, where notions of painting as the “mirror of nature” dominated contemporary art theory. Artists, too, were exhorted to really see nature—to see more than was apparent to the naked eye, and then to mirror these newly observed attributes in their pictures. The painter and foremost art theorist of the seventeenth century, Samuel Van Hoogstraten, called painting a “sister of [natural] philosophy,” that is, a sister of science; indeed, he decreed that the painter should be an “investigator of visible nature.” Extolling the Adoration of the Lamb triptych by the brothers Van Eyck, the late sixteenth-century painter Lucas de Heere had proclaimed dramatically, “They are mirrors, mirrors are they! No, they are not pictures.” Optical instruments—mirrors, lenses, and camera obscuras—allowing the painter to investigate nature more carefully were bound to be of great interest.
Eye of the Beholder: Johannes Vermeer, Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, and the Reinvention of Seeing Page 1