Eye of the Beholder: Johannes Vermeer, Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, and the Reinvention of Seeing

by Laura J. Snyder

  131 While he acknowledged: Wotton, Dec. 1620, in Reliquiae Wottoniae (1651), quoted in Seymour, “Dark Chamber and Light-Filled Room,” p. 324. See also Camerota, “Looking for an Artificial Eye,” p. 284.

  131 Wotton, who had lived: See Steadman, Vermeer’s Camera, p. 19.

  132 “I need not perhaps tell”: Boyle, “On the Systematicall and Cosmical Qualities of Things,” n.p.

  132 Johann Zahn illustrated: When Hooke demonstrated his cone-shaped device that fit over a user’s head, he noted that it could be used as an instrument “to give us the true Draught of whatever he sees before him.” M. S. Hammond claims that Zahn’s two models were impractical for drawing, and were intended only as illustrations of optical principles. See “The Camera Obscura,” pp. 299–302. Kemp says that Hooke invented a portable camera obscura around 1685, even though he did not present it to the Royal Society until Dec. 19, 1694. See Kemp, The Science of Art, p. 190, and Hooke, “An Instrument to Take the Draught or Picture of a Thing,” p. 295.

  132 Huygens had mentioned: Letter from Huygens to his parents, April 13, 1622, quoted in Wheelock, “Constantijn Huygens and Early Attitudes towards the Camera Obscura,” p. 93.

  132 In his autobiography, written: For these quotations from the autobiography, see ibid., p. 99.

  133 Huygens also noted: See Alpers, The Art of Describing, p. 23.

  133 So the quality of the glass: Cocquyt, “The Camera Obscura and the Availability of 17th Century Optics,” p. 134.

  134 The lens must have: Wirth, “The Camera Obscura as a Model of a New Concept of Mimesis in 17th Century Painting,” pp. 158–59. Cocquyt and Wirth reproduced two seventeenth-century camera obscuras using a lens by Christiaan Huygens from 1655 and one by Giuseppe Compani from 1680, both with focal distances of about three meters. The image attained each time was bright and sharp; they conclude that the lenses of the day were more than adequate for use in a camera obscura, and “lens quality is not a sufficient argument for refuting the application of the camera obscura in this period.” See Cocquyt, “The Camera Obscura and the Availability of 17th Century Optics,” pp. 134–39; quotation on p. 139.

  134 By 1604 Kepler had reported: Kepler witnessed a demonstration in which one of the rooms in the Dresden Kunstkammer (a collection of objects of various kinds, a sort of public “cabinet of curiosity”) had been turned into a room-type camera obscura with a lens a foot in diameter; he reports on this demonstration in his Ad Vitellionem paralipomena, in Optics, p. 194. See Dupré, “Inside the Camera Obscura,” p. 220, and Wirth, “The Camera Obscura as a Model of a New Concept of Mimesis in 17th Century Painting,” p. 159n. We know that flat, square mirrors that size were being produced in Venice in the sixteenth century. Because it was by then possible to blow flat sheets of glass at least that large, it would have been possible to grind a glass blank that size into a lens, though perhaps not a particularly good one. On the production of mirrors of this size in 1500, see Schechner, “Between Knowing and Doing,” p. 156; on lenses, see Wirth, “The Camera Obscura as a Model of a New Concept of Mimesis in 17th Century Painting,” pp. 160–61.

  134 By the mid-seventeenth century: By the 1620s, then, the question regarding the Hockney-Falco thesis becomes not “Were optical projections possible?” but “How and when were they used by artists?” See Lüthy, “Hockney’s Secret Knowledge, Vanvitelli’s Camera Obscura,” pp. 317–18.

  134 “one of the best optical”: Quoted in Wheelock, Perspective, Optics, and Delft Artists around 1650, p. 156.

  134 The camera obscura allowed: See Wheelock, “Constantijn Huygens and Early Attitudes towards the Camera Obscura,” p. 99, and Weststeijn, The Visible World, p. 105.

  135 Swammerdam, who would: Fournier, “The Fabric of Life,” p. 82.

  135 His father also had: Cobb, Generation, pp. 34–35.

  136 Alchemists were using: For more on the alchemists and how they were early chemists, see Principe, The Secrets of Alchemy.

  136 Especially starting in the 1650s: See Liedtke, “De Hooch and Vermeer,” p. 145.

  136 One of the main motivations: See Alpers, The Art of Describing, ch. 4, and Weststeijn, The Visible World, pp. 278–79.

  136 “imitate things as they”: Quoted in Weststeijn, The Visible World, p. 274.

  137 The viewer of De Hooch’s: Liedtke, “De Hooch and Vermeer,” p. 142.

  137 Like the natural philosophers: See Kemp, The Science of Art, pp. 192–93. In a book published in 1641, Franciscus Junius had already used the mirror metaphor to argue that the painter must base his art solely on the images presented to him by the visible world. See Weststeijn, The Visible World, p. 273

  137 “a painter, whose work”: Van Hoogstraten, quoted in Wheelock, Vermeer and the Art of Painting, p. 14.

  137 A century later Arnold Houbraken: Mander and Houbraken, quoted in Ruestow, The Microscope in the Dutch Republic, p. 74n58.

  137 “making things that are not”: Quoted in Weststeijn, The Visible World, p. 86.

  137 In his own pictures: See Brusati, “Paradoxical Passages,” pp. 59–61.

  138 Vermeer would use this device: Liedtke, “Vermeer: Style and Observation,” MMA Lecture, April 22, 2014.

  138 Like the drops of “dew”: See Wadum, “Contours of Vermeer,” p. 209.

  138 “transform a painter’s imagination”: Westermann, “Vermeer and the Interior Imagination,” p. 228, quoting Willem Goeree’s 1668 text on drawing.

  138 “saw hundreds of little barges”: Van Hoogstraten, Inleyding, p. 263, quoted in Steadman, Vermeer’s Camera, p. 22.

  138 “I am certain”: Van Hoogstraten, Inleyding, p. 263, quoted in Wheelock, Perspective, Optics, and Delft Artists around 1650, p. 165.

  139 “There are some who look”: Quoted in Kemp, The Science of Art, p. 163.

  139 Although Leonardo had: See ibid., pp. 169–70.

  139 “I have no other calculator”: Quoted ibid., p. 40.

  139 The science of art: Ibid., p. 41.

  140 It is no accident that: See M. S. Hammond, “The Camera Obscura,” p. 226.

  140 “the retina is painted”: “Retiformis tunica pingitur à radijs coloratis rerum visibilium.” Kepler, Dioptrice, quoted in Alpers, The Art of Describing, p. 38. A debate between some Kepler scholars rages over the question whether Kepler was “mechanizing” the eye or “naturalizing” the camera obscura; I will not explore that controversy here. See Straker, “Kepler’s Optics,” for the first view, and Lindberg, Theories of Vision, for the second.

  140 Earlier, Leonardo had been: Leonardo da Vinci, in a treatise of 1508–9 on vision and the function of the eye; see M. S. Hammond, “The Camera Obscura,” pp. 136–37. See also Crombie, “The Mechanistic Hypothesis,” p. 38, and Wheelock, “Constantijn Huygens and Early Attitudes towards the Camera Obscura,” pp. 99–100. As Wheelock notes, Della Porta had made a similar comparison in his Magia naturalis (1589); he still claimed, however, that the organ of sight is the “crystalline sphere located in the middle of the eye” (quoted in Wheelock, Perspective, Optics, and Delft Artists around 1650, p. 49). Jean-François Niceron included an illustration of the eye as a camera obscura in his Thaumaturgus opticus (Paris, 1646).

  140 Galileo’s friend Cigoli: Camerota, “Looking for an Artifical Eye,” p. 265.

  140 The comparison of the eye: See Lefèvre, “The Optical Camera Obscura I,” p. 8.

  140 Knowing that people: Alhazen, for instance, recognized that the crystalline humor acts as a lens and that light rays passing through it are refracted. But he refused to accept the logical conclusion that the image would be inverted; he insisted on an upright image within the eye and thus reached false conclusions about the eye’s anatomy. See Wheelock, Perspective, Optics, and Delft Artists around 1650, pp. 35–36. A. I. Sabra argues, however, that Alhazen did not understand the organ of sight as acting like a lens camera. See “Alhazen’s Optics in Europe,” pp. 53–56.

  140 “take the eye of a newly”: Descartes, La dioptrique, in Discourse on Method, Optics,
Geometry, and Meteorology, pp. 91–93.

  141 In 1625 the astronomer: See Kepler’s Dioptrice, Descartes’s La dioptrique, Kemp, The Science of Art, p. 191, Delsaute, “The Camera Obscura and Paintings in the 16th and 17th Century,” p. 116, Wenczel, “The Optical Camera Obscura II,” p. 24, and M. S. Hammond, “The Camera Obscura,” p. 230. Lindberg, however, downplays Kepler’s comparison of the eye to the camera obscura, because he sees Kepler’s theory of vision as the culmination of the medieval perspectivist tradition rather than a mechanistic view that breaks from that tradition. See Lindberg, Theories of Vision, p. 206; on the point about Lindberg’s view of Kepler as the culmination of the old tradition, see Dupré, “Inside the Camera Obscura,” pp. 220–21. Kepler also compares the telescope to the eye, calling it an “artificial eye.” See Malet, “Early Conceptualizations of the Telescope as an Optical Instrument,” p. 245.

  141 “Something of this kind”: Boyle, Some Considerations Touching the Usefulness of Experimental Natural Philosophy, pp. 95–97.

  141 Performing the same experiment: AvL to RSL, April 30, 1694, AB, 10:127.

  141 In this sense the camera obscura: Later this view of the eye as a camera would raise new problems about vision that needed solving—for example, the question of how the eye can focus, and the complications of binocular vision (issues arising from the fact that our visual arrangement consists of two separate lens/retina systems), questions that would exercise some of the most powerful minds of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, including John Locke in England and Immanuel Kant in Germany. See Kemp, The Science of Art, p. 234. See also Lefèvre, “The Optical Camera Obscura I,” p. 7.

  142 “La vision est la perception”: Quoted in Wheelock Perspective, Optics, and Delft Artists around 1650, p. 156.

  142 Images seen through the camera obscura: See ibid., p. 6. Earlier Kircher had spoken of natura pictrix, nature the painter; the visible world is but a painting, so our images of that world both on our retinas and in the camera obscura, also paintings, are the same type of thing as nature itself. Kircher, Ars magna lucis et umbrae, quoted in Gorman, “Projecting Nature in Early Modern Europe,” p. 45.

  142 “exceptional and secret knowledge”: Alberti, Vita, quoted in Yiu, “The Mirror and Painting in Early Renaissance Texts,” p. 198.

  143 “forte secrete, & comme un”: Hondius, Perspectivae, p. 19, quoted in Wheelock, Perspective, Optics, and Delft Artists around 1650, p. 164.

  143 “that which ravishes”: J. Leurechon, Recreation mathematique (1626), quoted ibid., p. 95.

  143 Even the recipes for mixing: See Kirby, “The Painter’s Trade in the 17th Century,” p. 10. Philip Ball discusses the intersection of alchemy’s “secret books” with color production in the Middle Ages in Bright Earth, chap. 4.

  143 Of all the artists who: Indeed, Martin Kemp believes that in Vermeer’s case “the evidence about the use of optical devices [including the camera obscura] is about as secure as it could be.” See Kemp, “Imitation, Optics, and Photography,” p. 243. See also Kemp, The Science of Art, pp. 193–94. Other seventeenth-century Dutch painters who probably used the camera obscura include Van der Heyden. The painter Sir Joshua Reynolds would later describe Van der Heyden’s work by saying that “his pictures have very much the effect of nature, seen through a camera obscura.” Reynolds, quoted ibid., p. 198.

  143 It might have been Fabritius: See Blankert, Vermeer of Delft, pp. 20–21.

  144 Passengers and goods incessantly: See Plomp, “Along the City Walls,” p. 551.

  144 “the scene’s varied light effects”: Westermann, “Vermeer and the Interior Imagination,” p. 219, emphasis added.

  144 “taught the correct way”: On Canaletto see Kemp, The Science of Art, p. 197; on Vanvitelli see Lüthy, “Hockney’s Secret Knowledge, Vanvitelli’s Camera Obscura,” p. 315. The Museo Correr in Venice owns a camera obscura taken to have been Canaletto’s instrument; it has the inscription A. Canal. While some dispute that this was his camera obscura, there are no doubts that Canaletto used one. See Lüthy, “Hockney’s Secret Knowledge, Vanvitelli’s Camera Obscura,” p. 322. Interestingly, Canaletto would have known Vermeer’s The Music Lesson, since it was owned by his Venetian patron, Consul Smith (but it was at that time incorrectly attributed to Van Mieris). See Gowing, Vermeer, p. 125.

  144 Vanvitelli would take: On Vanvitelli’s method, see Lüthy, “Hockney’s Secret Knowledge, Vanvitelli’s Camera Obscura,” pp. 328–32. As noted earlier, I believe box-type camera obscuras existed since at least 1622. Seymour claims that Vermeer must have used a portable box-like apparatus, aimed out of a window of a house across the water from the port, but says that no such apparatus is thought to have existed in Vermeer’s time. See Seymour, “Dark Chamber and Light-Filled Room,” p. 326–27.

  145 But even if he did: As, e.g., Gowing suggests for Girl with a Pearl Earring. See Gowing, Vermeer, pp. 137–38.

  145 In the seventeenth century: Wadum et al., Vermeer Illuminated, p. 11.

  145 One reason it is clear: See Wheelock, Perspective, Optics, and Delft Artists around 1650, pp. 296–97. Swillens argues, incorrectly in my opinion, that the picture was painted by tracing the camera image seen from the second story of a house across from the Rotterdam Gate. See Swillens, Johannes Vermeer, p. 90ff.

  146 “mutually complementary”: See Wheelock, Perspective, Optics, and Delft Artists around 1650, p. 283.

  146 “mathematical net”: Gowing, Vermeer, p. 18.

  146 In many of those pictures: This is another reason for the sudden appearance of the black-and-white marble floors in genre paintings of the time. See Vergara, “Vermeer,” p. 215.

  146 Vermeer in a sense one-ups: Wheelock, Perspective, Optics, and Delft Artists around 1650, pp. 280–81.

  146 The two men, painting similar: Liedtke, “De Hooch and Vermeer,” p. 144. Neither man invented the “Delft-type” interior; this was a variation of a regional type that flourished in Rotterdam, Dordrecht, The Hague, and Leiden, as well as in Delft (see p. 137). De Hooch and Vermeer, however, refined this type, adding to it “more realistic qualities of space, light and atmosphere” (p. 156).

  146 De Hooch also “upped”: See Liedtke, “De Hooch and Vermeer,” p. 142.

  146 if “the painter imitates”: Niceron, La perspective curieuse, quoted in “Vermeer and the Camera Obscura,” http://www.essentialvermeer.com/camera_obscura/co_three.html#.U31KwMaVvwI.

  147 The artist is in the: See Livingstone, Vision and Art, p. 100.

  147 Vermeer’s sudden facility: As noted earlier, Wadum provides an alternative explanation for this: Vermeer’s discovery of the system of using a pin and string to mark out the orthogonals. See also Costaras, “A Study of the Materials and Techniques of Johannes Vermeer,” p. 152. However, the artist Carsten Wirth has argued that the pinholes could have been the starting point for rendering accurate perspective, but would not have been sufficient for it. See Wirth, “The Camera Obscura as a Model of a New Concept of Mimesis in 17th Century Painting,” p. 192.

  147 But by looking: See Westermann, “Vermeer and the Interior Imagination.”

  148 Vermeer’s familiarity: Gowing believes that Vermeer was alone among those painters who used a camera obscura in “putting it to the service of style rather than the accumulation of facts.” See Gowing, Vermeer, p. 23.

  149 The effect is the appearance: Wheelock, Perspective, Optics, and Delft Artists around 1650, pp. 295–96.

  149 The richness of color: See ibid., p. 296.

  149 So does the intensity: Liedtke, Vermeer, p. 47.

  149 Claude Monet would later: Livingstone, Vision and Art, p. 95.

  149 We see this in: See Swillens, Johannes Vermeer, pp. 138–40, and Wheelock, Vermeer and the Art of Painting, p. 12.

  150 Like camera obscura images: See Westermann, “Vermeer and the Interior Imagination,” p. 226.

  150 Similarly, in Mistress and Maid: See Wheelock, Vermeer and the Art of Painting, p. 142.

  150 Vermeer learned
that by: Ibid., p. 165.

  150 The skirt’s edge was established: See Costaras, “A Study of the Materials and Techniques of Johannes Vermeer,” p. 156.

  150 Vermeer captured this effect: Wheelock, Perspective, Optics, and Delft Artists around 1650, p. 277. Swillens believes that the painting depicts the old men’s and women’s almshouses, which were demolished to make way for the new quarters of the St. Luke’s Guild in 1661. See Swillens, Johannes Vermeer, p. 95. However, Montias disagrees, pointing out that one of the buildings was not actually demolished, but merely superficially remodeled, and that this building had its main axis parallel to the street, whereas the house represented in the picture has its narrow side facing the street. See Montias, Vermeer and His Milieu, p. 149 and 149n53.

  151 However, in order to succeed: See Ruestow, The Microscope in the Dutch Republic, p. 18.

  151 In The Milkmaid: See Wheelock, Perspective, Optics, and Delft Artists around 1650, p. 295.

  151 These occur only: See Kemp, The Science of Art, p. 94: “In his later works the luminous dabs are exploited as a form of painterly shorthand which is at once optical in origin and artificially contrived in application.” And see Wheelock, Perspective, Optics, and Delft Artists around 1650, p. 295. Swillens, however, insisted that Vermeer used this technique “only there where such light-effects can occur.” See Swillens, Johannes Vermeer, p. 134.

  152 “the painter who draws merely”: Quoted in Yiu, “The Mirror and Painting in Early Renaissance Texts,” p. 208.

  152 “Has this been done”: Wadum, “Contours of Vermeer,” pp. 212–13. (Wadum is now at the National Gallery of Denmark.)

  153 “the painter [with] the camera”: Wirth, “The Camera Obscura as a Model of a New Concept of Mimesis in 17th Century Painting,” p. 177.

  154 “extraordinary geometrical coincidence”: Steadman, Vermeer’s Camera, pp. 101–3.

  154 not meant to be photographic: On the view that paintings in the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic were not intended as photographically accurate depictions of domestic life, see Schama, An Embarrassment of Riches, pp. 9–10.