Vermeer's Camera: Uncovering the Truth behind the Masterpieces

"Philip Steadman also took a practical approach in his book Vermeer’s Camera (2001) to determine whether Vermeer used a lens. The reason people think it possible, or even likely, is because Vermeer’s work has qualities that stand out, qualities which are unusual, and which could be related to the use of optics. In particular we see an extraordinary sensitivity to light, and a sense that we are looking at moments frozen in time. There are other unusual features too. There are few lines, mostly just blurry edges; there are changes in focus; and shifts in scale. There are also little highlight dots in his pictures, which are unusual; and in the lowest layer there’s a lack of compositional line, unlike in the underpaintings of other Old Master painters of his day. Vermeer’s painting is composed of shapes, rather than lines. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Rather than arguing in the abstract, Steadman asked himself whether science might provide the answer. He is an architect, and he took an empirical approach. What he did was to assume that Vermeer’s pictures, the spaces he shows, were actually real; and using the scale of some furniture, maps and tiles that still exist, he reconstructed a virtual studio, using mathematical calculations and architectural drawing. He worked out where Vermeer must have been sitting to paint the scene, and positioned a hypothetical lens in this place. Then he calculated the size of the projection from the lens at this viewpoint. In a significant number of cases, the scale of Vermeer’s paintings exactly matched the real objects in the projections on the wall. He thought that this couldn’t be down to chance, and was proof that Vermeer had used some kind of lens or instrument like a camera obscura . All this raises a different problem, however, and this is where my work began: the projection on the back wall is upside down, as well as back to front. If you were to make a tracing of that directly and rotate it upright, it’s still the wrong way around, like a mirror image. That’s not much use to a painter really, because it is impossible to then compare it with what you are actually seeing in the studio. “In a significant number of cases, the scale of Vermeer’s paintings exactly matched the real objects in the projections on the wall.” The other problem with a camera obscura is that it’s a dark enclosure and so it’s very difficult to use colour. You can really only trace with something that is dark itself. I came out of a lecture by Steadman and thought … I think I know what he could have done! I wrote to Steadman the very next day. If you’re a painter, you’re really used to experimenting and messing about in the studio. I realized that the orientation of the image in a camera obscura is a printing reversal of the original motif in the studio. So, if you made a tracing in paint from a projection, on something non-absorbent, then you could print it onto a canvas, and it would be all the right way around. The very exciting thing for me that when I tried this for myself, I found that these prints looked incredibly like Vermeer’s own under-paintings. They didn’t have any compositional line in them either. That’s because you have to trace one shape in relation to another, and because everything spreads out a bit when you press the tracing on to the canvas. Vermeer depended on his underpaintings a great deal. They established the plan of his pictures, and contributed towards the effect of strong illumination. Steadman’s book suggests that Vermeer saw what he painted. Of course, just that by itself is a huge area of discussion, because a lot of art historians do not think that Vermeer sat and painted exactly what he saw. They think that his paintings are actually constructions: that he would have never have seen chequered floor tiles in his studio, that he would never have seen expensive musical instruments, that he would certainly never have owned anything as expensive as the chandelier we see in his paintings. So did the scenes we see in his pictures really exist? Steadman thought that they did, and that was his assertion: he thought Vermeer painted the scene in front of him. I think that the answer lies somewhere in the middle of all the arguments. It’s very frustrating. Vermeer has become such an icon that we are desperate to know how he painted. The pictures somehow speak to people in a way other painters’ pictures don’t. It’s partly because of the extraordinary qualities about them that people take Vermeer so personally. They feel very strongly about him, because they have such an emotional connection to his painting."