Secret Knowledge

When "Secret Knowledge" first came out it was received with skepticism. It was accused of not being scholarly enough and subjected to the fancies of an imaginative artist. I candidly confess that I'm now looking at it for the first time.
Hockney's discovery with the aid of Charles Falco is so subversive that it is not surprise that it has been put aside. The idea that Western painting and representation is based on trickery rather than science is the equivalent of a bomb in the foundations of art school. Think about the inadequacy of studying human anatomy and perspective when you can get accurate representation and the smallest details by copying an image projected on the canvas.

Nevertheless it is difficult to admit that everything is about optics and the use of instruments in Western painting. I cannot help thinking of the Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Tulp by Rembrandt; Vesalius De Humani Corporis Fabrica, or even Leonardo Da Vinci's infinite descriptions of the human body.

The greatest achievements of Western visual arts seem to be realized when technology and optics, and the science of anatomy and perspective converge into a single event. Nevertheless, David Hockney's discovery of the use of the mirror by Jean Van Eick to project and draw a chandelier in his Jean Portrait of Giovanni Arnolfini and his Wife Giovanna Cenami is revealing. Needless to say, his hypothesis that Brunelleschi's invention of perspective is based on extending lines from a mirror projection is startling.

Having said that, how to account for the distortions that image projection produce? I have dealt with distortions the hard way while working with projections. Also, the human eye, or more exactly the cornea, is a kind of lens that can vary from individual to individual and on the same level, man made lenses vary in angle and radio as anyone can testify by working with different lenses by the likes of Canon and Nikon. The question of the use of an standardized lens or of a different kind of lens among different painters still remains open.

Copying projections is not enough to produce a good composition, to keep a system of proportions and to build structure. The projection needs to be constantly corrected by unmediated perception and calculation. If you are drawing the body it helps to be conscious of the bones and muscles underneath, otherwise you remain trapped at the surface level and liable to incorrect representation. When explaining Caravaggio, Mr. Hockney finds an explanation to distortion correction by changing the focus to the parts of the composition or by moving the angle of the mirror or lens and the angle of the canvas. But then the question arise of why to bother with so much complication when it would have been simpler to figure out the position of the structure in physical space onto the two dimensional space of the canvas, with the grid or by building proportion.

There are two approaches to representation,  the phenomenological and the structural (from the classical Marxist categories of essence and phenomenon. By using then we differentiate a method that would take into account only what they eye sees: the phenomenon; in contrast to what the mind knows: the essence. ) Phenomenological painters would be the Chuck Closes and David Hockneys of the world, while essentialist or structuralist painters would be those artists whose practices are linked to the investigations of science, especially human anatomy and architecture, such as Michelangelo ,Leonardo and Rembrandt. They had a clear understanding of the composition of the human body and they knew how to build a structure in physical space that would not collapse. For them representation was a way to build and convey.

I'm not denying the powerful effects of technology and optical instruments on representation. But to base the practice of art on optics is to limit yourself to surface problems. Great deeds get accomplished by the phenomenological way, as Mr. Close and Mr. Hockney paintings can testify; but also great limitations could be accounted for.

There is also another objection against the thesis that linear perspective was invented with the aid of optical effects only. As any Visual Dictionary would tell you, the cornea, the lens and the retina are curved; concave and convex shaped. This logically implies that any straight line that you see in nature is of necessity projected in the retina as a curve line. The resultant line that we perceive is only an abstraction of the brain. You can corroborate this by doing a simple experiment of perception : go to a near train station and look to a fixed point in space several meters in front of you. Without taking your focus away from the fixed point, look at your peripheral vision, you will see that the lines of the rails get more and more curved as they approach the edges; the same with the vertical lines of the columns.

The Greeks knew this phenomenon of perception and consequently built the Parthenon using curve lines to compensate for this characteristic of human vision. For Brunelleschi, to invent linear perspective by only using a projecting device seem to be impossible, at least not without geometrical abstraction. As Panofsky says, " Perspective, in transforming the ousia (reality) into the phenomenon (appearance), seems to reduce the divine into a mere subject matter for human consciousness" (Panofsky, Erwin. Perspective as Symbolic Form).

The most interesting thing I'm grasping from David Hockney's Secret Knowledge is the historical perspective of the science of representation which goes up and down as new technological inventions appear and old ones vanish. Every scientific or technological breakthrough implies the collapse of former paradigms and the need for new paradigms to be found. That is how modern art was born and that is how the practice of visual arts stayed alive more than a century after the invention of photography and cinema.

Today we are in a new-is-the-same-old- epoch where old paradigms are crumbling while new ones are being build. The crisis is so pervasive that nobody seems to know when started and how is going to reach an end. Human ingenuity is going to find solutions the same way modern artists found theirs at the turn of the 19-20 centuries. And we will witness and be part of the greatness of human creativity and will.