Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland 20771  

ENGINEERING COLLOQUIUM 

Monday, May 5, 2003 / 3:30 PM, Building 3 Auditorium 

David Stork

ABSTRACT -- In 2001, artist David Hockney and scientist Charles Falco stunned the art world with a controversial theory that, if correct, would profoundly alter our view of the development of image making. They claimed that as early as 1420, Renaissance artists employed optical devices such as concave mirrors to project images onto their canvases, which they then traced or painted over. In this way, the theory attempts to explain the newfound heightened naturalism or "opticality" of painters such as van Eyck, Campin, Holbein the Younger, and many others. This talk for general audiences, profusely illustrated with Renaissance paintings, will present the results of the first independent examinations of the Hockney/Falco theory. It covers basic geometrical optics of image formation, shadows and perspective as well as 15th-century technology with special emphasis on Lorenzo Lotto's "Husband and wife" (1543), van Eyck's "Portrait of Arnolfini and his wife" (1434), Caravaggio's "Supper at Emmaus" (1596-8) and Robert Campin's "Merode Altarpiece" (1425). While there remain some loose ends, an analysis of the paintings, infra-red reflectograms, modern reenactments, internal consistency of the theory, and alternate explanations allows us to judge with high confidence the plausibility of this new theory. You may never see Renaissance paintings the same way again.

SPEAKER -- David G. Stork is Chief Scientist of Ricoh Innovations and Consulting Professor of Electrical Engineering and Visiting Lecturer in Art and Art History at Stanford University, where he has taught "Light, Color and Visual Phenomena," "Pattern Classification," and other courses. He studied art history at Wellesley College and was Artist-in-Residence through the New York State Council of the Arts. He holds 15 patents, sits on the editorial boards of four international technical journals and his five books include Seeing the Light: Optics in Nature, Photography, Color, Vision and Holography for non-scientific readers and Pattern Classification (2nd ed.). He was one of four scientists invited to analyze Mr. Hockney's theory at a major symposium at the New York Institute for the Humanities in December 2001.