Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters.
By David Hockney.
''This van Eyck drawing/ painting pair . . . gives us amazing insight into specifically how an artist worked 600 years ago. That is, we can see he used a lens . . . in a camera obscura to produce a sketch at one time, then used a lens in an epidiascope to transfer, and magnify, that image onto a canvas at a different time.''So wrote Charles Falco, a professor of optical sciences at the University of Arizona, to the artist David Hockney in July 2000. It was the latest ''sensational'' discovery recorded in ''Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters.'' Indeed, much of the responsibility for the novel claims recorded in this book should surely rest with Falco, though it is Hockney whose celebrated name figures on the cover.That cover shows part of the long wall of colored reproductions Hockney assembled in his California studio to survey the entire span of Western art -- and van Eyck's painting of Cardinal Albergati (c. 1435) is placed just at the crucial hinge, on the spine, where, according to the Hockney-Falco thesis, Western art took its decisive turn, into the age of photographic realism, 400 years before chemical photography. From the 1430's onward, many major artists, they speculate, secretly used optical devices to make their masterpieces...
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