PHILIP STEADMAN
VERMEER’S CAMERA: UNCOVERING THE TRUTH BEHIND THE MASTERPIECES
CLICK HERE TO BUY THE BOOK AT AMAZON
Philip Steadman recounts a remarkable investigation into the technqiues used by the 17th century artist Vermeer. Steadman set out to establish whether or not Vermeer had used an optical apparatus to achieve the remarkably accurate perspectives in his indoor scenes - an issue on which there were conflicting (and strongly held) views among art historians. Steadman adopted a scientific rather than art-historical approach by constructing a replica of a room which featured in several Vermeer paintings. Within the room he created a camera obscura, and carried out experiments to reproduce the viewpoints used by Vermeer. The experiment demostrated that all Vermeer’s paintings of the room used precisely the same viewpoint, strongly suggesting that he had used a fixed camera obscura - a kind of tent fitted with a lens which would throw an (upside down) image of the room onto a piece of paper at the back of the tent. This projected image could then be used to lay out the geometry of a painting.
MEET THE AUTHOR
CLICK HERE FOR A VIDEO OF THE AUTHOR (6 MINUTES)
After reading architecture at Cambridge University Philip Steadman (born 1942) joined the university’s Centre for Land Use and Built Form Studies. In 1972 he was a visiting research fellow at Princeton University, and moved in 1977 to the Open University. In 1999 he joined University College London as a professor in the Bartlett School of Architecture.
