Did the great masters ‘cheat’ using optics?On the mysterious rise in realism in early Renaissance painting

In 2001, the celebrated contemporary artist David Hockney proposed that as early as 1420 Renaissance painters used optical devices such as concave mirrors to project images onto canvases which they then traced or painted over. In this way, the theory seeks to explain the newfound heightened realism in the works of van Eyck, Campin, Memling, and others. This talk presents the first independent optical analyses of this controversial theory (www.artandoptics.com). You may never see Renaissance paintings the same way again.

Presenter(s)

Dr. David G. Stork is Chief Scientist at Ricoh Innovations as well as Consulting Associate Professor of both Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Stanford University. A graduate of MIT (BS) and the University of Maryland (PhD), he has been on the faculties of Wellesley College, Swarthmore College, Clark University, Boston University and Stanford University. Dr. Stork holds over fifteen patents and has published numerous peer-reviewed papers and book chapters. His deepest interests are in adaptive pattern recognition by machines and humans and novel uses of the internet.