Exposing the seventeenth-century optical camera obscura.
Did Vermeer van Delft create some of his paintings by means of a camera obscura? This still undecided question has stirred up heated debates. For some, the mere idea is an inexcusable insult on a great artist. All this heat has drawn attention away from a rich seam of questioning: what was the seventeenth-century camera obscura really like? And did it shape the ways in which Vermeer's contemporaries viewed, imagined, understood and, for that matter, rendered the visual world?
Lefèvre
Wolfgang
W
Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Boltzmannstrasse 22, D-14195 Berlin, Germany. wlef@mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de
D049670:History, 17th Century; D006801:Humans; D009426:Netherlands; D009903:Optical Illusions; D055095:Optics and Photonics / Q000266:history; D010151:Paintings / Q000266:history*; D010781:Photography / Q000266:history*; D014796:Visual Perception