Camera Obscura's Role in Johannes Vermeer's Painting Space

Abstract

This article considers the hypothesis that the 17th century Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer utilized a camera obscura as an auxiliary tool in creating his paintings. I created analytic diagrams and plan views of 13 genre pieces in which he depicted perspective accurately, and compared them with reference to the dimensions of tiles depicted in those images. As a result, I determined that the depicted scenes can be cropped within the region of an image circle of the same size. The conclusion is that an image projected by a camera obscura is an excellent resource from the point of view of depicting perspective consistency within a painting space on canvas, and that by utilizing that resource, Vermeer explored spatial representations that had not been seen up until his time.