Dark Chamber and Light-Filled Room: Vermeer and the Camera Obscura

Abstract

For over thirty years the literature on Vermeer of Delft has included first hints, then suggestions and, finally, all but direct statements that Vermeer used the forerunner of the modern photographic camera, the camera obscura, as an aid in making his paintings. Although Wilenski in the late 1920's put much more emphasis on the use of mirrors than on the camera obscura, he pointed to certain effects (distorted enlargement in foreground objects, for example) which can be observed in photographs and noted as “perhaps one of the ironies of art history that with a Kodak any child might now produce by accident a composition that a great artist like Vermeer had to use all his ingenuity … to achieve.”1 More penetrating was Hyatt Mayor's discussion in 1946 of the evidence favoring Vermeer's use of a mechanical aid; here he spoke not only of distortion in size of near objects, but of the tonality of Vermeer's color which he “blended as perfectly as the ground glass of a camera” and of the highlights on foreground ...