Could the world ever really be ready for my enciphered sexy Jewish limerick? Having mulled over the punchline for this for a couple of months, I think I’ve finally nailed it. Happy deciphering! 🙂
A randy professor from Haifa
Wrote all his love letters in cipher
“Ven I look in your eyes,”
He would rhapsodize,
“J’n tdiuvqqjoh uif lojti pgg Njdifmmf Qgfjggfs!“
Equal parts brilliant and frustrating, Rolf Willach’s “The Long Route to the Invention of the Telescope” (2008), which reprises his featured sessions at the September 2008 conference in Middelburg, is a book formed of two stunningly different halves.
Through his insightful and breathtakingly meticulous analysis in the first seven chapters, Willach dramatically reconstructs the history of optical craft in the centuries preceding the invention of the telescope. Simply put, by casting the development of optics in terms of the technological and craft-based elements in making glass objects, he has produced without any doubt the most important new writing on the subject in decades. However, in chapters eight to eleven, his obvious eagerness to build on his main findings to retell the history of the telescope leads him to make what seem to me to be terribly, terribly weak inferences. Yet if that were to cause historians to look askance at his whole work, it would be a terrible shame, for there is a huge amount to be proud of here.
Willach is an independent scholar with his very own tightly-focused research programme: applying quantitative scientific testing methodologies to old lens-like objects to try to understand the ways in which they were made. Over many years in dogged pursuit of this quest, he has examined the Nimrud Lens, the Lothar crystal, lapides ad legendum (reading stones) embedded in liturgical art, curved glass covers in reliquaries, spectacle lenses embedded in a bookcase, rivet spectacles found beneath a nuns’ choir, spectacles in private collections, early telescope lenses etc. Furthermore, there seems to be no end to the range of physical and optical tests he has at his disposal: and he has even built and used his own a replica lens grinding machine. He has also delved deeply into the practical chemistry, physics and craft of glassmaking and glassblowing. In short, in a world where many self-professed experts are content to simply talk a good talk, it is wonderfully refreshing to find someone who has really, really walked the walk.
For Willach, the physical evidence strongly indicates that spectacle lenses developed not out of reading stones (pieces of rock crystal hand-turned on a wheel but progressively more curved towards the edges), but from the large number of reliquary covers needed to accommodate the tidal wave of martyrs’ relics that washed back into Europe after the Crusades. Just as with the reading stones, these were formed from pieces of rock crystal, and individually ground and polished on some kind of wheel, just as similar items had been turned since antiquity.
At some stage, glass began (quite understandably) to replace the far more expensive rock crystal. But when? Willach translates (pp.33-37) “cristallum” in the 1284 Venetian trade regulations as if it referred to the innovative Murano cristallo glass invented in the mid-Quattrocento by Angelo Barovier (and which is first documented in the context of a salt cellar in 24th May 1453, according to Gianfranco Toso’s “Murano: A history of glass”, p.46). Here, Willach has got the technological sequence right, but the timeline plain wrong. And so it seems highly likely to me that early glass spectacles were tinted or coloured (as indeed all other glass-made items were at that time), until 1450 at the earliest.
The first mass-manufactured glass lenses were made in a devastatingly simple way: by blowing a pear-shaped bubble of glass (contrary to popular myth, these bubbles were never spherical), stamping out circular blanks from it, and then subsequently grinding down the concave side of the blanks until flat. Used up until around 1500, this approach produced plano-convex lenses with a distinctive unground curved side and a ground flat side – though occasionally reasonably good near the centre, they were simply not optically good enough to be used in telescopes.
The next technological change came from Nuremburg, where from around 1478 a small group of spectacle-makers began to produce plano-convex lenses using moulds. For a while, these were ground only on the curved side with the planar side left unground: but it was only about 1500-1510 when both sides began to be ground that the quality of these lenses leapt ahead. This was arguably the first point when telescopes began to become optically possible (but not initially in Italy, for the Nuremberg spectacle-makers managed to keep their secret intact for a long time).
Yet the hunger of the European mass-market for cheap spectacles meant that, before very long, the quality of mould-made lenses began to go downhill. Ultimately, lens moulds ended up (as Girolamo Sirtori lamented in 1612) simply being hammered roughly into shape rather than measured against a perfect curve. By 1600 or so, all the subtle craft skills required for making good lenses had (apparently) long been forgotten.
All of which forms the moving technological and craft canvas upon which the history of optical devices (such as telescopes, microscopes, and camera obscuras) was painted: and, thanks to Willach’s sustained efforts, it is now very much better-defined than it has ever been. But… what of the telescope, then?
As far as the prehistory of the telescope itself goes, there used to be one big open question: despite the fact that convex and concave glasses were produced in large quantity from around 1450, why was the telescope not invented until circa 1600? I think it is a measure of Willach’s massive redefinition of the entire field of study that this now seems hugely simplistic, if not actually naïve. Yet this is essentially the question that he sets out to answer in his final chapters.
As an example: the writing of Girolamo Fracastoro has long been a curious anomaly in the telescope’s prehistory: in 1538, Fracastoro unambiguously described a twin lens telescopic arrangement – but this apparently was not picked up by anybody. Yet within the framework of optical history as rendered by Willach, I think we can get a glimpse of the reason why that should have been the case: in Fracastoro’s time, the craft of lens making was on the way down – that is, Fracastoro just happened to be living in the brief period early in the 16th century when moulded lenses were still made with a bit of craft in Venice – there was (I conjecture) only a brief window around that time when off-the-shelf lenses would have been good enough to be used in a telescope.
But why is Willach so certain that things had recovered by 1608? If, as Girolamo Sirtori wrote in 1612 (which Willach approvingly quotes), the craft of spectacle-making had indeed been lost, from where did the craft of telescopes emerge? As I wrote in my September 2008 History Today article, the notion that three Dutchmen all dreamt the same hi-tech dream at the same time (and then went away and executed it independently of each other) is extraordinarily suspect – and, I would now add, the kind of mass-produced, low-quality glass spectacle market that seems to have been in existence circa 1600 makes this even more unlikely.
But all of this begs a large question about one of Willach’s assumptions. Albert van Helden baldly expresses the assumption in his introduction to Willach’s book, when he notes that the telescope’s “origins clearly lie in eyeglasses”. I would say that, actually, the first half of Willach’s book does an excellent job in undermining that basic presumption: and that we are now at the point where we can start to glimpse what was really going on – and I now believe it wasn’t anything to do with eyeglasses.
There was a quite different class of glass-made lens-based optical artefact made at the time, which (thanks to David Hockney) has recently received a significant amount of academic attention and debate (particularly in “Inside the Camera Obscura – Optics and Art under the Spell of the Projected Image“, edited by Wolfgang Lefevre) – the camera obscura. The connection between this and the telescope is a big story yet to be properly grasped and retold: but one strand I would like to flag straightaway comes from Sven Dupré’s fascinating article (in Lefevre’s book), “Playing with Images in a Dark Room: Kepler’s Ludi Inside the Camera Obscura“.
Kepler mentioned in his 1604 book Paralipomena “an experimentum […] which I saw at Dresden in the elector’s theater of artifices […] A disk thicker in the middle, or a crystalline lens, a foot in diameter, was standing at the entrance of a closed chamber against a little window, which was the only thing that was open, slanted a little to the right. […] But the walls were also particularly conspicuous through the lens, because they were in deep darkness.” But hold on a moment… who made this camera obscura lens, so obviously predating the Dutch telescope? Perhaps it is to letters in a Dresden-linked archive that telescope historians should now be looking…
Of course, it would be a curious irony if Willach’s scintillating research actually had the effect of severing his presumed link between spectacles and telescopes. And my conclusion (that this is so) will doubtless be no more than one voice amongst many in the field. Regardless: whatever your own angle, I strongly urge you to buy a copy of Willach’s excellent book and make up your own mind. This truly is history in the making – exciting times.
Here’s a quicky idea…
I have (possibly literally) a ton of books in my library, most of which seems to revolve around early modern / Renaissance history, telescopes, ciphers, and themes touching on aspects of the Voynich Manuscript. And somehow the mound keeps on growing, week on week. Even though I love them all, I can appreciate that (actually) this is a bit of a waste: and that I should really find some way of sharing the ones I’m not currently referring to with like-minded telescope / mystery / cipher / history aficionados (such as you, of course!)
All the same, it’s not immediately obvious how. For example, Marke Fincher wants (quite rightly) to borrow my copy of James Morrison’s excellent book “The Astrolabe” – but it’s a hefty old thing, and so wouldn’t be cheap to pop in the post. And so the right question to ask is: what’s a good way to share?
The image vaguely forming in my mind is of a roughly-once-a-month meet in a central London pub, where I wheel along a heap of books (some pre-requested, others just of general interest) and merrily pass them on, hoping to see them return intact at some stage in the future. I’ve been meaning to meet up with various people anyway (basically, to catch up with Marke and Philip Neal etc), and so adding a book-sharing angle on it seems to me like an eminently sensible community-ish thing to do.
Would anyone else be interested? Email me or comment below, thanks! 🙂
A few days ago, chess-playing crypto guy Tony Gaffney emailed Cipher Mysteries about “The Subtelty Of Witches” in the British Library: I also blogged about his attempted solution to the Dorabella Cipher and the (not-very-)Ancient Cryptography forum where he often posts on historical ciphers. Since then, the copy of his 2005 book “The Agony Column Codes & Ciphers” (which he wrote under the byline “Jean Palmer”) I ordered has arrived… but is it any good?
(Incidentally, “agony columns” in Victorian newspapers were originally for readers to post personal announcements and messages about/for missing friends and relatives: while “advice columns” (which became popular in the 1950s) were actually a continuation of an eighteenth century newspaper feature known as “letters to the lovelorn“, as well as the advice column in popular magazine “The Lady’s Monthly Museum”. All of which means that the phrase “agony aunt” is a kind of uneasy linguistic marriage between two quite different types of newspaper column.)
People liked the ability to leave messages in agony columns: but some, wishing to remain anonymous, submitted their messages in code, in cipher, or in some other cryptic manner. Tony’s book collects together 1000 of these (simultaneously public and private) messages.
On the one hand, I can well appreciate the compositional agony of transcribing so many ciphertexts (which themselves may well have been scrambled by harried typesetters) and then trying to decipher them (which may not always be possible). I can also appreciate that a collection of these could well offer a nice commuter alternative to the sheer maddening pointlessness of Sudoku (oh look, all the numbers add up… and here’s my station).
On the other hand, who (apart from cipher history junkies such as me) would really connect with the content of such a project? Stripped of background, context, and outcome, the results are – if you go through your own agony of deciphering them – typically no more than fleeting half-scenes from lost Victorian soap operas, full of thwarted & hopeful love and clandestine meetings.
Structurally, the book comprises a series of dated cipher fragments sorted into chapters according to the newspaper in which they appeared (The Times, The Morning Chronicle/Observer, etc) and sorted by date, with a cipher key listed at the end for most (but not all) of the enciphered ones. All very logical and sequential as a reference work: but does it really work as a piece of cipher solving entertainment?
With my historical cryptography hat on, I’d say yes: the reader is presented with a cleaned up set of cipher transcriptions, with exactly as much information as a curious newspaper reader of the day would have had. It’s straightforward and clear, a nice little slice of cipher history.
But with my publisher hat on, I’d say no: as an editor, I would have discarded the merely cryptic, and rearranged the same material as a series of enciphered threads graded by difficulty, so that a commuter could engage with it as if it were a cipher puzzle-book. I’d also have opted for a larger page size, and included pre-printed solving grids and a sorted frequency count for all monoalphabetic ciphers.
(A fine example of this kind of cipher puzzle book is Elonka Dunin’s (2006) “The Mammoth Book of Secret Codes and Cryptograms”, which also briefly describes the Voynich Manuscript on pp. 489-493, as well as the Beale Papers, the Dorabella Cipher, the Zodiac Ciphers, and the Phaistos Disk).
I would also have moved all the (currently) unsolved ciphers to an end chapter, together with brief failed solving notes.
On balance, then, I’d say that the cipher historian side of me enjoyed the book, but the cipher puzzler side of me felt frustrated by its structure. However, because I would guess that cipher puzzlers outnumber cipher historians 100:1, perhaps it might be an idea for Tony to revisit this project, to Elonka-ify it?
Wah, looky heyuh – it’s another Voynich novel to add to my big fat list. Retired chemical industry R&D / sales guy Baz Cunningham will be signing copies of his third novel “The Voynich Enigma” next Saturday morning (15th Nov 2008) in New Martinsville, WV.
In the book, a couple of sharp-witted cousins find the key to the VMs on their West Virginia farm, before going head to head with an evil Mamluk chieftan in a cave in Provence as they try to reach a long-lost Templar treasure trove. If you like the sound of all that, a copy could be yours for $15 via the author’s pleasantly sparse website (though, errrrm, clicking on the PayPal button produced an error when I tried).
Also, the [contact-the-author] page says “put contact email here”, so I presume that’s a work-in-progress too. But when I do (finally) manage to get in contact with Baz, I’ll be sure to buy a copy & to post a review here, as per normal. *sigh*
As regular Cipher Mysteries readers will know, I’ve recently become particularly interested in early modern correspondence as a way of peering into the dispersed scientific networks that began to develop and extend during the late sixteenth century (the so-called “invisible colleges”), very much along the lines described for Tycho Brahe’s familia by Adam Mosley in his recent book Bearing the Heavens.
However, one key problem is that there’s an awkward quiet between the (early sixteenth century) Republic of Letters and the (mid-to-late seventeenth century) Scientific Revolution correspondence where relatively few letter-writers really stand out – Tycho Brahe (of course), Marin Mersenne, Tadeas Hajek, Fabri de Peiresc.
Incidentally, Peiresc (“the Prince of Erudition”) left more than 10,000 letters, of which only about 3,200 have been published. Fascinatingly, the Annales historian Robert Mandrou tried several decades ago to use this to chart the “geography of ideas” implicit in Peiresc’s correspondence network, through what Robert Hatch calls “simple yet eloquent maps”. There’s more on how Peiresc’s set of letters was split into two here.
Also, QMC has an initiative on this topic called the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters (“CELL”), with subprojects on the correspondence of Francis Bacon, Thomas Bodley (as in the Bodleian Library, of course), and the relatively little known Elizabethan intelligencer/diplomat William Herle. One recent CELL, errrm, inmate called Samuli Kaislaniemi has a nice set of links on the topic, including one to a National Archive wiki!
But I’m digressing (arguably even more than normal).
I recently found another Renaissance letter collection which I had been unaware of: the Clusius Correspondence Project at Leiden University, which holds most of botanist Carolus Clusius’ letters. Intriguingly, this was particularly focused on plants and gardening, and so was the kind of place where a mention of everyone’s favourite enciphered-early-modern-herbal manuscript might plausibly appear – and so I emailed Florike Egmond whether she had come across anything remotely like the VMs mentioned in Clusius’ letters.
Sadly, her answer was no: in fact, she pointed out that the letters contain “almost no references at all to herbals / manuscripts about plants“. Having said that, she also noted that a reference might yet surface in some of the letters with Clusius’ book-focused Italian correspondent Pinelli, or (rather less probably) with Hugo Blotius. All the same, as they say in showbiz, “‘No’ only means ‘no today’“.
Hmmm… as a final aside for the day, I really wish there was some kind of “meta-list” of early modern correspondence projects out there, one that listed started, planned or proposed, started-but-abandoned and as-yet-unstarted correspondence projects – a kind of correspondence project project, if you like.
As a Brit, there’s a very particular class of American-made sequel that fills my film-watching soul with despair. On planes and slow Sundays, you’ve doubtless caught a few exemplars yourself: “Garfield 2”, “Agent Cody Banks 2: Destination London”, “National Lampoon’s European Vacation” all spring readily to my mind, but these form but the tip of a particularly yellow-coloured iceberg.
The template is horrifically simple: having achieved moderate success with a first film by pandering to a peculiarly parochial home market, the US-based producers then look for somewhere vageuely ‘exotic’ (but still English-speaking) in which to set the follow-up. Almost inevitably, dear old Lahn-don Town gets the nod: and thus usually commences the exhausting directorial circus of finding American acting talent who can produce comedy UK regional accents as badly as American screenwriters can write them.
So far, so insular: but what gets my goat is not the fact that London has been chosen (actually, it’s a complex, interesting, intensely compromised place with a billion stories of its own), but rather that what gets realised in celluloid is a kind of bizarre fairytale version, complete with pea-souper fogs, whistling Cocker-ney cabbies (what, Polish and Cockney??), scheming upper-class twits (inevitably with huge estates in the country), and salt-of-the-earth plebs (without two brass farthings to rub together). Sorry to say it, guys, but these days London is actually more Dick Cheney than Dick Van Dyke.
All the same, I’d have to say that those much-maligned American film producers could just about pull off this whole stunt and, indeed, produce a masterpiece from this cloying amalgamation of unpromising clichés. But by this stage their budget has all-too-often already disappeared into the cavernous pockets of the oh-so-amusing comedy lead characters: and thus vanishes into painfully thin air any notion of hiring a writer of real genius, the kind you’d need to bring such a dead-before-it-was-ever-born project to life.
And so onto James K. Rollins’ new book “The Voynich Project” (2008).
Rollins builds his story around a polarity eerily familiar to Indiana Jones fans, teaming a lantern-jawed hero and a feisty female archaeologist against indestructible disfigured Nazis wielding futuristic weaponry. Into this (already somewhat eggy) mix he adds a group of Indigo children (each with their own superpower), just about every English-speaking secret military force in the world, ancient maps, Carl Jung’s Red Diary, and the Vatican, etc etc. Oh, and there’s an American Indian consciously modelled on Chewbacca. Sure, it’s not Shakespeare: but is it Dan Brown?
Look – I’m a sucker for the kind of pacy, evocative writing that you would need to turn such a morass of potboiler elements into a genuine piece of fun. However, from my own European point of view, that train never really arrives – instead, the book comes across as a stream of mystery-themed ideas machine-gunned in the reader’s direction, as if the countless holes in the story can be filled through a kind of macho puppydog exuberance. Sorry, JK: though notionally a “Euro-thriller”, its scope and writing are both just too narrowly American to win me over.
But there’s also the whole Voynich Manuscript side of the book.
Rollins has clearly taken the time to read up on the VMs and to engage with its strange pictures, for which I applaud him (I even get a brief mention in the notes at the end, which is nice, however unwarranted). Unfortunately, one thing manages to spoil the whole party.
Briefly, what happens is: hero goes to the British Museum/Library to meet man studying the alchemical side of the Voynich Manuscript; because the man has disappeared, the hero instead meets his sister (who also happens to work there); they go to a pub in the East End; hero learns about the woman’s mysterious Celtic tattoo on her back; Nazi thugs enter the pub; she produces a key from above the back door; they escape out to the rear into a messy gunfight… and when the woman is eventually captured by the Nazis, her tattoo turns out to contain an ancient map / key to the secrets hidden in the Voynich Manuscript.
The problem is that this central storyline exactly reprises probably the best-selling (and quite possibly the best-written) Voynich novel yet, Max McCoy’s (1995) “Indiana Jones and the Philosopher’s Stone” – you know, the one I recommend that all aspiring Voynich novelists should read first. If there had been just a handful of similarities, I could possibly have passed over them in silence – but this is all much too much for me to bear.
No reviewer ever wants to be in this position – but honestly, what else can I say?
Here’s a tiny crypto puzzle for you from the award-winning Adrenalini Brothers cartoon series. There, the three eponymic death-defying stunt brothers (Xan, Enk, and Adi) speak a language called Réndøosîan (sample phrase: oofa vamy bakeesh = “you can’t get anything right“): of course, this is simply a trick animation companies use to avoid localization costs (as with Pingu). However, whenever you see writing on screen, it’s not Rendoosian (sorry, “Réndøosîan”) but ciphered English. So what does the following (from “Box of No Return”, a Houdini-esque escapology skit involving a sealed box, a crane, and sharks) say? You’ll probably never guess, even if you live to be 199…
Actually, that’s a little bit too small to read comfortably: so here’s a larger version of the same page:-
OK, OK: seeing as I’m actually a pussycat rather than a cryptographic sadist, here’s the vaguely Voynichesque cipher key (or rather, as much of it as I could reconstruct from the intros to the flash cartoons, which is why there’s no F, Q and Z *sigh*):-
Deciphered it all yet? You like, yes? If so, here’s the next page for you to decipher, too… Enjoy! 🙂
Incidentally, here are some direct links to the first ten Adrenalini Brothers Flash episodes from 2002: these open in a normal (resizable) browser window, so you can enjoy them in all their full-screen glory (recommended!):
1 – High Dive of Doom,
2 – Ocean of Terror,
3 – Volcano of Venom,
4 – Monster of Mayhem,
5 – Wings of Destiny,
6 – Box of No Return,
7 – Slopes Of Peril,
8 – Joust of Glory,
9 – Cannon of Chaos,
10 – Tightrope of Triumph
“Yahzaa!” 🙂
Here’s something I stumbled upon recently & thought I ought to share…
Between 1935 and 1940, French scholar Seymour de Ricci published his gigantic Census of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts in the United States and Canada. Not content with that, he quickly moved on to a similarly epic project: a Census of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts in the United Kingdom. However, following his death in 1942, this ended up as a huge set of index slips (roughly 60,000 of them).
Because some of his secretarial costs were underwritten by the Institute of Historical Research, the Palaeography Room at University College London’s Senate House Library now holds the “De Ricci Slip Index“: about 65% describes books in public repositories, with the remainder describing those held by private collectors. Though De Ricci gained his information from wide and varied sources, he was especially reliant on sale catalogues (at his death, he had amassed 30,000 of these!). It has to be said that De Ricci was not hugely consistent in his note-taking: but for anyone doing provenance research on manuscripts, his slip index is a vital (if relatively little-known) resource.
Rather charmingly, the UCL webpage describes the thirty four boxes of slips as “idiosyncratic but recklessly and persistently useful“. Which is not far from the set of principles this blog tries to adhere to. 😉
Back in 2001, David Hockney proposed a radical new take on art history: that around 1430, artists began to use a camera obscura arrangement to focus images onto a canvas. This was to help them attain a level of draughting accuracy not available to artists who were simply “eyeballing” (Hockney’s term) a scene. The key paintings he employs as evidence for this claim are Jan Van Eyck’s ultra-famous “Arnolfini Portrait” (1434) and Robert Campin’s “Man In A Red Turban” (circa 1430) [though it’s not actually a turban but a “chaperon” – bet you’re glad you know that].
What is unavoidably odd about these Flemish pictures is that they suddenly aspire to a level of representational precision that had no obvious precedent – the technique of oil painting (developed much earlier) was suddenly refined and heightened in these artists’ apparent quest for almost (dare I say it) photographic imagery. Hockney sees all this as posing the implicitly technological question “How did they do that?” (particularly things like van Eyck’s highly complex chandelier, which has neither underdrawings nor construction marks): his own answer is that they must have used some unspecified (and now lost) optical means to assist them. But what?
Initially, this seems likely (he argues) to have been a convex mirror (though somewhat confusingly Hockney calls this a “mirror-lens”) within a camera obscura arrangement: but its technological limitations (particularly the small size of the projected image and the shallow depth of field) would only have allowed them to project one depth slice of one picture element at a time; and so would have required a kind of sequential collage effect to build up a complete composition. Much later (In the 1590s), the mirror was apparently (Hockney asserts) replaced by a lens, with Caravaggio’s two drunken Bacchuses held up as evidence (a “before-the-lens” and an “after-the-lens” pair, if you will).
Much of the scientific support for Hockney’s claim was provided by depth-of-field and relative size calculations by Charles Falco. Hence it has become known as the “Hockney-Falco thesis”. Really, it is a bold, almost aggressively naive technological-centred re-spin of art history, which sees photography merely as the modern version of a roughly 600-year-old tradition of optically-assisted realistic representation. By all rights, the entire hypothesis should be horribly wrong, with (I would guess) the majority of art historians on the planet looking for a way to help it sink into the sand upon which it appears to be be built. However, it has (quite surprisingly) proved remarkably resilient.
Actually, many of the criticisms are well-founded: but most seem to be missing the point. Hockney isn’t an art historian (not even close), but a practitioner: praxis is his matrix. Here, he is in the business of imaginative, empathetic knowledge production – which is a necessary part of the whole knowledge-generation cycle. Hockney repeatedly falls into many of David Fischer’s “Historians’ Fallacies” when trying to post-rationalize a narrative onto his observation: but given that historians often follow these same antipatterns, it is hardly surprising that an accidental historian such as Hockney fails to avoid them too.
Admirably, Hockney tried to respond to many of his critics by bringing together an intriguing selection of from primary sources on optics and the camera obscura (not dissimilar to the second half of Albert van Helden’s splendid “The Invention of the Telescope”). And so the “new and expanded” 2006 edition of his (2001) “Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the lost techniques of the Old Masters” has appended English translations of many relevant historical texts (Bacon, Alhazan, Witelo, Manetti, Leonardo, Cardano, Barbaro, Della Porta, etc), as well as correspondence from 1999-2001 between Hockney and various people (mainly the very excellent Leonardo expert Martin Kemp, who squeeze in several satisfyingly good whinges about academe along the way).
OK: enough folksy summarizing, already. So, what do I think about all this?
For a start, this obviously cuts a path right through a lot of my ongoing research interests – Quattrocento secret knowledge & books of secrets, the mirror+lens combinations, early camera obscuras, Renaissance proto-telescopes, the emergence of modern optics 1590-1612. So I ought to have an opinion, right?
In a way, the unbelievable technical prowess of the Old Masters – their sheer blessèd giftedness – has been so much of a given for so long that to have David Hockney waltz in & undermine that is quite shocking. And all credit to Martin Kemp for grasping so early on that this points to such a potentially significant sea-change in the tides of academic art history.
I’m hugely sympathetic to Hockney: I did a bit of painting (though many years ago), and I have a professional interest in camera optics & the subtle problems of image perception – so I can see very clearly the artefacts in the paintings upon which he and Charles Falco are focusing. In a very important way, that’s the easy bit.
Yet one of the problems I have with the correspondence reproduced at the back of the book is that it gives the overwhelming impression that Hockney is all too ready to leap to the conclusion that the Church would deem this kind of image capturing a new kind of heresy: that that which is not understood must be occult. This exact same non-argument template (along the lines of ‘if the evidence isn’t there, it must have been suppressed for being heretical’) gets trotted out ad nauseam for many other hard-to-explain historical mysteries (perhaps most notably for the Voynich Manuscript): and, quite frankly, turns me right off every time I see it.
But the reason for this is obvious: the quality of the non-pictorial evidence Hockney cites to support his case is generally rather poor. He simply doesn’t have a smoking gun – nor even a non-smoking gun, really. He’s reduced to speculating about the nature of the mirrors Caravaggio owned when he died: and, frankly, that’s not really sufficient. When he can’t even point to a single substantive mention in a single pre-1500 letter or document, it’s easy to see why the whole hypothesis remains speculative (historically speaking).
I suspect one good question that should be asked is instead about the quality of the translations we are all relying upon to form our critical judgments on this. When tackling an early modern passage, translators must first conceive what kind of thing is being talked about when trying to give the text a shape comprehensible to our modern mindsets. And when something as basic as using curved mirrors as a painting aid has only just entered our collective awareness, I think it is likely that almost all translators of primary sources would have fudged over difficult or obscure passages. And so the ‘absence of evidence’ may ultimately have arisen from a missing conceptual framework in translators’ minds.
For what it is worth, my best guess is that there will turn out to be some primary evidence to support Hockney’s ideas, but that it won’t be a new passage: rather, it will turn out to be a known passage that was subtly mistranslated. But which should we be reassessing?
I’ve checked Thorndike (as you would) and Sabine Melchior-Bonnet (of which Hockney seems blissfully unaware) for ideas: the latter discusses Parmigianino’s “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” (1524) on p.227, which should contain sufficient information for an optical historian to reconstruct the size and focal length of the mirror used. She gives many other leads: for example, Fioravanti discusses mirrors in his “Miroir des arts et des sciences”, and there is yet more discussion in Salomon de Caus (1576-1626)’s book “Perspective avec la raison des ombres et des miroirs”. Yet ultimately, if there is a smoking gun, it probably sits waiting to be found in 15th century letters and books of secrets.
Regardless of how much moral support it gains, Hockney’s hypothesis continues to stand parallel to the art history mainstream: it awaits a truly daring art historian to look again at the sources, and to tease out the subtle behind-the-scenes narrative. This kind of reconstructionist approach (not unlike Rolf Willach’s take on telescope history) yields one kind of evidence – but only one, and so this is not the whole story. Life is never quite that simple…