Peter Costello
Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters,
by David Hockney
(Thames & Hudson, second revised edition, £30.00 / €34.50PB)
In the many articles covering the death of British artist David Hockney a fortnight ago, few made mention of an aspect of his thinking that those interested in the difficulties of art history regard as the immense contribution he made as an active artist to a much-contested field.
One of the images that provided him with his insight was the portrait of Pope Innocent X by Velázquez, painted in 1650. It is extraordinarily lifelike in its detailing. Especially when compared with other papal images from the Middle Ages.
About 1999 Hockney was struck by this “realism” in Western art. With his assistant he created in his studio a “great wall” of photocopies images from 1300 onward to 1839, the year that saw the introduction of photography.
For the next two years he simply stopped painting himself to undertake a long investigation of this moment of change, helped by his assistants and by others such as the scientist Robert Falco.
What the gallery of images revealed immediately, with the art of North Europe at the top range and Southern Europe lower down, was that between the late 1420 and the mid 1430s there was a noticeable technical change in painting.
Effect
This, after his researches and discussions with friends and art historians worldwide, he put down to the introduction, first in the Netherlands and then in Italy, of the use not just of the camera obscura, but of other kinds of visual aids using mirrors and optics.
The result of all this energetic work – for Hockney had always been a great worker – was the publication of this immense book which contains 460 illustrations, 402 of them in colour. In itself it is a compendium of Western art to rival Gombrich.
There was an effect that is noticeable in religious art. Scenes from scripture and from religious history became more “real” – as for instance in scenes of the nativity and the three kings – and there for perhaps more “believable”, affecting in a particular way the very nature of religious belief, so it seem to me, though Hockney limits himself to the observation that the technique made the saints look very human – which of course they were, and are.
He felt that though they knew the history of art, they were not well versed in the actual art of painting”
The difference can be simply demonstrated by two different portraits of Pope Leo X, the earlier one in the Vatican Library by Melozzo da Forli and the later one by Raphael. One is stiff and formal, the other remarkably lifelike. Note too that Raphael shows the Pope himself holding an optical aid to reading!
Hockney argument received some objections from art historians, but he felt that though they knew the history of art, they were not well versed in the actual art of painting. Even his most outspoken critic, David Stork an American academic at Stanford University, based his analysis of a single painting. and even then misunderstood what Hockey said about it. The optical instruments he writes about were aids as were pencils and brushes: they still required the artist to make the media marks that preserved what he saw with them.
Secret Knowledge is undoubtedly a magnificent work of argument, but it is supported by extracts from artists and others on the topic of such aids in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, by the correspondence that Hockney sustained on the discoveries he was making, and (as I say) by the evidence of the reader’s own eyes in the pictures puts forward to support his case.
Discover
When the book appeared I was struck by something not mentioned in it: the view of Shakespeare’s London made by Wenceslaus Hollar, showing the theatres of the day on the South Bank in minute detail, set among the houses and gardens of the busy city. These too must have been created with optical aids.
So there is clearly still more to be discovered about the way in which artists – notoriously secretive about their methods in all periods – worked to achieve their effects. Doubtless a memorial edition will now be produced by Hockney’s publishers, with all his later thoughts on the matter.