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There is neurological evidence for your thesis:http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/22/magazine/22SAVANT.html http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/22/magazine/22SAVANT.html

There is neurological evidence for your thesis:http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/22/magazine/22SAVANT.html http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/22/magazine/22SAVANT.html Savant like drawing skills can be induced in ordinary people by selectively disabling the part of their brain responsible for semantic interpretation. See the shape of the cat, not the cat. Perhaps Vermeer was a savant.

stan_rogers 12y ago
Not likely. There is a reason why the rather nasty Supper at Emmaus van Meegeren forgery was able to fools the experts, and that's that Vermeer wasn't a particularly good draughtsman early on. Good colourist for the most part, yes, but not much cop at getting things straight or in proportion. His early works show distinct signs of painting things iconically; that is, he was drawing and painting what he "knew" things looked like rather than what they actually looked like. So he learned something in mid-career to change everything, and an optical device is a likely aid. I'm not convinced that a lucie was necessary. It's easy enough to create contour lines for tone using a camera obscura while you're tracing edges; it's something you can accomplish in a few minutes' work, and it's much less likely to be remarked upon by your sitting clients. (Let's remember that Vermeer took commissions; not everything could have been kept "in the family".)
- rquantz 12y ago
  So he learned something in mid-career to change everything, and an optical device is a likely aid. Do you have evidence to suggest a mechanical aid rather than just improvement in skills? Artists often change the way they produce art midway through their career. Ever listen to juvenalia by Beethoven, Brahms, or Strauss? Ever listen to early Stravinsky and compare it to what he was writing in the 1960s? Ever look at what Picasso was doing before his primitivist paintings? They all completely changed over the course of their careers, and they all had a moment in their career when they starting making art that was in their voice. So seeing someone get better at something like painting mid-career doesn't indicate to me some deus ex machina, just the gradual accumulation of skill and judgement, until it finally clicks and a mature artist is born. This is not proof that you're wrong, I just want to know why you jump to that conclusion when there seems to be a perfectly normal explanation.
  - stan_rogers 12y ago
    There are no transitional fossils, so to speak. That is, there are no examples where he got the perspective right but the lighting was a bit rough, or the general proportions correct with foreshortening a bit off. As a man who needed to earn a living, he couldn't afford to take a couple-three years off to learn how to draw. Picasso (who was never much of a draughtsman, even in his youth) was working in an era where photography had largely supplanted painterly realism; his concern was not with middle-class portraiture or advertising his skills in creating it.
    - kirsebaer 12y ago
      Picasso was skilled at drawing as a child, and he started formal art education at age 10. But maybe you mean he wasn't that impressive at drawing perspective and architecture? Childhood drawings by Picasso: http://drawingatduke.blogspot.no/2012/02/drawings-of-pablo-picasso.html http://drawingatduke.blogspot.no/2012/02/drawings-of-pablo-p...
      - stan_rogers 12y ago
        No, I don't think it's particularly remarkable, even for a ten-year-old. (At that age, I had been attending an atelier myself for three years, fancying myself a draughtsman and painter, and being told repeatedly that I had some skill. There were kids there who were immensely better than I was, and the differences in direct comparison were extremely subtle -- fractions of millimetres here and there -- but made all kinds of difference.) Nor was there anything convincing or compelling about his blue period paintings. Hell, even his cubism was inferior to Braque. Picasso was merely successfully audacious.
theoh 12y ago
Crucially, the drawings in that NY Times piece were done from memory, not observation. It's a different problem. "draw what you see, not what you know" is the standard instruction given to beginning artists, and the idea that this is the way to draw us well-established, for example in the philosopher Thomas Reid: 'I was recently much struck by a passage from the 18th century Scottish philosopher Thomas Reid, who speaks of the general habit of the human mind to move extremely rapidly, from the reception of stimuli in the eye, to mental interpretations of those stimuli in terms of known objects in the world. "The mind has acquired a confirmed and inveterate habit of inattention to [the luminous stimuli]; for they no sooner appear than quick as lightning the thing signified succeeds, and engrosses all our regard..." The only profession in life in which it is necessary, by training the eye and mind, to break this process apart - to separate seeing from recognising - Reid says, is painting. "The painter hath occasion for an abstraction, with regard to visible objects... and this is indeed the most difficult part of his art. For it is evident, that if he could fix in his imagination the visible appearance of objects, without confounding it with the things signified by that appearance, it would be as easy for him to paint from the life, and to give every figure its proper shading and relief, and its perspective proportions, as it is to paint from a copy." ' (Philip Steadman) Or Paul Valery: "Seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees." Practically a cliche.
- GregBuchholz 12y ago
  >Or Paul Valery: "Seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees." Practically a cliche. A great book that puts this to practice is "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain". Some of the first exercises are to free hand copy a line drawing, while the picture you are copying is upside-down. The theory being that the symbol-interpreting portion of the brain then doesn't exert much influence on the drawing. It was pretty amazing to see the difference this makes. Anyone who is interested in learning how to draw, but doesn't think they have the talent should check out this book. http://www.bing.com/search?q=drawing+on+the+right+side+of+the+brain http://www.bing.com/search?q=drawing+on+the+right+side+of+th...

stan_rogers 12y ago

Not likely. There is a reason why the rather nasty Supper at Emmaus van Meegeren forgery was able to fools the experts, and that's that Vermeer wasn't a particularly good draughtsman early on. Good colourist for the most part, yes, but not much cop at getting things straight or in proportion. His early works show distinct signs of painting things iconically; that is, he was drawing and painting what he "knew" things looked like rather than what they actually looked like. So he learned something in mid-career to change everything, and an optical device is a likely aid. I'm not convinced that a lucie was necessary. It's easy enough to create contour lines for tone using a camera obscura while you're tracing edges; it's something you can accomplish in a few minutes' work, and it's much less likely to be remarked upon by your sitting clients. (Let's remember that Vermeer took commissions; not everything could have been kept "in the family".)

rquantz 12y ago
So he learned something in mid-career to change everything, and an optical device is a likely aid. Do you have evidence to suggest a mechanical aid rather than just improvement in skills? Artists often change the way they produce art midway through their career. Ever listen to juvenalia by Beethoven, Brahms, or Strauss? Ever listen to early Stravinsky and compare it to what he was writing in the 1960s? Ever look at what Picasso was doing before his primitivist paintings? They all completely changed over the course of their careers, and they all had a moment in their career when they starting making art that was in their voice. So seeing someone get better at something like painting mid-career doesn't indicate to me some deus ex machina, just the gradual accumulation of skill and judgement, until it finally clicks and a mature artist is born. This is not proof that you're wrong, I just want to know why you jump to that conclusion when there seems to be a perfectly normal explanation.
- stan_rogers 12y ago
  There are no transitional fossils, so to speak. That is, there are no examples where he got the perspective right but the lighting was a bit rough, or the general proportions correct with foreshortening a bit off. As a man who needed to earn a living, he couldn't afford to take a couple-three years off to learn how to draw. Picasso (who was never much of a draughtsman, even in his youth) was working in an era where photography had largely supplanted painterly realism; his concern was not with middle-class portraiture or advertising his skills in creating it.
  - kirsebaer 12y ago
    Picasso was skilled at drawing as a child, and he started formal art education at age 10. But maybe you mean he wasn't that impressive at drawing perspective and architecture? Childhood drawings by Picasso: http://drawingatduke.blogspot.no/2012/02/drawings-of-pablo-picasso.html http://drawingatduke.blogspot.no/2012/02/drawings-of-pablo-p...
    - stan_rogers 12y ago
      No, I don't think it's particularly remarkable, even for a ten-year-old. (At that age, I had been attending an atelier myself for three years, fancying myself a draughtsman and painter, and being told repeatedly that I had some skill. There were kids there who were immensely better than I was, and the differences in direct comparison were extremely subtle -- fractions of millimetres here and there -- but made all kinds of difference.) Nor was there anything convincing or compelling about his blue period paintings. Hell, even his cubism was inferior to Braque. Picasso was merely successfully audacious.

theoh 12y ago

Crucially, the drawings in that NY Times piece were done from memory, not observation. It's a different problem. "draw what you see, not what you know" is the standard instruction given to beginning artists, and the idea that this is the way to draw us well-established, for example in the philosopher Thomas Reid: 'I was recently much struck by a passage from the 18th century Scottish philosopher Thomas Reid, who speaks of the general habit of the human mind to move extremely rapidly, from the reception of stimuli in the eye, to mental interpretations of those stimuli in terms of known objects in the world. "The mind has acquired a confirmed and inveterate habit of inattention to [the luminous stimuli]; for they no sooner appear than quick as lightning the thing signified succeeds, and engrosses all our regard..." The only profession in life in which it is necessary, by training the eye and mind, to break this process apart - to separate seeing from recognising - Reid says, is painting. "The painter hath occasion for an abstraction, with regard to visible objects... and this is indeed the most difficult part of his art. For it is evident, that if he could fix in his imagination the visible appearance of objects, without confounding it with the things signified by that appearance, it would be as easy for him to paint from the life, and to give every figure its proper shading and relief, and its perspective proportions, as it is to paint from a copy." ' (Philip Steadman) Or Paul Valery: "Seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees." Practically a cliche.

GregBuchholz 12y ago
>Or Paul Valery: "Seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees." Practically a cliche. A great book that puts this to practice is "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain". Some of the first exercises are to free hand copy a line drawing, while the picture you are copying is upside-down. The theory being that the symbol-interpreting portion of the brain then doesn't exert much influence on the drawing. It was pretty amazing to see the difference this makes. Anyone who is interested in learning how to draw, but doesn't think they have the talent should check out this book. http://www.bing.com/search?q=drawing+on+the+right+side+of+the+brain http://www.bing.com/search?q=drawing+on+the+right+side+of+th...