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> Then you can't see it through this device either.

The documentary goes into more depth as to why it is possible to see subtle variations in lighting using the device, and why a simple camera obscura is insufficient.

Similarly, the documentary also notes that the scrollwork on the harpsichord in The Music Lesson exhibits lens distortion consistent with an optical system. And Tim's contraption intrinsically reproduced that same distortion, before it was consciously noticed.

I'd highly recommend watching the documentary; it's quite fun.

In the documentary they show a Pieter de Hooch and a Vermeer side by side:

"Het Melkmeisje" by Vermeer: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/20/Johannes_...

And "Die Goldwägerin" by de Hooch: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/78/Pieter_de...

Though these painters were heavily influenced by one another, the difference is remarkable. See also: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a5/Gerard_te... for a difference between Vermeer's walls and other painters of the time period.

But then I saw: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7c/Pieter_de... and that closet nearly renders as real to me, it almost has one of those 60s cut-and-paste photoshop feel to it.

Really like the documentary too. Rekindled some of my awe with art and the process it takes. One thing I didn't spot in the documentary, but can see in detail in Tim's Vermeer: http://www.vanityfair.com/dam/2013/11/vermeer-the-music-less... I think Tim painted his own feet in the mirror.

> I think Tim painted his own feet in the mirror.

Nice easter egg! You can see the legs of the table and his feet.

I believe the device is meant to focus on certain locations so you can perceive the colors accurately without the brain doing image processing based on surrounding context.

In particular, the edge of the mirror is the key. By optically putting the subject of your painting directly next to the painting itself, you can directly compare shapes and tones. And moving your head back and forth, you can "scan" the edge of the mirror across the painting to find inconsistencies.

I was wondering how in the world this device works, but this explains it well. I understand now how an untrained artist can make such an amazing painting.

There is neurological evidence for your thesis: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.

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".)

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.

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.

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-p...

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.

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.

>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+th...

> Then you can't see it through this device either.

The technical trick is to align an edge of a mirror which reflects part of the real image with the canvas and add paint until there is no visible difference.

I believe this trick can get around the shade corrections made by the brain, just like tracing over camera obscura gets around the proportion & angle corrections.

> Then you can't see it through this device either.

So this isn't me saying you're wrong, because in this specific case, I have no idea. Just wanted to throw something interesting in there, which is lateral inhibition [1]

Lateral inhibition in vision is basically a rod cell, which is sending a strong bright signal to the brain, inhibits the signal of rod cells near it, which makes them send a darker signal; it increases sharpness and contrast in lines and helps with edge detection before the brain ever gets ahold of the image.

The wikipedia article has a graduated series of black to white stripes that demonstrates the idea. It looks like the stripes fade from light to dark. I bring it up because you can suppress this by covering the two sides of the stripe, providing a constant signal to your rod cells. I haven't seen the movie, but it sounds like (from the comments I read below) that might be part of what's going on. Using optical tricks to suppress certain pre processing the brain/eyes do.

(this is more a post about how interesting lateral inhibition is, because of information being preprocessed even before your brain mangles it, than to disagree with anything you said, which is a really interesting idea as well)

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lateral_inhibition#Visual_inhib...

I think he is talking about optical illusions like the "Checker Shadow Illusion":

http://www.businessballs.com/shadow-optical-illusion.htm

So we perceive the same color as a different one depending on the other colors surrounding it (also http://www.designmatrix.com/pl/cyberpl/cic.html ) I'm not sure there is any art training that can change your brain to make this illusion not work. Using a tool like the mirror device in the article, makes it easier to match colors because it can remove the other colors around it and also moves it closer to the color you are painting.

You're right. Try bringing the "Checker Shadow Illusion" as a .jpg into Photoshop or GIMP and check the color values. Surprisingly in both A and B locales they're 120,120,120 (RGB). More curious is experimentation with the eraser. Using the 120s, seemingly similar black squares can be grayed-out[?].

> When you get really good you can even start reprocessing a scene or a model, deconstructing it in your mind and then reconstructing it via some other technique. You can go from photorealistic reproduction to complete abstraction.

I think this is the first time I have seen an convincing argument for the value of abstract art. Thanks.

Thanks. Believe it or not, I'm not a big fan of most abstract art. I think the problem for me is that it's too easy to hack. Instead of going through years of art training and study, you really can just go throw a bunch of paint on a canvas and it's virtually indistinguishable from the real thing.

Yeah, that "easy to hack" is why I was turned off of abstract art as a category. That there is a possibility of some artwork to have that kind of an underlying language is exciting to me :-)

I'm no expert or even connoisseur of paintings or art in general, but one of my favorite artists is Wassily Kandinsky.

To me it's abstract art, but I really think it won't be easy to reproduce something that looks like his work. I think maybe someone more knowledgeable could teach you to "see" the abstract art. It happens to me with Jazz for example. By itself I really don't get it, but if one of my music loving friends walks me through it, explaining why the song is like this and that, then it all takes on a different dimension and I even start to like it. Then my friend goes away and again Jazz sounds like a mess to me.

So maybe go see some abstract art with a friend that knows about it and can explain it and it might surprise what you find aesthetic. Then again it might not, but I Believe there must be some value to abstract art.

Sure, though it would be fun to see the principles of how visual arts are deconstructed for myself. I have a guess that there are essential overlaps with the bits of Haskell and martial arts I know.

1. Wow--I was thinking the same thing, but about another artist. 2. I didn't realize most of Vermeer's painting are done at the same studio. The studio does look like it's on the first floor? (The way the lighting hits his subjects?) 3. Vermeer was not a famous artist when he was alive, and died in debt.(Probally, like I will). It would be very easy to set up staging area outside a room--noone cared about? 4. Woulden't it be ironic if his famous painting The Little Street 1658 is directly across from his original studio? 5. I got this from the wiki on Vermeer, and it's probally false, but here goes,"Here Vermeer lived for the rest of his life, producing paintings in the front room on the second floor". Second floor! Now, a staging area in the air? 6. I'll watch the video, and suffer through Penn & Teller, but in my heart I don't think he used camera obscura. 7. My favorite styles of art have been Expressionism, and Modern Art. I don't think these can be faked? I only got into art after some pretty sever anxiety issues--It might be the only positive out of a horrid situation?