Vanity Fair just posted a crazy interesting article on Vermeer, the famous Dutch painter of the 1650s. Fascinating read. Anyway, felt obligated to share.
Article is a little misleading because it is almost always taught that Vermeer probably used some kind of tool/camera obscura to get some effects but that his techniques were unknown. Very little is actually known about him artistically because he painted so little, he never had any students, and most of his works seem to have been bought by one local patron. So it would not be all that unusual that his techniques didn't spread. He was known to be an artist locally but mostly we know about his family business and his kids and all that domestic stuff. Also, it seems he did most of his work in 2-3 rooms of his house. So really,meh was not a public figure. He was almost immediately forgotten until his work was "discovered" in the 19the century.
Isn't the article more about whether an amateur can use his tools and reproduce Vermeer's work. I don't care, much. I'm not much for photo-realism works. Unless they are all done with Dots. lols. I'm more interested in how Da Vinci broke the rules of lighting, so our eyes saw things that photos can't.
Very interesting article. Camera obscuras have obviously been used for over 500 years in paintings, but I never really considered how one could match colors. Here's an unrelated article about Da Vinci's tree rule which states "all the branches of a tree at every stage of its height when put together are equal in thickness to the trunk" http://phys.org/news/2011-11-uncovering-da-vinci-trees.html
