The projected image and the introduction of individuality in Italian painting around 1270

Abstract

Before the publication of David Hockney’s book Secret Knowledge: rediscovering the lost techniques of the Old Masters in 2001, it was commonly believed that the first artist to use an optical aid in painting was the seventeenth-century Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer. Hockney, however, believes that the use of projected images started much earlier, as early as the fifteenth-century, claiming that evidence can be found in the work of the Flemish painter Jan van Eyck. Without rejecting Hockney’s pioneering work in this field, I nevertheless make the perhaps bolder claim that Italian artists were using the aid of image projections even before the time of Jan van Eyck, that is, as early as 1270. Although much of the information required to make an earlier claim for the use of optics can be found in Hockney’s publication, the key to linking all the information together has been missing. It is my unique contention that this key is a letter that has always been believed to have been European in origin. More commonly referred to as Roger Bacon’s Letter I show in detail how this letter was, in fact, not written by Roger Bacon, but addressed to him, and that this letter originated in China. Chinese knowledge about projected images, that is the concept that light-pictures could be received onto appropriate supports, came directly to Europe around 1250. This knowledge was expanded upon by Roger Bacon in his Opus Majus, a document which arrived in Italy in 1268 for the special consideration of Pope Clement IV. The medieval Italian painter Cimabue was able to benefit directly from this information about optical systems, when he himself was in Rome in 1272. He immediately began to copy optical projections, which stimulated the creation of a new, more individualistic, mode of representation in Italian painting from this time forward. The notion that projected images greatly contributed towards the development of naturalism in medieval Italian painting replaces the previously weak supposition that the stimulation was classical or humanist theory, and shows that it was, in fact, far likely something more technical as well.