You know, sometimes when I'm Iaying in bed at night 2
trying to get to sIeep, 3
aII I can think about is this goaI of trying to paint a Vermeer. 4
You know, reaIIy, I'm gonna try to paint a Vermeer. 5
And, at the face of it, that seems aImost impossibIe. 6
And I don't know if I couId do it. 7
You know, it'II be pretty remarkabIe if I can, 8
because I'm not a painter. 9
The Vermeer he's talking about is Johannes Vermeer, 10
the Dutch artist from the 1600s. 11
Some consider him the greatest painter of all time. 12
When you look at a Vermeer,it seems like more than paint on canvas. 13
lt seems to glow like the image on a movie screen. 14
That magical quality has mystified the world for 350 years. 15
How did Vermeer do it? 16
Dutch artists typically learnt by apprenticeship 17
and they kept written records to prove their training. 18
But no such documents have ever been found about Vermeer. 19
And strangely, when you x-ray these intricate images, 20
you don't find the usual artist's sketches underneath. 21
lt's as if Vermeer were some unfathomable genius 22
who could just walk up to a canvas and magically paint with light. 23
lt's possible that Vermeer was using technology 24
to make these beautiful paintings. 25
lf he did that, and, of course,there's no documentation that he did this, 26
it's possibIe he couId paint some pretty remarkabIe pictures without a Iot of training. 27
It's possibIe that he was more of an experimenter, 28
more of a tinkerer, more of a geek. 29
And, in that way, l feel a kinship with him, because l'm a computer graphics guy, 30
and we use technoIogy to make a reaIistic, beautifuI image, 31
and it's possibIe that's exactIy what Vermeer was doing. 32
Tim Jenison is not a painter, he's an inventor. 33
He's always had a talent for figuring out how things work. 34
When Tim was growing up in lowa,he got a broken player piano, 35
repaired it, and taught himself to play swing music 36
by slowing down the piano rolls so he could follow Fats Waller's fingers. 37
Tim played keyboards in a rock band for a couple of years 38
and taught himself to fix anything electronic that broke. 39
The amazing wizard! 40
He got married, had a family, 41
and built a business repairing pinball machines and video games. 42
Then, around 1990, he invented a way to turn personal computers 43
into TVstudios for live broadcasting. 44
He called it the Video Toaster,and it won him an Emmy. 45
That led him to other amazing achievements like LightWave, 46
a program for rendering 3D images, 47
which won an Emmy for his company,NewTek, in 2003. 48
Tim's now based in San Antonio, Texas, 49
and his company produces the TriCaster, 50
used in broadcast, web,and live performance. 51
All this has given Tim the money and free time to make things like this, 52
Frankie, his lip-syncing duck. 53
A plane made entirely of stuff from a home improvement store. 54
It's an eIectric moth. 55
His electric moth. 56
As you raise the Iight,it comes up off the fIoor, 57
and it stays at exactIy the same distance under the Iight. 58
And this. 59
Here's the pipe organ Tim put together from four different churches. 60
Once I got started,you have to have more pipes, 61
because it's never quite enough,so I've got three pipe organs here, 62
pIus an eIectronic organ that I'm using for the keyboard. 63
Tim and I have been friends for a reaIIy Iong time. 64
If there was an artist,he wouId draw it, what you see... 65
We've cried together at space shuttle launches. 66
We flew his Learjet down to Cabo San Lucas 67
to see the total eclipse of the sun. 68
So, the deviI's in there. 69
This is Penn, the Iast day he was abIe to see 70
before he Iost God's most precious gift Iooking at the ecIipse. 71
Tim's been weightless in an astronaut-training plane 72
and he arranged for me to try it, too. 73
l vomited into my own hair. 74
Tim was not and is not a painter. 75
So I didn't know he had this whoIe IittIe sub-obsession 76
with Vermeer. 77
Tim's Vermeer project started 1 1 years back,in 2002, 78
when his daughter gave him a copy of David Hockney's book, Secret KnowIedge. 79
Hockney wrote that when pictures started to look less like this,
and more like this, 81
that was because artists had found new tools to help them. 82
ln 17th-century Holland, high quality lenses and mirrors were in use everywhere. 83
Telescopes were all the rage 84
and science hobbyists were experimenting with ways to project live images. 85
Hockney challenged conventional wisdom by suggesting 86
that when artists of Vermeer's day began to paint more accurately, 87
they were no longer using just their eyes and their imaginations.
They were secretly getting help from optical machines, like the camera obscura. 89
Camera obscura is Latin for dark room 90
Build a box, any size. 91
Could be the size of a shoebox, 92
but let's make this one big enough to stand inside. 93
lt's a dark room. 94
Drill a little hole in one side of the box and you see something surprising. 95
The image of whatever is outside the box,in the light, 96
is projected on the wall opposite the hole,only it's upside down and backwards. 97
You can make the image brighter and clearer by putting a lens in the hole, 98
and you can change the size of the image on the wall 99
by changing the curvature and position of the lens. 100
Here's David Hockney on a TVspecial. 101
He's inside a camera obscura, 102
tracing the image of a live model projected through a lens. 103
Hockney was mostly focused on 104
how a painter could have traced images through a lens. 105
To me, what was most striking about the Vermeers, as a video guy, 106
l'm looking at this image,and l see a video signal. 107
l see something that looks like it came out of a video camera. 108
So I thought about how a painter couId actuaIIy copy that. 109
Now, most peopIe that have pIayed with a camera obscura 110
got the idea that they couId take that projected image and somehow paint on it. 111
WeII, I've tried that and a Iot of peopIe have tried it, it's impossibIe. 112
What happens is it actuaIIy fights you,it works against you, 113
it's worse than nothing at aII. 114
Painting on a projection just doesn't work. 115
Here's a blue that matches very closely the blue in the projection. 116
lmagine this is wet paint. 117
When you put it into the projection,it looks way too dark. 118
On the other hand, here's a perfect match. 119
The colour that matches the projected colour just right. 120
The only colour that'll ever do that is white. 121
Tim went around the world studying Vermeer. 122
They called it 'painting with light.'Vermeer'painted with light.' 123
You can't paint with light,you have to paint with paint. 124
And so what they're really talking about is this verisimilitude that Vermeer has, 125
that it just pops. 126
You see it from across the room and it looks like a slide, 127
it looks like a colour slide of Kodachrome. 128
Seeing the Vermeers in person was a revelation. 129
lt reinforced to me that l was on the right track. 130
That what l was seeing was an accurate representation of the colour in that room. 131
I just had a hunch that there must be a way to actuaIIy get the coIours accurate, 132
with mechanicaI means. 133
Some way you couId do that in the 1 7th century. 134
I remember just having this vague idea of comparing two coIours with a mirror, 135
and it didn't go any farther than that for a Iong time. 136
Sitting in the bathtub, 137
you know, that's I guess where you have your eureka moments, 138
but, I don't know,there's something about bath water... 139
It's just very, very reIaxing. 140
And I was just picturing that mirror hanging there in space, 141
and I pictured what I wouId see,and there it was. 142
And so I grabbed a piece of paper,being carefuI not to get it wet, 143
made a sketch, and that was where l realised 144
Vermeer couId have used a mirror to paint those paintings. 145
To test this l propped up a high school photograph of my father-in-law on the table. 146
l put a piece of Masonite down here to paint on. 147
l set a small mirror at a 45-degree angle. 148
And for the first time in my life,l did just what Vermeer may have done. 149
l picked up some oil paints and a brush. 150
In Vermeer's camera this wouId be a projection, 151
a Iens is projecting this image. 152
But to show the actuaI mirror painting process, 153
we're using a photograph here. 154
You can see that there's a refIection,and then there's my canvas down here. 155
And right at the edge of the mirror,I can see both things at once. 156
I'm just going to appIy paint 157
and either darken or Iighten the paint untiI it's the same exact coIour. 158
And at that point,when it's exactIy the same coIour, 159
the edge of the mirror wiII disappear. 160
AII right, and I'm an idiot at this, 161
I have done this process exactIy twice in my Iife before. 162
What I'm doing is I'm moving my head up and down 163
so that I can see first the origina I and then my canvas. 164
I'm Iooking at both things at the same time. 165
Right on the forehead,you can see that they match, 166
because you can't reaIIy see the edge of the mirror. 167
That's, that's your cIue that you've matched the paint exactIy. 168
It's not subjective, it's objective. 169
I'm a piece of human photographic fiIm at that point. 170
What you're doing here is you're essentiaIIy bIending? 171
Yep, I am either darkening or Iightening the paint that's aIready on the surface. 172
You aren't tracing any Iines,'cause there are no Iines. 173
Yeah, that's a characteristic of the Vermeers that makes them unusua I, 174
is that there weren't Iines, 175
and there weren't any Iines drawn underneath the paint either. 176
It Iooks Iike there's these bIobs that are emerging into a picture. 177
It doesn't Iook Iike... 178
The order you're doing stuff in is not a... 179
It's not being done mentaIIy. 180
No, it's... 181
And that's what's so nutty about it. 182
You know, if I was better at this,it may be more systematic, 183
I may evoIve into doing it more systematicaIIy, but... 184
No matter what I've tried, 185
if I just spend enough time comparing the mirror to the canvas 186
and stirring the paint around,it ends up Iooking Iike a photograph. 187
And this was the result of Tim's experiment, 188
it took him five hours. 189
Not bad for a first oil painting. 190
The father-in-law picture was proof enough in my mind that Vermeer probably did this. 191
However, my father-in-law doesn't look like a 17th-century Dutch woman, 192
so l don't think it would be very convincing evidence for a lot of people. 193
So, l thought the best way would be to really do a Vermeer. 194
l had the suspicion that it was exactly the same thing. 195
lf l could do the father-in-law,l could paint a Vermeer. 196
lt seemed to me the most powerful demonstration of the idea. 197
The reason l chose The Music Lesson is probably because, of all the paintings, 198
l think The Music Lesson is a great little laboratory, 199
because it's so complete and so self-contained. 200
You know where the windows are,you know how big the windows are, 201
you can reconstruct the harpsichord independent of the painting, 202
the Spanish chair, the viola da gamba, the rug, all these things could be procured, 203
and their appearance is gonna be what it is,independent of Vermeer's painting. 204
lt's a little scientific experiment waiting to happen. 205
Before Tim went to all that trouble, 206
we thought he should run his idea by a working artist. 207
So we called up our friend, 208
Los Angeles-based painter and entertainer, Martin Mull, 209
and asked him to meet Tim at a studio in Las Vegas and see his gizmo. 210
Oh, my God. 211
Oh, my God. 212
HoIy cow. 213
Took me about haIf an hour to Iearn how to operate a paintbrush. 214
Good for you, it took me 40 years. 215
WeII, and the beauty of this technique is that you can make mistakes 216
and see what you did wrong instantIy and try to fix it. 217
This is astounding. 218
So this is a camera obscura, 219
typicaI of the type that couId be found in the 1600's. 220
This type of camera obscura is caIIed a ''box camera obscura''. 221
It generaIIy had a ground gIass Iike this. 222
It has the abiIity to refocus by moving the Iens in and out. 223
The generaI consensus of peopIe that beIieve Vermeer used optics 224
was that he may have Iooked at that image and been inspired by it. 225
Yeah. 226
And that's the end of the story. 227
So now that we know there's a way to copy the coIours exactIy, 228
I'm proposing an aIternate history of Vermeer. 229
Okay. 230
His father's an art deaIer,he knows something about art, 231
he wants to make a painting. 232
He Iooks at this image... 233
Okay. 234
There's my daughter, NataIie. 235
What if Vermeer took the camera,turned it sideways, and now it's verticaI, 236
-Iike my father-in-Iaw picture.-Okay. 237
He takes his canvas, 238
and, the secret ingredient, 239
the mirror. 240
He positions the mirror here. 241
Which corrects the inversion? 242
-Yeah, it brings it back... -And everything... 243
And there it is! CIear as can be. 244
So if he's in his Iiving room,he puts up some curtains, 245
controIs the Iight, 246
and now picks up his brush and starts to paint. 247
My guess is that the Girl with the Red Hat is that first painting. 248
-Wow. -It's painted over the top of another painting. 249
We can x-ray it and see that here's something eIse underneath, 250
so maybe this was just a throwaway experiment. 251
So I understand, Tim,that when you go back to Texas, 252
you're going to construct a repIica of the exact room where Vermeer painted? 253
Yeah. 254
And you're going to do a painting in his stead, 255
am I right? 256
Yep. 257
Many of Vermeer's paintings appear to have been painted in the same room, 258
likely the north-facing room 259
on the second floor of the house Vermeer lived in. 260
That's the room Tim plans to construct. 261
I reaIIy hope to see firsthand what Vermeer was up against, 262
if he was using this technique. 263
And try to get some idea 264
of how Iong it wouId take, 265
just to get the conditions right... 266
Just mundane things Iike how much usabIe Iighting do you get in a day. 267
So you're not going to use any artificiaI Iight. 268
That's right. 269
And I'm onIy going to use materiaIs that Vermeer wouId have had. 270
O kay. 271
So,I'm going to force myse If into the constraint 272
of having to grind the pigments and, you know, make the paint, 273
and use onIy pigments that he had access to or that he used in his paintings. 274
For his experiment, Tim wanted to recreate, as closely as possible, 275
the conditions that Vermeer was working with. 276
Back then you couIdn't just run down to the paint store 277
and pick up a tube of paint, 278
so Tim had to Iearn how to grind and mix the pigments, 279
which I'm now taIking about something I know nothing about, 280
but of grinding the pigments and adding in the oiI 281
and however you make paint. 282
If it were Ieft to me to make paint,there wouId be no paint. 283
I aIso Iearnt how to make Ienses. 284
I couIdn't use a modern Iens,they're too good.
So I had to buiId one. 286
So I had to make the form on a Iathe,I had to meIt the gIass, 287
I had to poIish it with various grades of abrasives, 288
just the way they made Ienses in the 1 7th century. 289
To be sure he was getting everything right, 290
Tim took some time off of work to fly to Holland. 291
He visited Delft,the city where Vermeer had lived, 292
and studied the light and the architecture. 293
So this is it, this is where Vermeer painted those magicaI Iight pictures. 294
He learnt to read Dutch,he consulted with experts, 295
measured furniture in museums,and immersed himself in Vermeer's world. 296
AII right, so move it in. Okay, good. 297
I wouId Iike to get one exactIy Iike this.Do you think you couId make one? 298
That's possibIe, yes. 299
When he got back to San Antonio,Tim rented a warehouse that faced North, 300
just like Vermeer's studio, 301
and invited Professor Philip Steadman over from London 302
to look over his experiment. 303
While some believe that Vermeer painted from his imagination, 304
Steadman found evidence that Vermeer used optics. 305
Steadman is the author of Vermeer's Camera. 306
ln this book, Steadman analyses six of Vermeer's paintings 307
to determine the layout of Vermeer's studio. 308
Then he uses geometry to figure out 309
where the lens in a camera obscura would have to go 310
to match each painting's viewpoint. 311
Now he calculates the size of the projection on Vermeer's back wall, 312
and compares that to the size of the corresponding painting. 313
For all six, the sizes match exactly. 314
lt doesn't seem like that would happen by chance. 315
Pretty convincing evidence that Vermeer used a lens. 316
WeII, teII me about what you're doing. 317
Steadman's discovery fit perfectly with Tim's mirror, 318
so now Tim set up a test that would use both. 319
And this, we wiII make an attempt at painting this. 320
-Okay. -Using the mirror. 321
So, now Iet's go inside the booth. 322
Yeah. 323
He and Steadman would try to paint a jug 324
using his comparator mirror inside a camera obscura, 325
as Tim thought Vermeer had done. 326
They take turns painting. 327
lt doesn't matter who does the brushstrokes, 328
the process is objective, 329
and any painter who uses it,gets the same result. 330
David Hockney's book came out just after mine. 331
What do you remember about the reaction? 332
There was quite a controversy around both books, wasn't there? 333
Enormous, yes, yes. 334
There was a Iot of upset, a reaIIy deep anguish amongst the art historians. 335
The painters were reIaxed. 336
They said, you know,'This is a technoIogy, fine, okay.' 337
But there was something, a reaIIy deep hurt amongst some of the art historians 338
which was to do with intrusion of amateurs and crass rationaIists 339
into the preserves of art history. 340
It was to do with a misunderstanding of the nature of art 341
and cheating and genius, 342
and the idea that an opticaI method is some sort of cheat, 343
because these are very accurate,measured perspectives. 344
So, there are two ways you can do them.You can produce them opticaIIy, 345
or you can set them up geometricaIIy. 346
If you set them up geometricaIIy,you're using the standard methods, 347
it's a machine, it's an aIgorithm,you appIy the ruIes. 348
Why is that not cheating? 349
-ExactIy. -Strange, isn't it? 350
So, the onIy Iegitimate way to make a painting is to just waIk up to the canvas, 351
and aIIa prima paint it. 352
But the reason it isn't cheating is that it's hard. 353
-Yes. -It's geometry, it's mathematics. 354
-WeII, this certainIy is not easy. -This is not easy, no. 355
-If Vermeer did this, it wasn't a time saver. -No, indeed. 356
I can't comprehend that someone couId paint that from their imagination. 357
No. Of course not. 358
A human being is pretty remarkabIe sometimes. 359
To get objects at their true sizes, 360
and to get aII the kind of Iuminous effects... 361
Painters can do miracuIous things,it's difficuIt to say,This is impossibIe, 362
but some things are more impossibIe than others. 363
I was gonna go right off the edge there. 364
So. 365
-Great. WeII, congratuIations. -And you. 366
Fantastic. 367
I want to think that this simpIe, eIegant device 368
is something that Vermeer couId have used. 369
There's no doubt it's practicaI,and it's simpIe. 370
You know, it's a pIain mirror. 371
This is a 1 7th-century technoIogy,they knew aII about mirrors, 372
and you can imagine him perhaps thinking of something Iike what Tim has thought of, 373
but we know nothing from a documentary point of view 374
of how Vermeer worked,there are no descriptions by him, 375
by other peopIe, there are no drawings... 376
We know very IittIe about his Iife. 377
So the onIy reaI source of information to answer a question Iike that 378
wouId be the paintings themseIves. 379
Using Tim's device, it isn't easy, 380
but somehow it does turn you into a machine. 381
You become a machine.Was Vermeer a machine? 382
Maybe Vermeer was strong-minded enough to think,'I'II become a machine'. 383
That little picture of the jug 384
took Tim and Steadman eight and a half hours to paint, 385
and Tim's method worked. 386
But they were painting in black and white,and using powerful electric light 387
that wouldn't have been around in Vermeer's day. 388
Would Tim's mirror work well enough to paint The Music Lesson, 389
in full colour, in natural light? 390
To find that out Tim would need Vermeer's room, and everything in it. 391
But museums don't loan stuff from the 1600s to video engineers with a wacky hobby. 392
It wouId be nice if I couId have hired somebody to buiId aII this 393
but it was kind of an interactive process, 394
you know, I had to first modeI the room in LightWave 3D, 395
working from the painting to get the dimensions and the shapes right. 396
Even though it was a Iot of work,it was just easier for me to do it, 397
because as I went I couId make sure 398
that the furniture Iooked Iike the furniture in the Vermeers. 399
But Tim is not a dressmaker. 400
Or a framer. 401
Or a carpenter. Upholsterer. 402
Glazier. 403
Builder of virginals,which is a type of harpsichord. 404
Metalsmith. 405
Furniture maker. 406
Plasterer. 407
Tile layer. 408
Or a lens maker. 409
But he's not an artist either. 410
He used what he was, a technologist, 411
to help him become all those things he wasn't, 412
so that he could build his room. 413
This is fun. 414
I mean, this is the reaI thing. 415
Is it safe for there to be that much smoke? 416
I don't know, I've never done this before! 417
CouId it heat up and catch fire? 418
-WeII, I guess. I don't know. -Whatever! 419
It's kind of cooI. Okay, here we go. 420
Okay, I got a probIem with the virginaIs Ieg. 421
It's supposed to be 36 and a haIf inches Iong, 422
but my Iathe onIy goes 423
about 34 inches. 424
I mean, I couId make the Ieg in two pieces. 425
But I think what I'm gonna do is I'm going to cut the Iathe in two. 426
GeneraIIy, you don't take a fine precision machine tooI and saw it in haIf, 427
but power tooIs are made to be jury-rigged. 428
Yeah, it's a big guitar. 429
VioIa da gamba is caIIed a 'vioIa da gamba' because 'gamba'means Ieg, 430
and you pIay it between your Iegs. 431
I Iike it. 432
I don't know much about woodworking. 433
So I'm doing this, not out of Iove for woodworking, 434
but out of necessity 435
because you just can't buy these stupid chairs anywhere, 436
and I need one. 437
David Hockney is one of Britain's greatest artists. 438
He's famous for paintings like this. 439
Since his optical theory got Tim started on this journey, 440
he seemed the ideal person for Tim to talk to. 441
Hockney invited us to visit,so we all went to England. 442
What l knew about David Hockney was that he was a famous artist. 443
But, reading his book, l could see that he wasn't a typical artist, 444
that he was somewhat a scientist. 445
PhiIip Steadman and David Hockney,to my mind, 446
to the mind of a sceptic, 447
prove that Vermeer used some sort of device. 448
But Secret Knowledge,and aII the PhiIip Steadman work, 449
are this wonderfuI, exciting, tingIy whodunit,that never teIIs you who did it. 450
Hockney showed that artists were using lenses. 451
Steadman argued that Vermeer was using a lens. 452
l believed that Vermeer must have been using more than just a lens. 453
The reason to go see Hockney was to bounce this idea off him 454
and see if he thought it was plausible. 455
How did you figure this out? What are you, a... 456
WeII, I started thinking about it after I read your book, and... 457
Are you an opticaI... I mean... 458
I design teIevision equipment. 459
-That's my job. -I see. 460
So I know a bit about coIour and imagery. 461
And I suspected Iooking at these oId pictures from the GoIden Age, 462
Caravaggio, Vermeer, van Eyck, 463
that there must have been a way to copy the tones. 464
Because that's what's quite remarkabIe,actuaIIy. Yes, it is. 465
I need to stand on that side of the tabIe for a second. 466
So it's a mirror on a stick. 467
AII right. 468
This is what I saw when I was painting,if you Iook straight down. 469
And of course I started with a bIank... 470
I see, yes. Yeah, yeah. 471
And you can move your head up and down and you can see different parts of the image. 472
And that's how you work your way from one part to the other. 473
Now right at the edge of the mirror,where you see both images, 474
you can do a direct comparison of the tone. 475
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. 476
And your eye can instantIy see,because they're together, 477
can see any contrast, and the edge of the mirror basicaIIy disappears. 478
When you have the right coIour and onIy when you have the right coIour. 479
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I see.This is very ingenious. 480
So you notice that there is no paraIIax when you move your head, 481
there is no shifting. 482
-That's it, no. -The two images stay Iocked together. 483
-Why is that? -Want to Iook through it? 484
-How is that? -I know, it's very cIever. 485
I must say, the idea that the ItaIians, when you think about the ItaIians, 486
they Iove pictures, the idea that they didn't use this 487
because this wouId have been cheating,I find chiIdish, absoIuteIy chiIdish. 488
There's aIso this modern idea that art and technoIogy must never meet. 489
You know, you go to schooI for technoIogy or you go to schooI for art 490
but never for both. 491
But in the GoIden Age,they were one and the same person. 492
Yeah. 493
The interesting thing is that if this was around then, 494
we are seeing photographs. 495
If they were using this and exactIy copying that coIour. 496
Yeah, weII, I mean... 497
-It's a photo. -Yeah. 498
After seeing this, I mean,it's not a compIicated piece of equipment, 499
but how IikeIy do you think it is that they may have done this? 500
-I think it's very IikeIy. -ReaIIy. 501
Very IikeIy. Yeah, yeah, absoIuteIy IikeIy. 502
I mean, I'm pretty positive optics... 503
I mean, there's no expIanation for the paintings without optics. 504
But, you know, historicaI evidence, 505
it'd be great to find a Iost Ietter from Johannes Vermeer... 506
Wait a minute. 507
I put a joke Ietter in Secret Knowledge. 508
You did? 509
A joke Ietter. 510
This is what historians were Iooking for.From Hugo van der Goes to van Eyck. 511
CouId you go to ye Brugge Mirror SuppIy Company 512
and get one of those makeup mirrors for my wife, you know what I mean? 513
WeII, I said,'You'II never find a Ietter Iike that.' 514
-Yeah. -They never wrote down... 515
Van Eyck wouId not write down the formuIas for the paint 516
for the simpIe reason that somebody might read them. 517
And there were other peopIe 518
that wouIdn't write 'em down. 519
PeopIe were sworn to secrecy,oaths that they took very seriousIy. 520
You won't, you never...It's naive to think you'II find something. 521
Paintings are documents, aren't they? Aren't they teIIing you a Iot? 522
Paintings are documents. 523
They contain the story of their own creation. 524
Every brushstroke, every layer of colour,every shadow 525
represents another piece of information. 526
To the trained eye, a painting can be read as accurately as any written text. 527
And you don't need a trained eye 528
to see that Vermeer's look different from his contemporaries. 529
They look like video images. 530
He painted the way a camera sees. 531
Ever since photography was invented, 532
people have been noticing optical things about Vermeer. 533
On the GirI with the Red Hat, 534
there's this lion's head in the foreground that's fuzzy. 535
Your eye naturally refocuses on whatever you're looking at, 536
so something in the foreground 537
is not going to appear to your eye as out of focus. 538
But it could be out of focus if the image was projected with a lens. 539
The so-called pointilles, 540
these little circles of paint,look similar to what you get in a bad lens. 541
You look at the back of her jacket and there's a faint blue line. 542
And that looks a lot like chromatic aberration which is what happens in a crude lens. 543
The edges of objects can develop this rainbow fringe around them. 544
This faIIoff of Iight from the window to the opposite corner 545
is something that an artist reaIIy cannot see the way a camera sees it. 546
It's impossibIe to see it. 547
But Vermeer painted it the way a camera sees it. 548
Is it possibIe that some peopIe can see absoIute brightness, 549
and most peopIe, can't? 550
You know, the way a musician might have perfect pitch? 551
You know, that's a question for a doctor. 552
I'm CoIin BIakemore.I'm a professor at Oxford. 553
Or a scientist that speciaIises in human vision. 554
And I've spent most of my career studying vision and the functions of the brain. 555
Is Vermeer maybe some sort of a savant 556
that's different from the rest of the human race? 557
What if someone said, 558
Maybe there's a savant who is so smart,that he couId figure that out. 559
WeII, he's not smart. I mean,he'd have to have a very strange retina. 560
Our retinas are made the way they're made. 561
The retina is an outgrowth of the brain. 562
It's a very compIicated structure in terms of its nervous organisation. 563
The signaIs go through a compIicated network, 564
severaI Iayers of different types of nerve ceIIs, 565
before they finaIIy get back to the Iast ceIIs in the chain 566
whose fibres make up the optic nerve. 567
The optic nerve has limited bandwidth,so the signals have to be compressed. 568
One thing we lose in that compression 569
is the ability to record absolute brightness the way a light metre can. 570
When we see two values side by side,it's easy to compare them. 571
But when we split them,that ability goes away. 572
There just isn't any mechanism in the human nervous system 573
to turn the eye into a Iight metre. 574
And this is a very cIever trick for reducing information, 575
but it's a disaster if you reaIIy want to know about the appearance of the scene 576
because you just can't do it with your brain. 577
Look at the light on the back wall of The Music Lesson. 578
Every subtlety of brightness is recorded with absolute photographic precision. 579
The unaided human eye is not equipped to do that. 580
But if Vermeer used something like Tim's device, 581
the painting becomes possible. 582
The Queen of England owns Vermeer's Music Lesson 583
and she has it there in Buckingham Palace. 584
We thought since we were in England,we'd stop by the palace and check it out. 585
But the Queen said no.So we shot a whole tirade against the Queen. 586
But then... 587
WeII, I just came out of that buiIding. 588
That's where the painting is,Buckingham PaIace. 589
The day before Tim returned home,the Queen changed her Royal mind. 590
She granted Tim a private audience with The Music Lesson. 591
He had 30 minutes to study the painting. 592
The deal was, he could only record the experience in his head, 593
no photography allowed. 594
And it was a great 30 minutes. 595
The painting is amazing. 596
It's very different than I thought it wouId be. 597
The reproductions don't do it any justice at aII. 598
The coIours are more muted. 599
It's sIightIy darker,it's got a kind of an overaII bIuish cast. 600
But the astounding thing is the amount of detaiI. 601
I put on my magnifying binocuIars 602
and Iooked at the virginaIs, and every stroke 603
of that decoration is there. 604
The Persian carpet,you can see the individuaI knots. 605
The amount of devotion, or dedication,or obsession 606
to get that amount of detaiI 607
that just makes a generaI impression on the viewer, 608
but must have taken months of hard work. 609
I don't know if I can even come cIose. 610
When Tim got back to San Antonio,he was in trouble. 611
When he looked directly at the virginals, 612
he could see the intricate pattern of interlocking seahorses that Vermeer painted. 613
When he looked at the projection in his camera obscura, 614
all those delicate little lines were too fuzzy and dim to paint. 615
lt was a deal-killer. 616
l had visions of a failed experiment. 617
Tim knew there was something he was missing. 618
He experimented with increasingly complex arrangements of lenses and mirrors. 619
But nothing worked. 620
Then Tim had an inspiration. 621
He held a mirror against the wall where the image was being projected. 622
Now he could see a small circle of the room sharp and clear 623
and hundreds of times brighter. 624
By tilting the mirror around, he could see any part of the room he needed to paint. 625
Then he realised if he just replaced the flat mirror with a concave mirror, 626
like a shaving mirror, 627
he could make the bright circle much larger. 628
So I reaIised that if I couId have an image that bright, 629
I didn't have to have this darkroom, 630
I couId paint in dayIight,which is a huge, huge breakthrough. 631
Tim started in the dark room. 632
But the room is gone. 633
The back wall is a concave mirror. 634
All that's left of the traditional camera obscura is the lens. 635
Tim had invented a new optical instrument or, perhaps, rediscovered a lost one. 636
ln it, he could see well enough to attempt Vermeer's level of detail. 637
He had his room. He had his machine. 638
He was now ready to paint. 639
Oh, boy. 640
Boy, you know, I'm not trying to make this Iook Iike a Vermeer, 641
but it reaIIy Iooks Iike a Vermeer. 642
I was cIeaning up,and getting ready to put my paIette away, 643
caII it a day's work,and I Iooked up at the monitor. 644
I thought, ''Man, that camera got pointed in the wrong direction, it's pointed at the room. 645
How did that happen? 646
And that's the thought that went through my head for just a coupIe miIIiseconds 647
before I reaIised,'No, I'm Iooking at the painting.' 648
And it was just kind of Iike a... 649
You know, this project is a Iot Iike watching paint dry. 650
l can paint the costumes by putting them on mannequins. 651
But to paint faces and hands,l need to use people. 652
l do everything l can to help them hold still. 653
lt sort of works. 654
My daughter CIaire is home for a month from coIIege. 655
And it's time to paint the girl, 656
so I put two and two together,and used CIaire. 657
Her two sisters, are also in town,Luren and Natalie. 658
So they worked on fitting the costume and doing her hair 659
so that it looks like the girl in the picture. 660
When they got aII that on,she was a dead ringer for the IittIe Dutch girI. 661
With that completed,we put her in the head clamp, 662
and positioned her just right. 663
Few students have ever been happier to go back to school. 664
I may repaint that. 665
Excuse me a second.The wind's trying to bIow my shade down. 666
I thought you were having a ghost visitation. 667
Fucker! 668
Piece of shit. 669
We're gonna have to go to pIan B here. 670
The frame that has my window,and my shades and stuff, it came Ioose 671
and it feII over and I think everything's okay. 672
AII right. 673
I tend to buiId things untiI they're just bareIy good enough. 674
And sometimes that enveIope gets exceeded. 675
So if anything falls askew,your painting's in no danger, is that correct? 676
No, I wouIdn't say that. 677
-Okay. -But, you know, I can aIways start over. 678
Another interesting thing happened. 679
What I noticed whiIe I was Iooking at this, 680
I can see the straight Iines of the seahorse there, 681
and I can see the straight Iines that I've ruIed aIready on the canvas, 682
the framework of the virginaIs. 683
AII those are perfectIy straight Iines because I Iaid 'em out with a straight edge 684
before I painted them. 685
WeII, when I am trying to aIign this very cIose now, within a tiny fraction, 686
I can see that this straight Iine isn't quite straight 687
in the refIection. 688
It's ever so sIightIy curved. 689
ProbabIy not enough to throw me off now that I'm aware of it, 690
but if I had just IiteraIIy painted that seahorse pattern, 691
it wouId have ended up curved Iike this. 692
And, so, I don't know why, but I went over and I picked up the Vermeer print. 693
And I go,WeII, obviousIy Vermeer had no troubIe 694
painting those Iines straight. 695
And then, I heId the painting sideways Iike this 696
and I'm Iooking down these straight Iines. 697
And there's something reaIIy crazy about this. 698
The top and the bottom of the virginaIs are absoIuteIy straight. 699
Because when I Iook at it down here at an angIe, 700
I can see that it's a straight Iine. 701
The seahorse motif is curved. 702
It goes Iike this. 703
You can't reaIIy teII untiI you Iook at it 704
right down those Iines, but... 705
There is a curvature in there. 706
And there's reaIIy no IogicaI expIanation for that 707
unIess he was using something Iike this. 708
Tim caIIs that bend in the seahorse pattern the 'seahorse smiIe.' 709
It's a fIaw in Vermeer's painting. 710
A mistake that nobody noticed for 350 years,and then Tim aImost made the same mistake. 711
Tim is not Iooking for something that wiII dupIicate Vermeer's mistake. 712
You know,he doesn't know Vermeer's mistake is there. 713
That's either a remarkabIe coincidence 714
or Vermeer was using Tim's machine,or something very much Iike Tim's machine 715
to do his painting. 716
As Hockney said, paintings are documents, 717
and here's a IittIe bit of evidence. 718
Today I painted the seahorse motif. 719
It was a Iot of work. I couIdn't reaIIy sit here for more than 15, 20 minutes at a time. 720
Your back just gets extremeIy tense. 721
I tried to sit in the most reIaxed position I couId find, which is Iike this. 722
It's just reaIIy nerve-wracking, meticuIous,demanding work. 723
I'm not Iooking forward to doing the rest of the instrument, 724
but at Ieast I know it's doabIe. 725
What I painted today is maybe, I expect 726
wiII turn out to be the hardest part of the painting, physicaIIy, to do. 727
Man. 728
WeII, yeah this is going to be short because it's about 40 degrees in here. 729
So KarI and I came in here this morning,and Iooked at each other, Iike, 730
'No.' You know,it's reaIIy coId in here. 731
So I go, ''Wait, I've got this heater in the garage that I never assembIed. 732
I got it for Christmas a few years ago,it's one of those patio heaters. 733
So, KarI said,'Hey, I'II put it together, Iet's go get it.' 734
So we went and got it, and put it together,it's over there. 735
And fired it up and it worked great.It's nice and toasty, you know? 736
KarI was sittin' over there with his computer, 737
and I said, 'Hey, Iook up on there to see if it's safe to use these indoors.' 738
And KarI Iooks up and says, 739
'Yeah, you know it says here it's absoIuteIy not safe to use indoors.' 740
And I said,'Okay. WeII, Iet's just run it 741
and we'II be carefuI, okay? 742
So if we notice any symptoms of carbon monoxide poisoning, you know, 743
we'II shut it off. 744
So I start painting, and I actuaIIy painted an eIephant on The Music Lesson. 745
I don't know why I put it there,but it seemed Iike a good idea at the time. 746
KarI actuaIIy, he put his head down, 747
and he said, 'I need a nap.' 748
I said,'What did you say?'He said, 'I need a nap.' 749
I said,'Okay, Iet's Ieave right now.' 750
'Let's shut this thing off and go get Iunch.' 751
And on the way to Iunch, driving to Iunch, 752
everything sort of cIeared up again,you know, we were in a fog. 753
So anyway, that was a bad idea. 754
It was kind of a weird day. 755
I came in and started painting this Iower cushion, 756
and sort of a wave of revulsion swept over me. 757
l just wanted to do anything in the world but sit here and paint for some reason. 758
I don't know, just one of those things. 759
But I am pretty much ready for this painting to be finished. 760
If we weren't making a fiIm, wouId I quit? 761
Yeah, I definiteIy wouId. Yeah.I'd find something eIse to do right now. 762
WeII, yesterday when I was painting this chair, I was aImost 763
repuIsed by it. 764
I think maybe subconsciousIy I knew that it was wrong. 765
And it just didn't Iook Iike it beIonged in the painting to me, 766
and I couIdn't put my finger on the reason why. 767
And as I was trying to get to sIeep Iast night, 768
I was just sort of Iaying there and I was visuaIizing that chair 769
and I couId see it in my mind. 770
And I go,'You know, that's just the wrong bIue. 771
1 'l should darken the legs. ' 772
The top of the chair can't possibly be tilted to the left. 773
lt's like l'm seeing it and that can't possibly be right. 774
I realised that I had bumped the lens out of position 775
and that's why the chair's perspective was wrong. 776
It was totaIIy a subconscious thing. 777
Maybe I do have an inner artist that knew that was wrong. 778
I thought that the rug wouId be a IittIe more free-form painting. 779
But this rug is cIose enough to the opticaI equipment here 780
that I can clearly see all those little stitches. 781
And since I can see that, and since my ruIe is'paint what you see in the mirror,' 782
if I want to get that kind of detaiI, 783
I'm gonna have to sort of make Iike the harpsichord here 784
and just go for the detaiI. 785
So, another day, more dots. 786
Ditto yesterday. 787
Just painting more dots. 788
You know, it gets oId painting this carpet. 789
Oh, my God. 790
We're on. 791
O kay, so I've been franticaIIy running around here, 792
setting up Iights. 793
And it shows. 794
Today is the denouement, of sorts.
The varnish job. 796
For the last several months l've been promising myself 797
that all would be better when the varnish went on. 798
Because as the paint dries,it gets light, it gets chalky, it desaturates. 799
l've been very anxious to do this. 800
l went along slowly with a small brush and finally l just grabbed a giant brush, 801
sloshed it in the varnish and just started going to town. 802
And everywhere l touched was magic. 803
lt's pretty astounding. 804
WeII, you know, today... 805
Today's the day I've been waiting for. 806
I'm sorry. 807
I can't beIieve it's finished. 808
We took Tim's painting back to England to show Hockney and Steadman. 809
WeII, that's it. 810
So, you know, it's my first ambitious attempt at oiI painting, 811
and that's kind of part of the experiment,that I'm not a painter, 812
but I was trying to show the power of the concept. 813
Yeah. 814
This is terrific, I must say. 815
We noticed this when we were doing our Iens experiments. 816
We noticed that especiaIIy on these kind of cIoths, 817
on the projection you saw every weave 818
that you couIdn't in the reaI one,and you get that in Vermeer. 819
Now that's very, very effective.Anybody Iooking at this... 820
-I think this is better than Vermeer. -Better than Vermeer? 821
You do feeI the weave of the carpet. 822
Yeah, you reaIIy do. 823
It Iooks actuaIIy wooIIy, doesn't it? 824
Amazing, actuaIIy. 825
It had to be something simiIar, it had to be. 826
I mean, there's no doubt that you've proved one thing, Tim, 827
that you can paint a painting of this degree of detaiI and precision in... 828
WeII, it's not exactIy a camera obscura,but it's an opticaI machine. 829
And that's reaIIy what I set out to prove,is that it couId have been done that way. 830
Sure. I mean there's no doubt about that. 831
There's no way that it proves that Vermeer did. 832
That's the second question obviousIy, yes.Did Vermeer work that way? 833
Yeah, but it makes you rather convinced that's what he did. 834
I'm getting a IittIe more convinced aII the time. 835
I wouId say I'm about 90% there. 836
But, you know,if there was some historicaI record... 837
I mean, the idea that a painting isn't a historicaI record 838
is from Iiterary peopIe who seem to just not Iook at pictures and just read texts. 839
This is a document in itseIf. 840
I know peopIe are going on about documents. 841
Paintings and drawings are documents,they teII you a great deaI. 842
You've made a document that's proving something, it is. 843
It's fascinating. 844
I mean, you set out to do some research. 845
I think you've succeeded and, weII,you've shown it's possibIe to do it. 846
-As I say, if you've recorded it very weII... -Yeah, yeah. 847
I think it might disturb quite a Iot of peopIe. 848
-I certainIy hope so. -Which is fine, that's fine. Why not? 849
My friend Tim painted a Vermeer. 850
ln a warehouse, in San Antonio. 851
He painted a Vermeer. 852
And is Tim an artist, or is Tim an inventor? 853
l think the problem is not trying to pick one of those two for Tim to be, 854
but the problem is that we have that distinction. 855
What Tim has done is given us an image of Vermeer 856
as a man who is much more real,and in that way much more amazing. 857
l mean, unfathomable genius doesn't really mean anything. 858
Now he's a fathomable genius.
lf there's any great merit in this picture as a work of art, it's Vermeer's. 860
lt's Vermeer's composition and it's Vermeer's invention. 861
lt's just been forgotten for 350 years.