In the previous post, I mentioned that Canaletto often used a camera obscura as an aid to creating his drawings and paintings. Let's discuss what that is...
The principle of the camera obscura
has been known since ancient Greek and Chinese time, but it became
popular during the Renaissance of the 1500s. The literal translation of
the Latin term is dark room (camera for "room", obscura for "dark").
It
works like this: You are in a very dark room on a very sunny day. Cut
a small hole in a window cover and look at the opposite wall. What
do you see? Magic! There in
full color will be a view of outside the window upside
down! This magic is explained by a simple law of the physical
world. Light travels in a straight line and when some of the rays
reflected
from a bright subject pass through a small hole in thin material
they
do not scatter but form an upside down image on a flat
surface parallel to the hole. With mirrors positioned inside
the room the image could be flipped 180 degrees and reflected
right-size-up onto a surface for tracing onto a canvas.
In the image above you can see how an artist would use the camera obscura to help create his painting. The reflected image inside the camera obscura not only miniaturizes the scene reflected, but it also intensifies color, and highlights and increases the contrast of light and dark areas. The image could then be traced to create an accurate sketch and be transformed into a painting.
In the mid-17th century the portable camera obscura was developed and became the basis of the photographic camera.
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This post was originally published in my blog Tutti Capolavori on July 6, 2012.
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