Scientists blamed Rembrandt "in cheating" when writing self-portraits

Rembrandt, and probably many other great painters of the Renaissance and Baroque periods, using sophisticated optical tricks to paint their self-portraits with almost photographic accuracy, say physicists in an article published in the Journal of Optics.

"The artist David Hockney and physicist Charles Falco first in 2000 put forward the idea that outstanding old-time artists could use optical technology to enhance the realism and accuracy of their self-portraits This idea was met with many of our colleagues with great skepticism -. They claimed that realism portraits and talent of their authors, by contrast, point out that such tricks they were not needed, "- said Francis O'Neill (Francis O'Neill) from Oxford (UK).

One of the main innovations of the Renaissance artists and more recent times was that they began to draw not only landscapes, still lifes and others, but also themselves, often "inserting" themselves in scenes of other films. Self-portraits of Rembrandt, Durer, Leonardo da Vinci and a high degree of realism and photographic become a role model for all modern painters.

O'Neill and his colleagues argue that the object of their admiration could be written not as honest as we all thought, to analyze the optical technologies that were available, and 16 guilds artists of the 17th century, and trying to construct from them a system that allows you to design an image of himself on the canvas.

In total, the authors have collected five of these "projections" of several sets of lenses can be used crooked mirrors and pinhole cameras, which in the theory of the artist in order to "see" themselves in the form of lines of light on the surface of the future picture. Analyzing how these reflections appeared on the canvas, the researchers came to the conclusion that at least Rembrandt used such devices.

"A lot of self-portraits of Rembrandt carved or written on a sheet of copper, on the surface on which the projection can be easily seen. His work is built on the technique of chiaroscuro, the contrast of light and shadow, which is also the basis for the work of all svetoproektorov. Moreover, in many self-portraits Rembrandt laughs and looks to the side, which was very difficult to see and write, if he had just looked in the mirror "- continues to O'Neill.

According to physics, there are other, more obvious and physical evidence "scam" - for example, many unusually large self-portraits of Rembrandt, his head is disproportionately large compared to other parts of the picture, and its proportions are usually distorted. Scientists have attributed this to the fact that the lens, which the artist used to increase projection image, distort it when printed on canvas.

According to O'Neill, Rembrandt was not the only artist who has used optical technology to write portraits and even "normal" pictures. Many other artists who have used the technique of chiaroscuro, according to the physicist, was also not entirely "clean the hands."