Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #70747 in Books
• Published on: 2006-09
• Binding: Paperback
• 328 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
David Hockney's brilliant Secret Knowledge is the fruit of his practical and historical investigation into how artists from the 15th century onward produced such vividly realistic drawings and paintings. Hockney's conclusions are simple but devastating. He argues that, "from the early 15th century many Western artists used optics--by which I mean mirrors and lenses (or a combination of the two)--to create living projections". The results are extraordinary. Secret Knowledge carefully explains how Masaccio, Van Eyck, Holbein, Caravaggio, Vermeer and Ingres all used optical aids, as it carefully takes apart the paintings and recreates the instruments and techniques used by artists from as early as the 1430s.

Hockney concedes that his opinions have been attacked by the mainstream art world that has complained that "for an artist to use optical aids would be 'cheating'; that somehow I was attacking the idea of innate genius". As a practising artist himself, his response is persuasive: "optics would have given artists a new tool with which to make images that were more immediate, and more powerful". Hockney concludes that this does not "diminish their achievements. For me, it makes them all the more astounding". Hockney's evidence is compelling and convincing, and brilliantly conveyed in this beautiful book, complete with details, foldouts and over 400 illustrations in sumptuous colour. Secret Knowledge also contains a collection of primary evidence detailing artist's use of optical devices, and Hockney's correspondence on the subject over the last two years. This book will revolutionise how we look at the art of the past. As Hockney himself suggests, "exciting times are ahead". --Jerry Brotton

Synopsis
"Secret Knowledge" created an international sensation when it was published in 2001. Now, Hockney takes his controversial thesis - that some of the masterpieces of Western art were created using optical devices - even further in light of new and exciting discoveries. In 32 new pages, he demonstrates how Renaissance artists used mirrors and lenses to help them develop chiaroscuro, perspective, and the arts of depicting three-dimensional space and forms. Stunning in its presentation and wide-ranging in its implications, "Secret Knowledge" remains the art book sensation of the new century.

Customer Reviews

A new perspective
A friend of my father's loaned this book to him, recommending it very highly. I picked it up when I was visiting my parents and became glued to it. I read it in one sitting because it is written and presented in a very digestible way, and the content is fascinating.

Whether you agree with Hockney's conclusions or not his thesis presents some very interesting ideas and he made me look at art in a slightly different way. I have a degree in Art History and it was great to have my perceptions challenged.

I particularly like the way that Hockney emphasised that artists had to make a living and were, in the final analysis, producing something that needed to meet specific client requirements - in a satisfactory period of time. It was a point that someone made many years ago about the variability in the quality of Shakespeare's plays - he and generations of other writers and painters had to make a living!

Hockney emphasises that even if artificial devices were used to reproduce details this does not detract from the sheer skill of the completed painting, or of the artistry of the original vision. You just have to look at the differences in style and technique to realize that even if special devices were used, the artist still controls the fabulous result.

Hockney makes interesting comparisons between the realistic portraiture of the pre-Impressionistic era and those that followed when formal ideals were abandoned in favour of creating a light-infused impression of someone and their background in paint. He makes it easy to understand why the Impressionists were so poorly regarded by the conventional art world when the artists first started exhibiting their works.

The quality of the main sections of the book are remarkably good - the reproduction of photographs of the paintings under discussion is excellent, and they are all the better for being printed on quality paper. The text is sufficiently large for most people to read without difficulty. It feels nice to handle.

The final section of the book, on ordinary matt pages, captures all the documentation that is mentioned in the text - including descriptions of different types of image rendering device, extracts from papers, and entire letters between Hockney and correspondents. It gives the preceding pages more substance.

Very enjoyable.

A long way from a complete answer.
As someone struggling to "unlock the secrets of the old masters" myself, I bought and read this book eagerly but was ultimately disappointed. Despite his protestations to the contrary, so much time is devoted to the explanation of excellence via the use of optic aids alone that one can't help feeling that Hockney himself believes that this is a major part of the answer. It's a sad reflection on the sheer degree of knowledge of artists training of the past that is now lost to us, in my opinion, that Hockneys ideas have been so enthusiastically accepted.
First of all, if you think that you can paint a great portrait in the style of Raphael, da Vinci, Ingres or even Bouguereau (apparently singled out for attack because the sea crashing over the model wasn't 'real' and therefore 'honest'!?), with the aid of a camera lucida and a bit of painting practice, then buy yourself the equipment and give it a try. Don't be surprised when the results are just as appalling as they were without these aids.
It's my view that no self-respecting Italian or Frenchman with even the tiniest awareness of their artistic past would write a book like this without feeling great shame. They would be far too aware of the immense amount of training - not to mention natural flair for painting and drawing identified in selection procedures for apprenticeships and later academies - endured by their great schools and great artists. Put quite simply, if Hockney genuinely wished to reveal the secrets of the past, he would have been far better off spending the "two years research" time completing, a 19thC drawing course. They're still available to buy (Charles Bargue and Jean-Leon Gerome's "Cour de Dessin" or the slightly earlier drawing course by Louis Delaistre).
Artists learned to draw faces from canons (eyes half way up the head, distance between eyes = one eye width, line of mouth one third of the way from nose to chin, etc, etc, etc) and anatomical knowledge to an incredibly realistic degree. So much so, that I'm personally convinced that many portraits by well known artists not only didn't use optical equipment, but also didn't even use a model! (look at George de la Tour's painting of the "Fortune Teller" and measure the distances on the face of the young woman with the headscarf - they correspond to the millimetre with the standard symmetry of canons of the face).
After this initial phase, they learned to draw by observation - first using sculptures (largely from antiquity), then later, life models. After a few years, any half decently trained artist could draw a convincingly realistic face practically with their eyes shut. Then, applying this knowledge to real sitters in real portraits, it's relatively easy to adapt (move the mouth up a bit, lengthen/shorten the nose etc. etc.) After all this drawing, they finally learned to do the same thing with paint.
When you become accustomed to scrutinizing enough great paintings, you quickly realise that each great painter has their own distinguishing traits. Some prefer different body shapes, different lengths of noses, faces taken from antiquity, stylized faces, 'tweaking' the canons to suit their personal preferences, the list is endless. If painters largely relied on standard optical equipment as Hockney suggests, then why should the fluidly drawn lines vary so greatly from artist to artist? If you put the elements together - extensive training & practice, natural flair and the idealism of the time - and add the artists personally preferred stylization, then you have a formula for reading and understanding great paintings.
That's not to say that optical instruments and aids weren't used (see Durer woodcut of a portrait artist at work from 1525)- more by some than others - but if it is presented as virtually the 'whole' answer to the greatness and skill of figurative and portrait painters of the last 500 years, then I'm afraid you might come to the conclusion that I have: that Hockney simply doesn't know or appreciate what he is looking at. Worse than that, one could become cynical and suspect that, with this book, Hockney is merely trying to justify the fact that modern artistic training is, by comparison, non-existent (hence, possibly the attack on William Bouguereau who is known not to have used any kind of optical aid in the production of his 800+ near perfect, life-sized figure paintings - just sheer hard work, good trainting, practice and a stunning natural aptitude).
Finally, as for the "predominance of lefthandedness" theory being proof of the use of such aids, as an observational painter myself, the answer is blindingly simple: you're in the studio painting, you need one of your figures to be holding an object - a glass, a sword, whatever. You want to use a real hand to get the foreshortening absolutely correct. What do you do? Do you hire a model? Wait for a friend to drop by? No! You set up a mirror and you use your OWN LEFT HAND while you're painting with your right! (the majority of artists being right handed of course). With your knowledge of canons of the body and anatomy, you can transform your hand into male/female, young/old etc. Not quite 'Eureka' is it?
Overall, I would recommend buying the book but only as a partial and distorted rediscovery of the lost techniques of the past. Similar in a way to 20th century improvements in medical surgery resulting from better scalpel design: it's true, but also kind of ignorant.

The Light Bulb Goes On As You Read This
This is a fascinating book. David Hockney will point out an odd proportion in a painting (all paintings etc are nicely illustrated)and explain how this, in his opinion, resulted from use of the camera obscura. I will have seen the painting in illustrations before, and even noticed the odd proportion before, but never wondered why a consummate painter would make such a silly mistake - a woman's arm that would hang past her knees, for example. But you read this book and the Light Bulb goes on - EUREKA! - that's how he'd paint something this goofy! Now, I do want to say that Hockney's explanation is not appreciated by many in the "art" world. The most strident critics are speaking largely from ego. The most reasonable will point out that a portrait painter would usually paint only the face "in person". The rest was painted from memory, sketches and written descriptions and this could lead to mistakes. However, the abundance of examples Hockney brings to the table, and the historical evidence showing that a camera obscura could have been available to the painters, leads me to side with David Hockney. This is a great read.