‘Rembrandt used cutting edge optics for self-portraits’

Dutch artist Rembrandt Harmen-szoon van Rijn, one of the greatest painters and printmakers in European art, and many other of the Old Masters may have used cutting-edge optics to draw self-portraits, new research suggests.

“Artist David Hockn-ey, and a physicist, Charles Falco, first put forward the idea that the Old Masters may have used optics to help with realism and accuracy in the year 2000,” said Francis O’Neill, an independent researc-her based in UK.

“However, this was met with some scepticism, with the realism shown in some self-portraits used as an argument that these artists would not need optics for other wor-ks,” said O’Neill, one of the authors of the study published in the Journal of Optics.

Researchers showed that using technology available to 17th century artists, it is possible to project a self-portrait image onto a surface that the artist could mark or trace.

Five setups are proposed by the authors — one using solely a concave mirror, and three using a combination of a flat and a concave mirror, and one using two flat mirrors and a lens.

The researchers also analysed the works of Rembrandt, an artist well-known for his highly-detailed self-portraits.

“He made etchings and even a couple of painted self-portraits on copper, a surface upon which projections can be seen very clearly,” said O’Neill.