Leon Battista Alberti made several references to miracoli della
pittura (miracles of painting) in two of his early works, Vita
(Life) and De Pictura (On Painting). After extensive research,
author Jim Egan has concluded that these "miracles of painting"
were the amazing full-detail and full-color images seen in a camera
obscura. In Latin, camera obscura means "dark room." In a dark room
with one small hole, the image of what's outside appears projected
on the interior wall upside-down and reversed left-to-right. The
room can be a people-sized room or a small box, like a pinhole
camera. Nowadays, with slide shows, movies, TV, and computers,
we're quite accustomed to seeing projected images. But over 575
years ago, back in the 1430s, a camera obscura image would have
blown the socks off people. However, there was a down side: this
was risky business. Creating full-color, full-motion, magical
images inside a dark room might be considered heretical. You might
find yourself on the wrong side of a barbecue. If you're so excited
that you must share your knowledge, there's a solution: write about
it cryptically. Only those "in-the-know" will catch your gist.
That's what Egan thinks Alberti did. Alberti, whose books On
Painting and On Architecture revolutionized these two fields, has
been explored extensively by art historians for years. Surely they
saw that Alberti was talking about a camera obscura. But no. Dozens
of the top art historians of the 20th century write that Alberti's
description of his "small box" was definitely not a reference to a
camera obscura. Instead, they think it was a "show box," a small
dark box with a small hole through which you viewed a picture,
which was painted on glass and backlit to make it luminous, like a
photographic slide. Who is Jim Egan to challenge great art
historians like Kenneth Clark, Helmut Gernsheim, Samuel Edgerton,
Anthony Grafton, and Robert Tavernor? For 40 years, Egan has been
an in-the-trenches guy: a professional photographer, spending hours
viewing upside-down images under the dark cloth of 4x5 and 8x10
view cameras. He has built dozens of pinhole cameras, camera
obscura rooms, and even a camera obscura building. Plus, he's
written ten books involving Renaissance optics, mathematics and
architecture. How did the art historians get it wrong? The short
answer is: "lost in translation" and "follow the leader." Egan
thinks Alberti not only had a camera, but that he also had a lens
to sharpen the image. And that Alberti had another camera obscura,
which was a "Lucy" machine, used to enlarge and reduce artwork. And
that Alberti hid clues expressing his understanding that "the eye
is a camera obscura" in the design of his "Winged Eye" symbol and
his bronze self-portrait plaque (both shown on the front cover).
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