Both 17th-century artist Vermeer and scientist van Leeuwenhoek made pioneering use of optics. A joint biography shows how they changed our world view
- Book information
- Eye of the Beholder: Johannes Vermeer, Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, and the reinvention of seeing by Laura J. Snyder
- Published by: W. W. Norton
- Price: $27.95/£16.99
IN THE spring of 1694, the Royal Society of London received a letter from Antoni van Leeuwenhoek describing an experiment. Dissecting the eye of a dragonfly and pinning the cornea in front of a powerful lens, van Leeuwenhoek looked out on his street and spied the church steeple multiplied myriad times.
Van Leeuwenhoek was no stranger to the Royal Society. From his home in Delft, the self-taught scientist had dispatched regular accounts of his optical experiments since 1673, when he carried out the first observations of microbes through a home-made microscope.
From dental plaque to blood cells to sperm, nothing was off-limits. Yet what most interested van Leeuwenhoek, says Laura J. Snyder in Eye of the Beholder, was "visual perception itself". As it happens, van Leeuwenhoek had a neighbour with similar interests in visual perception and optics. Living just across Delft's Market Square was the artist Johannes Vermeer, who used observation through lenses to craft his paintings.
There's no evidence that the two knew each other, but physical proximity and many common friends make them irresistible subjects for a joint biography. Snyder makes spectacular use of this historical coincidence. As in her previous masterwork, The Philosophical Breakfast Club, she ingeniously explores the minutiae of her subjects' lives to reveal sweeping changes in how their world was understood – ones that still resonate today.
When Vermeer and van Leeuwenhoek were born, just a week apart, in 1632, Delft was renowned for the quality of its lens glass. Although lenses were mainly used in eyeglasses, they were increasingly being incorporated into tools for scientists and artists. The telescope was invented around 1600; within a decade it had been transformed into a scientific instrument by Galileo, who also developed some of the earliest microscopes by adapting telescopes to study insects.
For artists in the 17th century, composition was frequently augmented by concave lenses, which condensed imagery for easier observation, and by convex lenses, which projected scenery on to canvas for more realistic perspectives. That set-up, also used by scientists to observe eclipses, was known as a camera obscura.
According to Snyder, Vermeer avidly experimented with all these aids, exploring "the way the world appears to us through lenses as a way of understanding visual perception". Initially his focus was on simple optical effects, such as the way that a concave lens distorts proportions.
Artificial eyes
Although there's no direct evidence that Vermeer used the camera obscura, Snyder speculates that he began to do so in the early 1660s, and was exhilarated by it. She bases her argument – convincingly – on close visual analysis of his paintings. Moreover, she attributes many of his works' inventive qualities to his experience with it.
One example is the way Vermeer represented shadows. Hues hidden from sight in the darkness of a room become visible when projected on to a screen. By following what the camera obscura showed, Vermeer was able to increase the realism of his work.
Vermeer "used the camera obscura... to experiment with light, to investigate and discover its optical properties", Snyder writes, deftly aligning the artist with his Delft neighbour. "Both... were employing optical instruments as 'artificial eyes' to supplement the natural organs."
Van Leeuwenhoek's mastery of lens-making and microscopy are as extraordinary in their own way as Vermeer's mastery of painting. Developing his own, mostly secret techniques, he built some 500 single-lens microscopes capable of magnifying objects as much as 450-fold, and performed micro-dissections that would be challenging even today. Nobody approached his technical capability, let alone patience. But as Snyder points out, his greatest achievement was interpretive.
Biology in the 17th century was totally unprepared for the sight of microbes, or even the tails on sperm. To make these discoveries, van Leeuwenhoek "needed to train himself to see what was there, not what he expected to find", Snyder writes.
And that required a critical understanding of perception: like seeing the colour in shadows, seeing the tails on sperm required insight into sight, an awareness that observation isn't passive.
Snyder sometimes overreaches in her effort to fit this notion to van Leeuwenhoek's every dissection and Vermeer's every brushstroke. But that doesn't diminish her larger argument that active observation fundamentally changed art and science in the 17th century, and is "the most radical influence of the seventeenth century on our time".
How radical? Snyder only hints at the reverberations, mentioning the vast amount of interpretation needed to "see" what our new radio telescopes and electron microscopes can reveal about the unknown universe.
While she doesn't discuss how data analysis and visualisation may be distorted by our preconceived ideas, there is clearly much we can learn from Vermeer and van Leeuwenhoek. Observing how they observed, we are primed to scrutinise our own beliefs.
Leader: "Who said the camera never lies?"
This article appeared in print under the headline "Through a glass, clearly"
Jonathon Keats is an experimental philosopher and artist
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