Computer analysis of a 17th-century painting shows that the artist did not, as has been claimed, use optical devices to project a perfect image of the scene onto his canvas. The researcher behind the analysis believes his findings undermine many aspects of a theory recently put forward by the painter David Hockney. In his 2001 book Secret Knowledge, Hockney set out to show that the heightened realism of many Renaissance paintings was achieved by projecting images of the subject onto the canvas, which the artists then traced. This would have required artists to use a device such as a camera obscura.
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