THE HISTORY OF THE FIRST
It was difficult to transfer a box-shaped tool used for entertainment or drawing, which is called a camera obscura, which translates to "dark room" or "dark chamber" in Latin. It shows an inverted, reversed image on one side while allowing light to enter through a tiny hole on the other, much like a pinhole camera.
As the name implies, a darkened room was used for numerous historical camera obscura investigations. For the projected image to be clear, its surrounds must be reasonably dark. The pupil, a biconvex lens for refracting light, and the retina, the surface where the picture is created, are all features of the human eye that are similar to those of the camera obscura.
Real-life image onto a sheet of paper or a similar flat surface before the development of the photographic camera. Leonardo da Vinci, a Renaissance artist and inventor, was the first to propose a device that would make painting in perfect perspective much simpler. This device would subsequently be known as a camera obscura. Camera obscura provides a shortcut to painstakingly calculating the lengths and angles of a subject or scene. Artists could now easily trace forms and lines from a projected image onto their canvas thanks to this contentious invention.
Large, early camera obscuras were frequently set up within tents or even whole rooms. Later, handheld models constructed from wooden boxes frequently had lenses in place of pinholes, enabling users to change the focus. Additionally, some portable box camera obscuras had an inclined mirror that made it possible to project the image upwards.
The camera obscura notion was first documented in writing around the fifth century BC. The image in a camera obscura is upside down because light rays move in straight lines from their source, according to research by the Chinese philosopher Mo Ti (470–390 BCE), often called Mozi, who created Mohism. The Greek philosopher Aristotle observed in the fourth century that sunlight projected an image of solar eclipses onto the ground through the spaces between leaves.
Anthemius of Tralles, a Greek mathematician and co-architect of the Hagia Sophia in the sixth century, also saw the occurrence. He conducted his tests using a kind of camera obscura. Al-Kindi, an Arab philosopher, mathematician, physician, and musician, also experimented with light and a pinhole in the ninth century.
Leonardo da Vinci, who was familiar with these early investigations, gave the first precise description of the camera obscura in Codex Atlanticus (1502), a 12-volume bound collection of his writings and drawings in which he also discussed other innovations like musical instruments and flying machines.
He wrote (translated from Latin); "If the facade of a building, or a place, or a landscape is illuminated by the sun and a small hole is drilled in the wall of a room in a building facing this, which is not directly lighted by the sun, then all objects illuminated by the sun will send their images through this aperture and will appear, upside down, on the wall facing the hole. You will catch these pictures on a piece of white paper, which is placed vertically in the room not far from that opening, and you will see all the above-mentioned objects on this paper in their natural shapes or colours, but they will appear smaller and upside down, on account of the crossing of the rays at that aperture. If these pictures originate from a place that is illuminated by the sun, they will appear colored on the paper exactly as they are. The paper should be very thin and must be viewed from the back."
Other painters started to recognise the possibilities of the camera obscura as a drawing tool in the fifteenth century. However, a lot of people thought the tracing method was cheating; therefore, utilising the device caused controversy.
Art historians have proposed that the 17th-century Dutch master Johannes Vermeer employed the camera obscura as a tool to produce his paintings, despite the lack of verifiable proof to support this theory. Studies of the actual artworks serve as the foundation for the theory. There are no indications beneath the surface of his paintings that he altered his plans as he was painting. Rather, Vermeer drew a dark outline of the scene before painting it, maybe from a projected vision.
American artist Joseph Pennell was the first to openly suggest that Vermeer might have utilised a camera obscura. In 1891, he observed that, like in a photograph, the guy in the front of Vermeer's Officer and Laughing Girl (1657) was almost twice as big as the girl he sat facing.
Vermeer's skill shouldn't be undervalued even if he used the camera obscura to create photographic perspective. According to Jane Jelley, the author and painter of Traces of Vermeer (2017), "The image from the camera obscura is only a projection." It takes time, expertise, and discernment to capture and translate this to canvas, and the final result can only ever be a step in the painting process. Although we will never know if Vermeer operated in this manner, we must keep in mind that this is neither a thoughtless procedure nor a quick fix for success.