Did Johannes Vermeer Use the Camera Obscura or did he not?

There is a big question mark laying on Vermeer’s work is riling up scholars until today: Did Johannes Vermeer use the camera obscura for his paintings? We do not have any document supporting this notion, yet there are quite a few paintings such as” Officer and Laughing Girl” which enforce this idea.

A camera obscura is a optical device used for image projection and might have been known even in the late Renaissance. The Dutch masters are well known for their attention to detail, what gave way to debates on the extent in which they might have used the camera obscura. Here are the main arguments for what we know today:

The artists of the 17th century, including Vermeer ought to be familiar with the laws of proportion and that objects closer to the viewer appeared larger. Yet, this was more theory than practice as it was only the modern photography that made us used to this geometrical law. Any deviation from the common practice to in favor of mathematical laws would have been at least uncommon, if not revolutionary and being worth to mention. Thus, painters rather used to ignore these mathematical laws in favor of same sized figures in their paintings: Even though, when the figures are not even close to one another there was an instinctive tendency to compensate those differences and paint them rather equal in size. However, Vermeer’s officer is painted extraordinary big compared with the girl: his head being almost double in size compared to the girl. This is perfectly correct from a modern point of view and the extreme angle of the viewpoint, as we are used that closer objects appear bigger than others. For Vermeer’s time this was quite an extraordinary step.

Another indicator can be found in the painting “The Lace maker”, where the materials seem kind of unfocused, a typical effect for pictures produced by lenses, less common in paintings executed without visual aid. Charles Seymour, a scholar of the 20th Century, tried to reproduce the conditions under which Vermeer might have used the camera obscura found several similarities between the results he achieved and features, special to the paintings of Vermeer. The full research paper can be read at Jstor.org.

However, other academics challenged the notion that Vermeer used the Camera obscura, thriving the focus on the usage of color and light which itself should support rather the usage of visual aid. However, in their point of view Vermeer does not ignore shadows but just replaces them with color and contrast – in a strong opposition to chiaroscuro.A contemporary style Rembrandt’s paintings might be best known for. Another art critic put it this way: light, shadow, reflection and distance – Vermeer transforms everything in chromatic values. According to this point of view, the remarkable features of Vermeer’s paintings are not artifacts, but stylistic elements.

Nevertheless, even though none of the arguments above would be (on its own) a sufficient proof for the usage of visual aid, most scholars support today the notion that Vermeer did use the camera obscura. The sheer number of indicators specific for his art are way to numerous. The bid question of today seems rather to be to which extent Vermeer made use of the camera obscura.
It should be underlined, that the value of his wonderful paintings would nevertheless remain the same.