Re: VMs: Drawing circles

[Nick Pelling <incoming@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Larry,

At 17:32 06/08/2003 -0400, Larry Roux wrote:
> Also, by the 1430s artists were using projected light with a lens to trace 
> the basic shapes of images for paintings which they then painted in.   For 
> instance, a person could stand outside and a lens would focus the image 
> onto a canvas which would then be traced (the image was upside down...but 
> a flip of the canvas corrected that - except left/right was also reversed).

I don't think this accurately represents David Hockney's (somewhat 
polemical) theory on this: AFAIK, the kind of camera obscura thought to 
have been occasionally used in the 15th Century didn't involve lenses - 
those came somewhat later in the 16th Century with Della Porta, IIRC.

If you search for "camera obscura" and "history", you'll get numerous hits, 
like:-
http://www.historiccamera.com/cgi-bin/librarium/pm.cgi?action=display&login=camera_obscura

> People were far more advanced back in the middle ages than most people think.

Strictly speaking, we're talking "early modern" here, I think. :-)  But 
yes, I'm forever saying how smart those Quattrocento humanists were. ;-)

Cheers, .....Nick Pelling..... 


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