Caravaggio used it in his famous works

Mar 10, 2009 15:57 GMT  ·  By

The famous Italian painter Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio lived between September 29th, 1571 and July 18th, 1610, and exercised his profession in Rome, Naples, Malta and Sicily. He is currently credited as being the first painter to have everused a dark room and special lighting in order to be able to paint exquisite images of his models. And while some claim that these ideas have no ground, others strongly support  them, bringing numerous arguments in their favor.

Most famous for his genius use of a painting technique known as chiaroscuro (extensive shadows and lights), Caravaggio is now believed to have been among the first to use the principle of a dark room, which was explained before him by Leonardo da Vinci.

The painter, who was notoriously hard to get along with, had numerous friends who were physicists and especially opticians. According to historical documents, it was such a friend, namely physicist Giovanni Battista Della Porta, who introduced the painter to the idea of using the dark room for his artistic compositions.

Caravaggio master and art study professor Roberta Lapucci, who is currently a professor at the famous Studio Art Centers International in the Tuscan capital of Florence, believes that the painter used a sealed chamber for his drawings, where he would ask his models to hold still and then allow light to come through a single hole in the roof.

It would then be redirected via a mirror and other optical instruments to the canvas, where photosensitive substances would be affected. The painter would, consequently cover the design with ample brush strokes and fill in the gaps, Lapucci tells AFP.

“There is lots of proof, notably the fact that Caravaggio never made preliminary sketches. So it is plausible that he used these 'projections' to paint. An abnormal number of his subjects were left-handed. That could be explained by the fact that the image projected on the canvas was backwards,” she shares for the news agency. “This anomaly disappears in the artist's later works, a sign that the instruments he used were improving. Also thanks to technical progress, his paintings gain a lot in depth of field over the years.”

Answering critics who say that her claims take a swing at the artist's genius, the Italian expert considers that “His mastery of certain techniques before his time in no way diminishes his genius. To the contrary: clearly, you can't just project images on a canvas and copy them to become a Caravaggio!” As it turns out, the concept of photography was around a good two centuries before the first verified claims, even though Caravaggio used to work inside the “camera,” rather than operate it from the outside.