Reflections of Reality in Jan van Eyck and Robert Campin

There has been considerable debate about the perspectival/optical bases of the naturalism pioneered by Robert Campin and Jan van Eyck. Their paintings feature brilliantly rendered convex mirrors, which have been the subject of much comment, especially iconographical. David Hockney has recently argued that the Netherlandish painters exploited the image-forming capacities of concave mirrors. However, the secrets of the images within the painted mirrors have yet to be revealed. By means of novel, rigorous techniques to analyze the geometric accuracy of the mirrors, unexpected findings emerge, which radically affect our perception of the way in which the paintings have been generated. The authors focus on Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait, and the Heinrich von Werl Triptych, here reattributed to Robert Campin. The accuracy of the images in the convex mirrors depicted in these paintings is assessed by applying mathematical techniques drawn from computer vision. The proposed algorithms also allow the viewer to …