From the Library

“The earlier ones had been highly figurative; over time, however, the drawings followed de Koonig’s evolution away from his academic training and toward a somewhat more geometric way of rendering the shapes of the body. Years later, Juliet described how he worked during this period as he tried to puzzle out the figure. He would take a long time to finish a drawing. He would think a lot. It took him more than a week to draw my eyes. He wanted to draw them in the style of Leonardo, showing the outside of the eye as the inside. The part above the eye he wanted to draw without the skin around it. I remember him drawing on his knees.” (

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In seeking to explain the emergence of the remarkable art of the Renaissance the celebrated contemporary artist David Hockney came up with a bold and controversial theory. He suggested that Renaissance paintings looked realistic—possessing what he called the “optical look” because artists used lenses and mirrors to project images on the canvasses or similar surfaces and then trace or paint over the results. However, scientific analyses of these paintings, including the use of computer vision techniques …