2/5/2025 | 9:20 AM - 10:30 AM | Grand Peninsula B

Symmetry and asymmetry in historical "Lotto carpets" and their relevance to claims the artist used projection optics

Author(s)

Evan Laksono | Stanford University

Abstract

In 2000, the celebrated British-American artist David Hockney claimed that some Western artists, as early as 1430, secretly used optical devices during the execution of their works (a quarter millennium earlier than scholars have secure evidence of such praxis).  The central evidence or " Rosetta Stone" put forth by Hockney and his collaborator Charles Falco concerns geometric anomalies in the carpet design in Lorenzo Lotto's Husband and wife, which these proponents claim are "optical" effects arising when the artist refocused a secret optical projector.  The theory's proponents uncritically assume that the intrinsic shape of the design in the carpet in Lotto\rq s studio was highly symmetric, and ascribe the asymmetries in the painting to the artist tracing two "exposures" with different centers of projection, altered to overcome the purported projector's depth of field.  We test the proponents' implicit assumption that the inherent design in the carpet was highly symmetric by quantifying the symmetry and asymmetry in forty-one hand-made "Lotto carpets."  We find that the distribution of asymmetry is several times greater than that implicitly assumed by Hockney and Falco.  We conclude, in the parlance of statistics, that Hockney and Falco are "fitting noise" and thus that their claims that Lotto used optics are invalid.  These technical results comport with contextual and historical evidence rejecting the optical claim for this painting, such as the lack of documentary evidence in Lotto's personal notebook or Libro di spese, among other facts.