Word: obscura
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...next eight years, portrait painting absorbed most of Porter's energies. Attacking portraiture with his customary canny vigor, Porter tried to speed up the normally tedious process and devised a simply constructed portable camera obscura. By projecting the subject's facial outline onto paper, Porter could, in 15 minutes, trace a likeness, fill in the features, and collect...
...Bellotto's crystalline and chillingly immobile visions of Warsaw's palaces, churches and streets, crowded with 18th century Poles of every class, that the city's postwar reconstructionists turned for aid in rebuilding dozens of bombed-out structures. "Bellotto's use of the camera obscura made him able to achieve complete precision of proportions," points out Ministry of Culture Engineer Henryk Wasowicz. "The technique yielded pictures as precise as any technical drawing...
...During the early 16th century reign of Sigismund I, Italian Renaissance artists were at work in Poland. Even two centuries later, the most famous master in the country bore the name of Bernardo Bellotto, a nephew of Canaletto. A court painter from 1767 to 1780, he used a camera obscura to obtain perfect perspectives for his city scapes. After the destruction of Warsaw during World War II, his paintings were so accurate that they were used to reconstruct demolished monuments and buildings. The horn of the Wieliczka salt miners, made in 1534 from a bison that roamed Central Europe, celebrates...
...like a vision from a nightmare. Yet Vermeer was very much a man of his time. Geometry was the cornerstone of 17th century scientific investigation; well aware of it, Vermeer laid out his paintings in a wizardly arrangement of planes, lines, cubes and cones. He also used the camera obscura, a forerunner of photography. In all probability, he was introduced to it by his fellow townsman Anton van Leeuwenhoek, inventor of a microscope, pioneer in optical research, and thought by some critics to be the young scholar portrayed in The Astronomer...
With Camera Obscura. The Daniells landed in Calcutta in 1786. spent two years making sketches of the city for a series of aquatints. The pictures were published back in England with such success that the artists decided to penetrate into upper India on "guiltless spoliations'' of more picturesque material. Laden with tents, palanquins, great stocks of paper, canvas, paints, pencils, a camera obscura (for sketching views projected through a lens) and a "perambulator" (for measuring their mileage), the Daniells and a retinue of servants set out by boat to sketch Mother India. So adventurous and rewarding were their...