BBC, David Hockney's Secret Knowledge [HD AI Upscaled]

David Hockney was seized by the desire to discover how artists of the past managed to represent the world around them with such precision and vividness.
For two years, he sacrificed his time as an artist to follow this mysterious trail, obsessively tracking down the hidden secrets of the old masters.

In the BBC-produced film, David Hockney shows how, four hundred years before the invention of photography, artists used simple cameras to capture realistic images. Hockney takes us to Florence, Bruges, Ghent and a specially designed setting in Hollywood to present his discoveries.

Now, for the first time, Hockney tells the story of his quest as it happened. He explains how he discovered piece after piece of scientific and visual evidence, each providing new revelations about the past. With his painter's eye, he examines major works of art history and reveals the truth about how artists such as Caravaggio, Velazquez, van Eyck, Holbein, Leonardo and Ingres used mirrors and lenses to help them create their famous masterpieces.

He compares van Eyck's "Ghent Altarpiece" (1432) to his own "Pearblossom Highway/" (1986), concluding that multiple viewpoints (very many windows) have a similar distance effect on a two-dimensional surface, as shows it a bird. ocular view, but that it is contradicted in the details. Hockney's photographic collage /"Pearblossom Highway/" consists of approximately 750 individual chromogenic prints and, it is historically known, that van Eyck made numerous drawings of various elements and then "drawn" the entire painting to from details. Hockney also convincingly demonstrates how Brunelleschi, the first architect to use mathematical perspective to redefine Gothic and Romanesque space, used a mirror for the perspective image of the Baptistery of San Giovanni; a painting which, around 1412, stunned Florence.

Arts documentary released by the BBC in 2003

Director:
Randall Wright
Cinematography:
John Hooper

Stars:
David Hockney
Michael Bova