It directly challenges the image of the divinely-inspired Old Master catching perspective and those fleeting expressions and complicated, jumbled shapes, by pure eye and hand co-ordination, with a confident fluency modern artists can only marvel at. Hockney is arguing that the camera obscura principle, the passing of light through a small hole into a darkened room to produce an inverted image, was taken up and modified with lenses and mirrors throughout the great age of Western painting. This whole insight about optical aids doesn't diminish anything it merely suggests a different story.'Įven so, the audacity and verve of his argument, overturning a long tradition of art connoisseurship with the flick of a pencil, has arrived like a depth-charge in the art world. Hockney would regard none of this as cheating: 'The lens can't draw a line, only the hand can do that, the artist's hand and eye. That was how they achieved their near-miraculous use of perspective that was how they caught transient smiles with such a swagger. 'Did the old masters cheat?' That was the inflammatory cover line above David Hockney's new thinking on how a cascade of the greatest names in Western art - including Caravaggio, Raphael, Frans Hals, Vermeer, Velázquez and Ingres - used lenses to trace out their pictures.