Researching Venice

The Virtual Probus Club meeting had featured a talk regarding the validity of a painting featuring a Venice Landscape.

Apparently the painting had been examined in a TV programme called "Fake or Fortune". 

Club members were asked to vote on the validity of the painting. Only 4 of the 20 or so club members agreed that the painting was not genuine.

I was one of the four. The other three had seen the programme.
The final clue was that the painting purported to be 100 years older than the canvas it was painted on!

I had noticed that the actual painting had two different perspective view points. The main building in the centre was different from the remainder.

Another member referred to the composition being "copied and pasted".

The Blipfoto shows one of my studio bookshelves featuring a couple of tomes about Venice.

David Hockney wrote a book called Secret Knowledge about twenty years ago. This is a very well documented study by David and his two assistants into the techniques and methods used by artists over the centuries to accurately portray the composition they were painting.

Very well worth reading.

Various optical devices have been used and compositions with different perspective viewpoints have been incorporated in many examples.

However, these techniques are still available today.