Philip Steadman presents his case for Johannes Vermeer’s use of the camera obscura with prosecutorial flair, bringing in diagrams, reconstructions, and a variety of circumstantial evidence. Vermeer never wrote about his methods, and no physical evidence exists in the form of preparatory drawings or sketches. The inventory of his studio contents lists standard equipment, such as easels and canvases, without a hint about lenses, boxes, or any other unusual objects that might place a camera obscura in the artist’s studio. As Steadman himself notes, the sole source of evidence for his conjectures lies within Vermeer’s paintings.

While writers have remarked on the use of the camera obscura by Dutch painters as an aid to observation since the seventeenth century, the interest in Vermeer’s alleged use dates to the beginnings of photography in the nineteenth century. Debates over photography’s place in art parallel the argument about whether Vermeer achieved his eerie stillness by methods other than direct observation. Although the issue has been around for more than a century, Steadman’s book presents some new, thought-provoking insights.

In the early chapters, Steadman presents a concise history of optics in layman’s terms. His description of the camera obscura, along with simple illustrations and diagrams, is refreshingly easy to understand. The introduction of the tent-like camera is important later in the book, because he argues that Vermeer’s camera was actually a camera, or “small room” in its Latin origins. The painter sat within the camera rather than looking into a tabletop box. A history of the debate over Vermeer’s compositional techniques is followed by a chapter placing the painter in the context of seventeenth-century Delft society. Relying again on circumstantial evidence, Steadman describes how it would have been possible for Vermeer to come into contact with men such as Constantin Huygens or the “pioneer of microscopy,” Antony van Leeuwenhoek. It is even possible that one of them instructed him in the use of the camera, or at least provided him with lenses. As a painter well known and respected in his own lifetime, Vermeer very easily could have been acquainted with these men. Whether or not one believes that the sitter for Vermeer’s The Astronomer (1668) and The Geographer (1669) was van Leeuwenhoek, the works still indicate some sort of connection to the scientific community.

That Vermeer employed a camera obscura in some way is accepted by most scholars, but the extent of his reliance on it and the effect it had on his paintings has caused considerable debate. Using geometric reconstructions, Steadman not only argues for Vermeer’s extensive use of the optical device, but he is also determined to place the paintings within a specific room, indeed, to claim that Vermeer used the same room for all of his paintings. In order to rely on mathematically derived proofs, Steadman is restricted to analyzing paintings that show floor tiles as well as the opposite wall and at least one side wall. By reconstructing the rooms backward using the orthogonals visible in the images, he then explains how difficult it would have been for the artist to construct his painted space using traditional geometric perspective. Steadman describes just what sort of calculations Vermeer would have taken in order to achieve the perfectly correct reflection of the floor tiles in the mirror hanging from the back wall of The Music Lesson. When he points out the sloppy math of Pieter de Hooch’s A Woman Drinking with Two Men (ca. 1658) or Soldier Paying a Hostess (1658), he makes it apparent that Vermeer’s careful constructions would have required endless calculations.

Even for the mathematically challenged, Steadman’s painstaking descriptions are both clear and compelling. Equally persuasive is the notion that the large marble floor tiles visible in a number of paintings are really the same floor covered with small ceramic tiles in other images, since they conform to the same overall grid. Similarly, Steadman proposes that the window panes, while exhibiting a variety of patterns, are in reality always the same set of windows. These variations reflect a desired difference in interior spaces by Vermeer, be it a simple kitchen with ceramic tiles or an upper-class drawing room with expensive marble floors. Steadman focuses on counting bricks and measuring tiles, but he fortunately compresses twenty years of fascination, reconstruction, and research into a short, succinct exposition.

Yet the real point of the book is not simply to prove that Vermeer used a camera obscura to a far greater extent than has yet been acknowledged. Despite his empirical method, Steadman has a more romanticist goal in mind. He wants to find the artist in the painting, to capture the “Riddle of the Sphinx of Delft,” as he titles one chapter. Floor tiles and windows now firmly in position, Steadman turns to the back wall—not seen in many of Vermeer’s works. There, he proposes, sat the painter, enclosed within a life-size camera obscura, a “camera within a camera,” copying the upside-down, backward image onto either a piece of paper or directly onto the canvas itself. As proof, Steadman calculates that the size of the actual paintings were nearly equal to what they would have been if Vermeer had projected them onto this imaginary back wall. In addition, Steadman reminds us that earlier radiographic analysis of Vermeer’s paintings show no signs of preparatory or underlying drawing on the canvas and appear to have progressed from masses of tonal values to become rounded, stable objects. He also grapples with the possibility not only that Vermeer would have had to paint in the dark, but also that he would have recorded colors and shapes as abstractions. More important to his argument, a growing realization surfaces throughout this chapter that, by looking at the painting, we can now place the painter within it and somehow capture him, almost as one would catch the image of a fleeing burglar on a security-camera still. Steadman’s deliberate and careful exposition manages to create a certain amount of suspense when we suddenly imagine Vermeer-the-painter staring back at us from just outside the edge of a hanging mirror or inside the reflection of a mirrored globe.

Vermeer’s Camera is beautifully presented, clearly written but complex in its implications. Realizing the conjectural nature of his project when trying solve the problem of image reversal, he states that “this is perhaps getting over-ingenious” (113). But unlike David Hockney’s recent “revelation,” Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters (New York: Viking, 2001), which says more about Hockney’s self-absorption than about Vermeer, Steadman’s book makes a valuable contribution to the ongoing debate about the elusive painter. Whether one is swept away by the mathematical reconstructions or remains a skeptic about its claims, the book raises intriguing questions about working methods and about artists’ perceptions of themselves.

For example, if Vermeer really did place his camera obscura, and thus himself, in the hanging globe in the Allegory of Faith, as suggested in Chapter 6, was he making the same sort of self-reference as Jan van Eyck’s mirror in The Arnolfini Wedding Portrait? He certainly could have avoided giving himself away by smudging the paint a bit. And if he did actually allow us a glimpse of a smaller camera obscura in the illogically tilted mirror of The Music Lesson, what sort of statement was he making about himself as an artist expert in the latest technology? On the other hand, if Vermeer chose not to paint everything exactly as he saw it, (as when floor tiles become marble or window panes change shape, or especially when he denies the actual tilt of the mirror but not what it reflects), why then did he make an effort to incorporate photographic compositional elements and the unusual focusing effects of the camera obscura? Vermeer’s paintings are, after all, so often about light and so rarely about geometry.

Written crisply and to the point, this book satisfyingly balances mathematical method with a quixotic yearning for a glimpse of the artist himself. Steadman makes Vermeer’s few works even more haunting because the painter seems to hover just on the edges of our line of vision. The use of the camera obscura should not, as the author reminds us frequently, detract from his enduring genius. It remains a way of looking and no more affects Vermeer’s ability to place paint on the canvas than if we were to suppose that he wore spectacles.