“Self Portraits” by Rembrandt van Rijn
The idea that artist used mirrors for their self-portraits seems pretty obvious. But in 2001, an artist named David Hockney worked together with a physicist named Charles Falso to “discover” that Rembrandt and many of the other Old Masters used curved mirrors and lenses to create their self-portraits. In 2016, the Journal of Optics explained even further how this could have been achieved. These mirror and lenses could be used to project the image onto the canvas, so Rembrandt could literally trace the real-life image. If this is true, it sort of takes away from the “genius” behind his incredibly life-like self portraits. However, many artists use tracing to help create their works of art, and very few actually work freehand in the way you would imagine.