Painters used the camera obscura for drawing from the Renaissance onwards: Leonardo da Vinci described it in his notebooks around 1500, Giambattista della Porta popularised it in 1558, and Vermeer is suspected of having used it in the 17th century, without proof. Long before anyone knew how to fix an image on paper, people already knew how to project one. In a closed, dark room pierced with a single hole, the world outside would appear upside down on the opposite wall, alive, in colour and in motion. Renaissance painters very quickly understood what use they could make of this spectacle.
The camera obscura, the dark chamber, was for a long time an instrument for drawing and study before it became the ancestor of the photographic camera, and it is this period of the painters, from Leonardo's notebooks to the workshops of the Dutch Golden Age, that concerns us here.
What the camera obscura is
The expression is Latin and literally means dark chamber, in other words a closed and completely dark enclosure, pierced with a small hole through which light from outside enters to project the image of the outdoor scene onto the opposite wall.
The camera obscura has no date of invention: the phenomenon was described as early as the 5th century BCE by Mozi in China, then explained by Ibn al-Haytham around the year one thousand, well before the Renaissance. It is exactly the principle that drives pinhole photography today, with a closed box pierced with a hole in place of an entire room.
Leonardo da Vinci describes the phenomenon
Among the first to record the observation carefully was Leonardo da Vinci, who described the camera obscura in his notebooks around the turn of the 15th and 16th centuries.
His description is remarkable because he does not simply note the result: he compares the workings of the camera obscura with those of the human eye, seeing in both the same light entering through a small opening and forming an inverted image inside.
This comparison has considerable reach, because it turns the camera obscura into a model for understanding vision itself, and not merely a curious optical trick. Leonardo places it within a broader reflection on light and shadow.
A drawing tool for capturing perspective
The instrument's appeal for a painter becomes clear as soon as you look at what it puts before your eyes. On a sheet placed at the back of the chamber, the three-dimensional world is already reduced to a flat surface, with its proportions correct and its depth properly rendered.
This is precisely the problem the Renaissance was trying to solve. Perspective, the construction that gives the illusion of depth on a flat surface, occupied workshops and treatises, and the camera obscura offered an immediate demonstration of it.
In it you could see how parallel lines seem to converge, how distant objects grow smaller, how light shapes volumes. The instrument did not replace the painter's knowledge, but it showed at a glance what geometry demonstrated step by step.
In 1558, Giambattista della Porta popularised the device in his Natural Magic, just as it was establishing itself as a drawing tool. Over time, more practical versions appeared. The hole was made in a room's shutter, then portable boxes were built, and adding a lens in place of the simple hole made the image brighter and sharper.
Drawing camera obscura, engraving by Defehrt after Louis-Jacques Goussier. Wellcome Collection, 33831i. Public domain.
The Hockney hypothesis and the Vermeer debate
There remains a question that has long been debated and must be presented as such: did some painters use the camera obscura to trace their compositions, and not just to understand perspective?
The name that comes up most often is that of Johannes Vermeer, a 17th-century Dutch painter whose play of light, precise perspective and certain optical effects have fed the hypothesis that he used a camera obscura. The idea appeared as early as the 19th century, on the fringes, and only really gained ground in the 20th.
It was revived and popularised in the early 2000s by the painter David Hockney, who argued, in what is sometimes called the Hockney thesis, that many old masters used optical aids far earlier and more widely than had been thought.
What can be said with confidence is more measured: the camera obscura existed, painters knew it, and it is plausible that some drew on it to study light and composition. Whether they used it as a tracing device remains an open question.
Johannes Vermeer, Girl with a Pearl Earring, c. 1665. Mauritshuis, The Hague. Reproduction via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.
Understanding light before fixing it
Beyond individual cases, what the camera obscura gave painting lies in what it taught people to see. By projecting the scene onto a flat surface, it revealed how light is distributed, where shadows arise, how colours change with distance. Painters found in it a school for the eye, a way of testing their intuitions about perspective and modelling.
However, we need to draw a clear distinction. The painters' camera obscura fixed nothing: the image was projected, looked at, perhaps traced by hand, but it vanished as soon as the hole was closed or the daylight faded. All the work of fixing it permanently would come later, in the 19th century, and belongs to the history of the invention of photography.
The camera obscura of Renaissance workshops comes before photography, and it already lays down its founding gesture, namely letting the world in through a hole to set it down on a surface, an episode in the long history of the pinhole camera.
Four centuries later, making your own pinhole camera obscura remains the most direct way to rediscover what these painters saw: the same inverted image, the same light settling at the back of a box. The Sténoflex offers a ready-to-use version, a direct descendant of this ancient principle.
Éric Marais — Photographer, author of two books on pinhole photography (published by Pearson) and creator of the Sténoflex. Since the very beginning, he has run introductory workshops in pinhole photography and analogue developing.