Question

Why did artists use pinhole cameras during the Renaissance?

Answer 1

Taken from Yahoo Answers:
I know it's a bit long, but it's DEFINITELY worth the read! SO COOL!

Legend tell that Greek with a hangover overslept. To his amazement, in his darkened with curtain bedroom, saw on his wall an inverted color image of his courtyard. The image resulted from a moth hole in the curtain. The Camera obscura is Latin for "darkened chamber". About a century later Leon Battista Alberti and Florentine colleagues conceived rules for drawing that embraced correct perspective. These rules were based on light rays emanating from objects and received by the eye as cones of light rays with the eye at the apex. The year was 1435.

The idea was to simply draw on a pane of glass with wax pencil while looking at the subject through an eyepiece hole. All was illustrated in books of portraiture published 1525. A box with pinhole was fitted with ground glass upon which, thin paper was placed and the image traced. The upside down image was inverted by means of a mirror set at 45⁰ (first reflex camera). In 1553 Daniello Barbaro Professor at the University of Padua had authored a book on perspective and it replaced the pinhole with a lens. By 1764 the best painters among the Italians were using such a devices now fitted with a two element lens to correct distortion. The device was renamed camera lucida Latin for chamber + light.

In 1797 at a Paris Salon some 600 + portraits were put on display. With these new cameras, amateur artists and draftsman could turn out portraits fast. A market opened, the middle class now wanted portraits. The stage was set for the paper to become sensitized. The first permanent was made via an 8 hour exposure by Nicephore Nipce, "a view from his window at Le Gras France". The year was 1827. His camera and tools are now at a museum at the University of Texas in Austin. His papers and notes tell us that he had made permanent pictures 10 years early but they have never been located.

Answer 2

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