World’s first photo: an unknown Da Vinci?

A famous piece of art from Albrecht Durer, the Melancholia engraving, was created in 1514.  Welshman Roger Davis has spent the last 3 years closely analysing the picture and believes it may actually be a photograph of a much larger, and older, Da Vinci painting.

The former contractor for the Atomic Weapons Establishment – whose job gave him experience in optics – claims that the 9in high Dürer masterpiece was no such thing. Rather a photograph of a much larger Da Vinci drawing – perhaps eight feet tall – exposed and then fixed onto a ‘light-sensitive’ copper plate, placed inside a camera obscura.

His primary argument is that the lines are so straight and so close together that it’s not humanly possible to create, only through some mechanical process (reducing & photographing) could it be achieved with such perfection.

via World’s first photo: an unknown Da Vinci?

This story written by Randall Hand

Randall Hand is a visualization scientist working for a federal research lab, aiding researchers to discover the insights buried within their terabyte datasets generated on some of the most powerful supercomputers in the world. He also runs VizWorld.com .