Amateur Photographer Magazine

 World's first photo: an unknown Da Vinci? - Page 1: Camera obscura

Monday 28th September 2009

SPECIAL REPORT by AP news editor Chris Cheesman


Roger Davies used sophisticated computer graphics to back his claim that this famous 1514 engraving by Albrecht Dürer is a photograph of a drawing by Leonardo da Vinci. The graphical representation shown here has been simplified for use online

Image, courtesy Roger Davies



A photography enthusiast is battling to re-write the history books after a three-year project left him convinced that a famous 16th-century engraving is the 'world's first photograph'.

Welshman Roger Davies also claims to have uncovered a secret code in the artwork, leading him to conclude that the 1514 engraving is a photograph of a previously un-attributed drawing by Leonardo da Vinci.

Davies came up with his intriguing theory after scrutinising Melancholia, a famous engraving by renowned German Renaissance artist Albrecht Dürer.

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.

'It's basically a photograph of a drawing,' says the retired electrical engineer, adding that the exposure time may have taken several days.

He claims Dürer then used the plate to run off hundreds of prints in his name more than three centuries before Fox Talbot and Louis Daguerre first experimented with the permanent fixing of a photographic image using chemicals.

By magnifying a high-resolution digital image of the engraving, the 66-year-old says he can show that lines on the print are so close together - a 'sixth of a millimeter' in one area - that it would have been physically impossible to hand engrave them with such accuracy and consistency, even for the master technician that Dürer was.

Davies believes that Da Vinci created his artwork before 1507 and then gave Dürer the photographic plate.

'Da Vinci' code

Davies says he first suspected a Da Vinci connection after spotting that the cherub in the Melancholia image has similar facial features to a figure depicted in a Da Vinci sketch held at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Caen, France.

Also, key to it being the work of Da Vinci, he asserts, is the Italian artist's renowned level of knowledge of mathematics and geometry, in addition to what some believe was Da Vinci's practice of planting secret messages in his work.

'It's not a random drawing. It's a mathematically geometrical structure,' says Davies who believes Da Vinci also used a camera obscura to help him sketch the human figures in the original large-scale artwork.

Davies suggests that the layout was a deliberate attempt to create a type of astronomical calculator, linked to the cycles of the sun and the moon relative to the earth.

He believes Da Vinci implanted a hidden code in the work connected to the prediction of future geophysical events such as earthquakes.

The number '532' is fundamental to this concept - a figure reached by multiplying the 28-year cycle of the sun to the 19-year cycle of the moon.

The fifth-century astronomer Victorius of Aquitaine used this figure to predict the recurrence of a given phase of the moon on the same day of the week and month.

Davies says he found that when superimposing computer-generated lines over Melancholia, they radiate from two distinct areas of the image corresponding to lunar and solar cycles.

And the lines - he insists - align themselves with various key points in the image, such as the thread marks in the rope (top right in the picture) and the jagged edges of the knife (bottom).

Furthermore, these 'precise radial graduations' (not visible on the artwork itself) totalled 532, or multiples of that figure, leading Davies to suggest that the artist created the piece to conform with a predetermined 'symmetrical' geometric pattern.

Davies argues that Da Vinci used a thin pencil to draw these lines as an 'underlay' to the drawing which was then photographed using a camera obscura.

STORY CONTINUES: Click here for 'astronomical calculator' theory

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