Rembrandt used mirrors, optical tricks to paint self-portraits

Famed 17th-century Dutch painter Rembrandt may have painted his celebrated self-portraits with the help of optical projections created by assemblies of mirrors, a new study suggests.
Researchers identified several arrangements of a flat and curved mirror, or a flat mirror and a lens, which they say can recreate the perspectives, proportions and lighting seen in the self-portraits of Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn.
"The evidence suggests he used lenses and projections," according to UK based researchers, Francis O'Neill, an artist and art teacher, and physicist Sofia Palazzo Corner.
"The similarity of his images to projections, in their lighting and soft focus, along with the use of lens technology by his peers and fellow artists, and the contemporary literature on the subject, all support this," they said.

In 2012, when O'Neill began painting his own self-portraits from his reflection in a flat mirror, he found that it was too difficult to accurately paint his face while giving attention to both his reflection and his work on the canvas, 'Live Science' reported.
"I was thinking, 'How has Rembrandt done his best work in his self-portraits, if it is such a demanding physical discipline?' And so I thought, 'It has to be done this way (with optics),'" said O'Neill.
The study details several combinations of subjects, mirrors and a projection surface that result in projected images that almost exactly match the physical measurements taken from a sample of Rembrandt's self-portraits.

The finding was published in the Journal of Optics.