SKIN DEEP ONLY

Jan Koenderink

D E C LOOTCRANS P RESS
SKIN DEEP ONLY
Jan Koenderink

D E C LOOTCRANS P RESS , MMXV

Front cover: Skins come in many varieties. They may have very different optical or Foreword
mechanical properties, and a wide spectrum of functions.

This little book is about surfaces, or—better—skins. Surfaces come as “fiat

objects”, like a national border on land, as “two-fold extended geometrical
objects”, as “boundaries of volumes”, as “skins”, and a few more. They oc-
cur as mental objects, something that is obvious for fiat objects and formal,
geometrical objects, but perhaps less obvious for skins. They also occur as
physical objects, for instance boundary layers in aerodynamics, chemistry,
for instance oxide layers, and biology, for instance “the” skin, or cell mem-
branes. Consider a flag, a soap bubble, a stone, all points within a foot of a
given point, a cloud and a stellar cluster. These all have “surfaces” of some
sort. Some have skins, some have not. Some are only mental, others have
physical correlates.
As you see, the topic is virtually inexhaustible. The present book derives
from a talk I gave some time ago. People were amused. I hope you are too,
but I really hope you will feel the urge to explore and expand the topic. Roads
to novel explorations lie open in numerous directions. Why not leave the main
stream for a change? Fun starts off the beaten paths!
De Clootcrans Press
Utrecht The Netherlands Utrecht, january 1, 2015 — Jan Koenderink
[email protected]

Copyright © 2015 by Jan Koenderink

All rights reserved. Please do not redistribute this file in any form without my
express permission. Thank you! Jan Koenderink
University of Leuven (KU Leuven)
Laboratory of Experimental Psychology
pax / jan koenderink Tiensestraat 102 – bus 3711
3000 Leuven
Belgium
[email protected]
First edition, 2015

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

i
Contents

I Surfaces, sheets and skins 3

Surfaces in mind 4

Lattices, Clouds and Clusters 5

Schools, Swarms and Configurations 7

Sheets 9

Skins 10

Clothes — artificial skins 12

II The Inside and the Outside 16

III Shape 23
Where IS the shape? 25

The Made and the Grown 26

Going Bananas 29

Local Shape of Relief 30

1
IV Optics 34
Marble 35

Translucency 36

Surface reflections and scattering 37

Surface Reflections 39

Examples: Metals and Water 41

Metals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
Water . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44

Skins as optical machines 45

V Mechanics of sheets and skins 48

VI The Representation of Human Skin 53

VII Conclusions 62

2
 Part I

Surfaces, sheets and skins

3
 Surfaces in mind

Consider the image of two hands framing a scene. This is a common way
used by visual artists of finding a suitable view and to experience that view as
“flat”.

A natural sponge and a sculpture. The sculpture “Head No. 2” was made
by Naum Gabo2 in 1916. It is in the Tate Gallery. Actually, it is a bust, the
picture shows only the head.

The bath sponge is a roughly globular object, the concavities occur as “tex-
ture”. The “surface” you are visually aware of is like a mental shrink-wrap. If
there is anything like a “physical surface” that is extremely complex and de-
pends upon the resolution3 : a microscope will reveal otherwise unnoticeable
porosities. Thus “the surface” of your awareness is a mental object, not less
Using the hands to frame a scene. The “view” becomes a flattish picture so than the gap between your fingers.
framed by the fingers. A similar analysis applies to the Gabo “head”. The surface of the head
follows the face, not the metal-walled cavities. Your awareness is a mental
The view is experienced as a planar picture. It looks much smaller than the shrink-wrapped version of the object. What makes up the face—the topic of
scene. It has the size of a postcard, depending upon the length of your fingers. the piece—does not exist as a physical object. This must have been a major
For other sizes one uses cardboard cutout frames, you can also buy adjustable incentive to Gabo to construct the piece in the first place. How large can you
frames in art stores. Where is the “surface” of this picture? It can only reside make the gaps before awareness loses track of the face? This is a mystery that
in your mind, because the gap between your fingers is “empty”. would easily appeal to the artist.
Consider some other examples, a sponge1 , and a constructivist metal head. Other examples include such objects as nets, or open fences. A net can
These are physical objects, so at least we have some real surfaces here! But span a large area with very little material because almost all of the physical
consider, where are they? surface is “open”. The same holds for the fence. Here the open space even

4
has an important physical function in that it greatly reduces the aerodynamic
resistance and thus renders the fence fit to survive a storm. Emptiness can Lattices, Clouds and Clusters
have a function!
Maybe you have enough of emptiness, let’s consider something real! A
stone evidently has a real surface, you notice that when you kick it, as fa-
mously demonstrated by Dr. Johnson (be sure to wear shoes if you repeat
the experiment!).7 But what is a stone anyway? The one depicted here is an
agglomerate of many much smaller mineral crystals. Each such crystal is a
regular space lattice of atoms of various kinds. Each atom is mainly empty,
its “size” is the size of its electron cloud. That the stone is voluminous as it is,
despite consisting mainly of empty space, is due (well, . . . , what is “cause”)
to Wolfgang Pauli’s “exclusion principle” from quantum theory8 . This princi-
Two more examples of surfaces in the mind. The use of the fence, or the net, ple has that an electron cannot share a quantum state with a colleague. Thus
is in the area subtented by the mazes. the “surface” of the stone is again a “shrink-wrap” abstraction, it has a certain
existence as a boundary layer to the solid state physicist, but it has a mere
This immediately reminds me of the Tao Te Ching4 : fiat existence9 . It is like the net, but at a much different scale.

Thirty spokes join in one hub

In its emptiness, there is the function of a vehicle
Mix clay to create a container
In its emptiness, there is the function of a container
Cut open doors and windows to create a room
In its emptiness, there is the function of a room

Therefore, that which exists is used to create benefit

That which is empty is used to create functionality

The upshot is that many an emptiness is an intentional object5 with meaning

in terms of your interaction with the environment. Many “surfaces” are mental A stone and a droplet.
objects that are rather more real than the famous round square although that
object is surely as round as it is square.6 Stones count as enduring objects, perhaps they are the best example of
a generic “solid object”. But look at it! How did it arrive at its shape? This
stone started out as part of a huge rock, it somehow broke off and was abraded
by water and wind. It may have been put here by glaciers from the last ice
age, perhaps it lied buried in the ground for ages, and came to the surface

5
due to effects of erosion. Its present shape is due to the elements, it is not an may find it interesting to use the Internet to figure out how many orders of
essential property of the stone. In that sense it is not different from a sculpture. magnitude the gaps between these cases span. I hope you will be surprised.
It was“sculpted by nature”. The cluster is held together by gravitational forces. Although the stars have
The surface of the stone changes continuously and very fast at a geological little mutual interaction they really “belong together” as our visual aware-
time scale. The stone is a process10 . To humans it is a very slow process, ness instantly reveals. The cluster is evidently an object. Does it have a
which is why we consider it an immutable solid object. surface? Hard question. Intuitively, it has a “size”, but only a “fuzzy size”.
Now consider the droplet. This is a flash photograph, the shape of the One might use the diameter of the smallest sphere that contains at least 99%
droplet is hard to see. That is because the droplet is a fast process for us (or 99.9999%, up to you) of the stars. Does that sphere define “the surface”?
humans. The droplet is held together by “van der Waals” forces. Its shape is This is evidently less obvious than the shrink-wrapping we considered thus
determined by surface tension, gravity, hydrodynamics, and so forth. far. Whether compact objects can be said to possess a surface or not is a
moot question. I would say yes, although such surfaces are volatile and visual
awareness may catch them within certain fuzzy bounds.
What is common in these examples it that we have compact objects held
together by physical forces. They differ enormously in size, but also in dis-
tance. Their angular sizes in the visual field are not that diverse. They also dif-
fer enormously in the time scales for which they might be considered “static”.
All are processes, some fast, some slow. But visual awareness is apt to classify
slow processes as “objects” and very fast processes as “events”. The human
scale is all important when we try to make sense of “surfaces”. In any case, all
surfaces considered here exist only in the mind. They are “fiat objects”. Yet
A cloud and a globular star cluster. some of these are to be respected, as you notice when you kick a stone with
your bare foot. But that is not that different from crossing a national border.

A cloud in the sky is a swarm of water droplets in moist air11 . It is rather

less resistant than the stone, as you notice when you enter a cloud with a
plane. You certainly notice the cloud mechanically, but it is mainly the turbu-
lence of the air that makes you shake, rather than the water droplets as such.
(Of course, the turbulence has much to do with the moisture and so forth, but
let that be.) The droplets have some aerodynamic interaction, but they are not
really “held together”. In the boundary layer droplets come and go. The cloud
has a certain coherence, but can hardly be said to have a surface. But a surface
you see. What is it? A mental object, mainly brought about by gradients in
your retinal irradiation.
The globular star cluster12 is much larger than the cloud, as the cloud is
much larger than the stone, and the stone much larger than the droplet. You

6
 Schools, Swarms and Configurations

Schools of fishes13 and swarms of birds14 are moderately fast processes,

slow enough that they appear in our visual awareness as “objects”. They are
not held together by physical forces. Rather, the animals are aware of each
other and “take their cue” from their neighbours. This leads to remarkably
coherent patterns that are quite different for the schools of fish and the birds.
Swarming starlings are very common in my country at some times of the year.
It is remarkable to see the changes in shape on the time scale of seconds. Such
swarms are very coherent and appear to have rather clearly defined surfaces.

A bare tree in winter. Imagine how it will appear in early summer. Does its
surface change with the seasons?
A school of fish and a swarm of birds. Aren’t vertebrates amazing? They are
our kin. The bare tree looks very different. It is a very slow process, and in a sense a
single object, rather than a swarm. However, although the branches and twigs
These surfaces, of course, are a kind of fiat shrink-wrap objects. Since the are no doubt connected to each other and ultimately to the trunk, your vi-
swarms are somewhat transparent—indeed, you cannot make out their front sual awareness is unlikely to keep them apart. In practice, here is yet another
or back—you see fully enveloping surfaces. Due to simple perspective effects swarm that populates your mind. Consider how you would draw the tree top.
the contours, or silhouettes, are especially salient. They show the generic sin- It is unlikely that you would (or could!) draw all individual branches. You
gularities of the projection from 3D to 2D, that are folds and cusps. Because either draw a symbolic representation, or you draw a visual object that some-
of the movement you can experience the “unfolding” of such singularities how calls up the tree when you look at it. The latter is the more interesting
over time. case for my purpose.
Of course, I picked only the clearest examples here. In practice you can see You probably suggest some kind of “cloud” vaguely attached to the trunk.
shapes in any “swarm”, and even intersecting flocks. Just think of sheep, or Only after you have tried this you will appreciate the trees—especially bare
soccer supporters clad in the (mutually different) colours of their clubs. You ones—as painted throughout art history. Then you are ready to scan any num-
become aware of continually changing, mutually intersecting surfaces. ber of books on “how to draw”, or “how to paint”. Now look at paintings and

7
drawings again. And at real trees. Iterate the process.
You will come at some understanding of what the “surface” of a tree top is.
Such initial understanding is only the beginning of an endless quest. Even
great painters never stop exploring and learning. That’s one reason why
they’re great painters.

The Pancrastinae at the Uffizi, Florence, Italy. It is a Roman marble after a

lost Greek bronze of the third century BCE. It has been attributed to Myron,
Cephisodotus the Younger or Heliodorus. It was discovered in 1583, both
heads missing.

I don’t really like the famous Pancrastinae at the Uffizi. It seems too de-
Wrestlers in a hard to parse interlock. What kind of a shape has this perplex-
tailed and the pair looking too much like a combination of two individuals.
ing object?
Perhaps chopping off the heads again, and doing some generalization might
help.
Consider the wrestlers. Due to the interlocking this appears as a single
object rather than a group. What is its shape? A good way to start on this is
to imagine that you will have to sculpt it. What would be a convenient block
to start articulating? Notice that as a sculptor you will not need to keep the
bodies apart. Nor need the arm and leg counts add up. All that is needed is
the look.
In this case your shrink-wrap vision easily defines a “surface”. The
wrestlers make a slow enough process—except for sudden events—that you
can arrive at a stable visual object.

8
 Sheets

The dry leaves look like “surfaces that bound nothing” or at least as part of
such things. They are in a class of their own. I will call them sheets.
Although sheets can be used to construct a volumetric object, it is not neces-
sary that they “bound”, they may remain sheets. The basket is a good example
of that. Structurally it is similar to Naum Gabo’s “Constructed Head 2”.

Salvador Dali, Dali at the age of 6.

Remember that the very concept of “surface” remains an enigma! This has
been nicely illustrated by Salvador Dali16 in his painting Dali at the age of 6.
Dry leaves and a woven basket. (For some reason best known to himself Dali depicted himself as a little girl.)
Here the water surface is depicted as a paradoxical “sheet”.
Leonardo da Vinci was obsessed by such problems:
Sheets can have many functions, even if they do not bound. A good exam-
The point, being indivisible, occupies no space. That which occupies
ple are the sails of the ship15 . They are “filled with wind”, but their function is
no space is nothing. The limiting surface of one thing is the beginning of
not to contain, but to resist wind, in order to generate forces that drive the ship another.
forwards. Notice that you “see the wind” because of the sails, for air escapes That which has no limitations, has no form. The limitations of two
our vision. Likewise you “see the forces” because of the attitude of the ship, conterminous bodies are interchangeably the surface of each. All the sur-
although forces are invisible to. But, of course, forces are invisible in another faces of a body are not parts of that body.
way that air is. Air is material, forces are figments of the mind, like the round The boundaries of bodies are the least of all things. The proposition is
square. Bishop Berkeley would perhaps say the same about air. This would proved to be true, because the boundary of a thing is a surface, which is
give Dr. Johnson a soft target to kick. not part of the body contained within that surface; nor is it part of the air

9
 surrounding that body, but is the medium interposited between the air and
the body, as is proved in its place.17 Skins
These are problems that haunt us since the pre-Socratics. You can’t cut
the line with an axe, for the points are atomic, thus can’t be cut, whereas The Josephinum19 was founded by Emperor Joseph II in 1785. This Vien-
there is no space between them! The only theory in phenomenology is that nese medical-surgical Academy houses a famous collection of over a thou-
of Franz Brentano, who would hold that a points on the water surface have a sand wax specimens. These were made at Florence under the supervision
split “plerosis”: water in the downwards, air in the upwards directions. Al- of the anatomist Paolo Mascagni20 between 1784 and 1788. The six rooms
though this can be made logically consistent, it has not been the choice of housing this collection are an anatomical wonderland and a visual treat21 .
contemporary topology or mereology.
The soap bubble18 is very different from the sails. It actually encloses a
volume of air which looks like nothing. The spherical shape is due to a pres-
sure difference between inside and outside which is in equilibrium with the
surface tension of the sheet.

A soap bubble and a ship at full sails. The lady with the pearl necklace at the Viennese Josephinum.

Soap bubbles are special. I will put them with the sheets in the taxonomy. One of my favourites is the showcase lady. For medical educational pur-
However, I’ll hardly have occasion to return to them here. poses one would have sawed of the head so as not to distract attention by
leaving unnecessary detail and mounting her on a featureless slab for the same
reason. Instead, she lies on a silk cloth spread over a comfortable mattress,
her hair artistically spread out instead of cut of by the anatomist. The pearl
necklace is a nice finishing touch. The rather grimy business on the dissection
table has become a tasteful display that is both educational and aesthetic.

10
 The image shows what the human body looks like when you remove the colour through their spectrally selective absorption. Bulk and volume scat-
skin—and some fatty layers, of course, this is a careful preparation. It is fair tering render the skin opaque, causing your vision to probe only skin deep.
to say that the body looks very different without the skin. Vision penetrates Volume scattering also affects colour since it acts much like the atmosphere
only skin deep. Painters have to suggest the texture though, for otherwise the on a greatly diminished scale. Thus the “blue mountains” effect applies to
skin looks like a layer of paint, like on a doll. skin as well because high energy photons are scattered more strongly than
low energetic ones.

A patch of human skin.

A schematic cross section of human skin. The outermost layer causes super-
ficial scattering, the deeper layers volume scattering. Notice the circulation
Skin22 is usually seen from the outside. At the micro-scale it has a charac-
of the blood and the different colours of oxyhemoglobin and de-oxigenated
teristic pattern of hills and grooves. If the skin is young and healthy this yields
haemoglobin. At the bottom the fatty tissue containing carotenes, yellowish
a micro-texture of shading and highlight. These patterns are easily seen from
to red pigments.
nearby, but are much too fine to be painted.
On the macro-scale the skin is characterised by its overall colour, its local
colour variations, and its bidirectional reflectance distribution function23 . The structure of the skin explains much of its optical properties. These
The colour and its variations are due to local variations of the nature of vary a lot from case to case. In young skin the superficial layers are more
the skin, the variations of local illuminance due to shape and spatial attitudes, transparent than in old skin. The opaqueness is due to the scattering of dead
and the optical properties of the skin tissue. The haemoglobin in the subcu- cells, causing the skin to look like paper. Optical immersion24 with some fatty
taneous circulation and the carotenes in fat are the major pigments, affecting substance removes this effect and thus “makes you look younger”, a major

11
reason for the success of the cosmetics industry.
Baby skin is especially transparent, yielding the interesting “marbling” ap- Clothes — artificial skins
pearance that you will never regain even as a child.
Clothes are artificial skins. They are typically designed to cover and hide
part of the body. This hiding property is typically due to scattering. Most
clothes are constructed from woven cloth, of which the finest fibres are trans-
parent. They scatter radiation because their refractive index is higher than that
of the air in which they are embedded.

Field and sky. The field has a skin, the cloud only a surface.

Skins are categorically different from surface. I mean not just human skin,
although that is the central instance of a “skin”. This is well illustrated by
the landscape. The field has a skin, the cloud only a surface. The skin of Here are some examples of “clothes”. Clothes have many functions. Hiding
the field is made up of grass, it is very unlike human skin and has different parts of the body is just one.
optical and functional properties. Yes, from a phenomenological perspective,
it is evidently a skin, hiding the soil below it. In contradistinction, the cloud Cloth is a highly complicated mechanical structure. Many structures have
has no skin, you’re looking right at the water droplets of which it is made up. been developed throughout human history. The major dichotomy is between
felted and woven materials. Then there are numerous techniques to influ-
ence the optical properties, both superficially, and in the bulk. Even a fairly
shallow account of cloth technology would imply a textbook of hundreds of

12
pages. For my purposes it are mainly the optical and mechanical properties
(density, anisotropic elasticity) that are important, but cloth is also engineered
for thermal insulation, permeability for air and water and various chemical
properties.

Here clothes without the body retain their shape. This looks paradoxical,
indeed these clothes are not made of cloth. They are computer graphics
fakes.28

The empty drapery by Benjamin Leitgeb is visually stunning for a variety

of reasons. It clearly shows that clothes on a body are not sheets, but really
Clothes are artificial skins that may come of, in that respect they differ from skins, albeit artificial skins. One (derived) function of the skin is to reveal the
natural skin. shape of what it hides. Here the clothes hide only empty space, but they still
“reveal the shape of he body”. When you look at a clothed person you are
Different from your natural skin, clothes can be taken off. They become an visually aware of both the clothes and the body. Since the clothes let you only
artificial skin when worn, but become sheets when taken off. This is well rep- penetrate skin deep, the actual body is not optically specified. The body is
resented in Gérôme’s painting25 . He has painted the cloth taken of Phryné26 as seen amodally on the basis of the shape and arrangement of the clothes. Thus,
a sheet. The cloth does not reveal the shape of the woman’s body, but is repre- it is only to be expected that you see bodies in these empty clothes. Because
sented as a cavity that once contained something solid. It is also represented as you also see that the clothes are empty, you perceive a paradox in reflective
a flag in the wind, due to the sudden move—the veritable coup de theatre—of thought, whereas for your visual awareness this is business as usual.
ripping the cloth of the body. This, with the theatrical poses of the protago- Ridgeway’s sculpture The West Wind is instructive for slightly different rea-
nists, make for a highly effective “history painting” of which Gérôme was a sons. This is actually a huge block of marble that has been sculpted so as to
master27 . What is of interest here are the optical and mechanical—including appear as the figure of a woman dressed in a garment that is blown by a gust
aerodynamics—properties and processes suggested by the painter. Although of wind.
vision goes skin deep only, visual awareness takes a great deal of ecological Thus there are no sheets, nor clothes, nor a body, but just a piece of stone
physics into account. sculpted into some particular shape. The work is not entirely compelling,

13
which makes it interesting as a study object. The artificial and the natural Notes
skin are hardly differentiated at places. Visual awareness indeed presents you
1
with various ambiguities, that seem to be resolved in recognition. Spongia officinalis or just “bath sponge”, is found throughout the Mediterranean Sea.
The animal may take as much as fort years to grow to hand size. Harvesting is a threat to
the population. (Linnaeus, C. 1759: Systema naturæ per regna tria natur, secundum classes,
ordines, genera, species, cum characteribus, differentiis, synonymis, locis. Tomus II. Editio
decima, reformata. – pp. [1–4], 825–1384. Holmiæ. (L. Salvii).)
2
Naum Gabo, born Naum Neemia Pevsner (1890–1977) was a prominent Russian sculptor
in the Constructivism movement.
3
For practical purposes it is a fractal object. I have not tried to figure out its fractal
dimension, but most probably someone has done that already.
4
Tao Te Ching: Annotated & Explained, published by SkyLight Paths in 2006, Translation
by Derek Lin. Source www.Taoism.net. This is chapter 36.
5
Franz Brentano (1874—88–89) famously introduced the notion of “intentional inexis-
tence”:
Every mental phenomenon is characterised by what the Scholastics of the
Middle Ages called the intentional (or mental) inexistence of an object, and what
we might call, though not wholly unambiguously, reference to a content, direc-
tion toward an object (which is not to be understood here as meaning a thing), or
immanent objectivity. Every mental phenomenon includes something as object
within itself, although they do not do so in the same way. In presentation, some-
thing is presented, in judgment something is affirmed or denied, in love loved, in
hate hated, in desire desired and so on.
This intentional inexistence is characteristic exclusively of mental phenom-
ena. No physical phenomenon exhibits anything like it. We can, therefore, define
mental phenomena by saying that they are those phenomena which contain an
object intentionally within themselves.
(From Psychologie vom empirischen standpunkt (1874).) Brentano became an important
philosopher/psychologist with well known students that founded Gestalt psychology, phe-
nomenology, ontology and logic. When Brentano started to lecture Hermann Lotze was still
active, the foremost figure from the previous generation.
6
Alexius Meinong (1853–1920) famously affirmed the existence of such objects as the
Thomas Ridgeway Gould (1818 - 1881). The West Wind, 1876, Marble. “round square” in his Untersuchungen zur Gegenstandstheorie und Psychologie (1904).
Of course, he differentiated between various levels of existence. Meinong was a pupil of
Brentano and became the founder of the Graz school of Gestalt psychology with many im-
The fluttering cloth at the rear of the figure assumes a life of its own, this portant students in Northern Italy, Austria, Germany and Poland.
is visually a sheet with complicated convolutions in aerodynamic interaction 7
Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) debated Bishop Berkeley’s concerning the nature of real-
with the air. It is like a snapshot in stone of a fast process. ity. The famous incident is described in Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson (1791)
After we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time together of
Bishop Berkeley’s ingenious sophistry to prove the non-existence of matter, and

14
 that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we are scattering becomes much less, and the skin is rendered transparent. It makes you look ten
satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget years younger, at least if you’re under thirty to start with.
25
the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824–1904) Phryné devant lAréopage, 1861 (Hamburg, Kunsthalle)
26
against a large stone, till he rebounded from it, ‘I refute it thus’. A famous hetaira (courtesan) of Ancient Greece (fourth century BCE).
27
Jean–Léon Gérôme (1824–1904) was a French academic painter and sculptor. He was
Of course, Berkeley would not have accepted this as an argument. one of the most important academic painters and an important teacher with numerous pupils.
8
Nobel Lecture Physics, December 13, 1946: “Exclusion Principle and Quantum Me- 28
See this tutorial of ZBrush 3.1 by Benjamin Leitgeb at http://docs.pixologic.
chanics” by Wolfgang Pauli. com/user-guide/tips-tricks/benjamin-leitgeb/. It is worth a visit because
9
Barry Smith & Achille Varzi, “Fiat and Bona Fide Boundaries”. Philosophy and Phe- it shows a method of arriving at artistic drapery that is fully different from the well known
nomenological Research, 60: 2 (March 2000), 401–420. academic treatments.
10
Whitehead, A. N. (1929). Process and Reality, Macmillan, New York.
11
World Meteorological Organisation, ed. (1975). Luminance, International Cloud Atlas
I. ISBN 92-63-10407-7.
12
Milky Way Globular Clusters, see http://spider.seds.org/spider/MWGC/
mwgc.html.
13
Shaw E (1978) Schooling fishes. American Scientist 66, pp. 166–175.
14
Hemelrijk CK, Hildenbrandt H (2011). “Some causes of the variable shape of flocks of
birds”. PLoS ONE 6 (8): e22479.
15
I. C. Campbell, “The Lateen Sail in World History”, Journal of World History (University
of Hawaii), 6.1 (Spring 1995), p. 1–23.
16
Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalı̀ Domènech, 1st Marqués de Dalı̀ de Pubol (1904–
1989), known as Salvador Dali. Dali is perhaps one of the better known Spanish surrealist
painters.
17
The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (Richter, 1888)
18
Boys, C. V. (1890) Soap-Bubbles and the Forces that Mould Them; (Dover reprint) ISBN
0-486-20542-8.
19
Helmut Wyklicky: Das Josephinum: Biographie eines Hauses; die medicinisch–
chirurgische Josephs–Akademie seit 1785; das Institut für Geschichte der Medizin seit 1920.
Brandstätter, Wien 1985.
20
Paolo Mascagni (1755–1815) was an Italian physician, known for his study of human
anatomy. Paolo Maseagni, “Anatomia universa XLIV tabulis aeneis juxta archetypum homi-
nis adulti, aecuratissime representata . . . ”. (Pisa: Apud Nieolaum Capurro. 1823-32).
21
Indeed, a visit is a must, it complements the famous Florence “La Specula” collection.
22
Skin: A Natural History Nina G. Jablonski Berkeley: University of California Press.
2006.
23
Nicodemus, Fred (1965). “Directional reflectance and emissivity of an opaque surface”
(abstract). Applied Optics 4 (7): 767–775.
24
Optical immersion is a technique to diminish scattering by matching the refractive in-
dexes of components of bulk matter. Dead skin cells have a higher refractive index than the
air interstices, leading to strong scattering. This renders the skin opaque look like paper.
When you fill the air gaps with oil the refractive indices are more closely matched, thus the

15
 Part II

The Inside and the Outside

16
 Here is an exercise in phenomenology: peel an apply. Meditate on what you
“see”, your experience of the process. Reflect on what you know. Reflect on
your expectation as you start peeling. And so forth, and so forth. The world is
inexhaustible, so is your mind. In fact, they are the same, your Umwelt. Your
Umwelt is inexhaustible for you because it is what you are. This is equally
trivial as the fact that the eye can’t see itself. Things of great importance
should be taken lightly, things of little importance should be taken seriously.
In fact, everything is equally important, but one has to learn to see that. Some
mystics, some artists, some academics succeed. None of these “make it” in
their profession. Small wonder!

Tree trunk sculpture by Tim Burgess (sculpture trail in Griffin Wood)2 .

Peeling an apple reveals the inside. The apple has a skin, its outside. The
peel is a sheet that is two-sided as many—but not all—sheets are. Here the
Look at the sculpture hacked out from a tree trunk. The tree trunk has a
two-sidedness is inherited from its prior existence as a skin.
skin, usually called “bark”3 . The sculptor has cut through that and revealed
the inside. He then sculpted the interior. This object has no skin. You im-
Notice how the apple—seen as an “object” but, of course, a slow process— mediately see the interior, the wood. The “face” is like the inside of a peeled
changes as you reveal its interior. It is what happens on the dissection ta- apple. Indeed, you can easily sculpt a peeled apple into all kinds of things, the
ble, or—in historical times—when people were flayed. I experienced it as a major problem being that it is so slippery. A pocket knife and some creative
child when preparing a chicken or rabbit, or when the annual family pig was imagination suffice to turn you into a sculptor!
butchered—a great festive event. The inside is very different from the outside, The sculpture by Demetz4 is very different. Here you also look at the inside,
that applies to many slow processes. I vividly remember the buckets of pig but the sculptor has produced a novel “skin” by fraying the wood. Isn’t this
blood that we processed into “black puddingh”1 . interesting? It makes you wonder what a skin really is. Clearly a skin is not

17
merely something physical. Skins are no less mental objects than surfaces literally miraculous? Of course, science has nothing to do with miracles,
are. Our problem is often that we confuse our mental objects with things rightly so! This is unashamed phenomenology. As a scientist you should
“elsewhere”. Where? People say “in the world!”. What does that mean? ignore it—better close this book, it is poison to you (I hope).
“The world” is only seen by God’s Eye.
What humans mean by “the world” can at best be the latest successful the-
ories in physics. This tends to amaze me, because I have even trouble to
explain Dirac’s equation5 , a beautiful construction by Paul Dirac6 in 1928, to
modern intellectuals. Dirac died in 1984! Students consider it a loss of their
time to read up on history! Yet they implicitly agree on what “the world” is. I
honestly admit that I don’t know, I’m enough of a physicist for that.

This is a “clay board” sculpture.7

Painting is really not that much different from clay board sculpture. You
use light and dark instead of up and down, that’s about it, except for the fact
that you can also use colour. But the Frans Hals painting would still “work” in
monochrome reproduction. Of course, it is nicer with the colour! Frans Hals
is my favourite painter from the dutch Golden Age. It is amazing to see the
fast intuitive brush strokes that are absolutely correct. I mean “correct” in the
sense of exactly addressing the psychogenesis of your visual awareness. Yet
Frayed wooden head, Aron Demetz (1972, Sterzing, Südtirol), The Tainted
Frans Hals lets you see the brush stokes, his amazing display of sprezzatura8
(2012) — Distressed wood Here the interior has gained an unexpected novel
is very much part of the work.
skin.
Hard to imagine that a genius like Frans Hals (1582–1666) had to die des-
titute. Yet he had a (small) pension from the city (of Haarlem) and was buried
Skins of that nature can be made in many different media. The clay relief in the main church. His widow was even admitted to the local almshouse.
sculpture is a good example. Notice how the clay surface becomes a face How successful can you be? Many of his colleagues fared far better with
and gains a material quality quite unlike clay. Isn’t this miraculous? I mean mediocre, main stream work.

18
 Painting is interesting because it is purely skin, the interior being irrelevant. Many highly finished objects do too. The wood sculpture by Kvitka Anatoly
Only the paint surface, the skin, counts, it doesn’t matter whether the substrate is a case in point. Notice that there is no skin here. You look right into the
is paper, linen, copper plate, or wooden panel. interior. Notice the grain that continues right into the interior. There is only a
Paint is mainly used to hide the interior, there is something dishonest about surface here, no skin. This equally holds for many works in stone, especially
it. This is probably the reason why the Japanese object to painting wooden obvious in non-uniform marbles and breccias.
objects.

Wooden sculpture Eva by Kvitka Anatoly9 from Lugansk, Ukraine. It is of

highly finished bubinga wood.
Frans Hals Portrait of a boy.

Skins, even natural skins, often hide surprising interiors. I show some ex-
Not just peeled apples or roughly sculpted tree trunks lack a proper skin. amples of familiar food stuffs to illustrate this. Suppose you were unfamiliar

19
with these objects—and skins—would you have ever guessed the interiors? process. It makes many people feel uncomfortable.
Be honest! This is evidently an impossibility. Thus the interiors for many
skins have to be learned. We keep on learning all our lives as the industry
invents novel skins. Suppose you never met a beer can, a milk pack, a candy
wrap, and so forth. You would be left clueless.
This is no doubt of considerable biological importance. Nature is hardly
less surprising than the industry. Learning the affordances of specific skins
has to be of great survival value, incorporating it into the evolutionary heritage
desirable. I mean not short-lived skins like beer cans, but “generic” skins of
fruits, fishes, game and roots.

Fur tea cup10 .

Much stronger effects are obtained when humans are involved, for instance
when eyes are covered with fish scales and so forth. Such have become rather
cheap devices in science fiction illustrations. They work though. They have
an estranging effect. You evidently have implicit “templates” that may or may
not apply.
Some skins of familiar foods. Would you have guessed the interior if you Skins are such tricky things that they can easily be used to fool your visual
had never met instances before? awareness. Even the blind evolution of the skins of animals and plants illus-
trates that. Mimicry and camouflage play largely—though not completely—
We certainly have expectancies, as becomes evident when we meet with on skins. They have to, for the interior can hardly be changed! Humans do
unexpected cases and are surprised. the same thing by artificial means.
Meret Oppenheim’s fur tea cup is a good example. It is understood as a Skins are often simply applied to hide blemishes or blend unfortunate com-
Dada joke, but it somehow rather immediately addresses the psychogenetic binations of materials. This is a rather benign application. Often a layer of

20
paint serves as a simple and cheap skin that will “unify” the visual appearance correct as is at all possible. Of course, the models will still look strange (eerie
of an object. is the word) because they are slow processes whereas the originals evolve at
human time scales. Although it is the same with photographs, the estranging
effect is much larger because the figures are so “real”. It is a perfect illustra-
tion of the “uncanny valley”12 .

A head at Madame Tussaud’s. The basic form has been made from wax, it
can be seen on the left side. The right side has been painted. Notice the skin Kim Kardashian wax figure unveiling at Madame Tussauds. Which side is
colour, lips, cheeks and eyes. This requires a professional touch. This side more “real”?
also sports implanted hair. Usually the hair looks more “real” than the face,
partly because skin texture cannot really be applied, partly because of the The result can be judged in the image where the wax figure and its “origi-
“uncanny valley” effect. nal” are simultaneously seen. Of course, to make out the difference is much
harder in the photograph than it would be in reality! In reality it is hard to
Other uses are less benign, but are aimed to fool you. Examples abound, be fooled, it takes a professional actor to convincingly appear as a “slow pro-
I illustrate a fairly harmless example, designed for amusement. It is the case cess”!
of Madame Tussaud’s11 . The figures at Madame Tussaud’s are basically wax
models that have been painted, hair implanted, clothed and so forth.
The process is a lengthy one, done by specialised professionals. Madame
Tussaud’s goes to great length to get the shapes, the skins and the clothes as

21
Notes
1
A blood sausage called “bloedworst” in Dutch, like the Germam Blutwurst, or Swedish
blodpudding.
2
See http://www.suttonbeauty.org.uk/beauty/griffinwood/.
3
Sandved, Kjell Bloch, Ghillean T. Prance, and Anne E. Prance. 1993. Bark: the Forma-
tion, Characteristics, and Uses of Bark around the World. Portland, Or: Timber Press.
4
Aron Demetz (1972, Sterzing, Südtirol) is an Italian sculptor in wood.
5
The original Dirac equation reads

∂π(x, t)
βmc2 + c (α1 p1 + α2 p2 + α3 p3 ) ψ(x, t) = i~


,
∂t
which should be understandable if you know some basic physics, with exception of the 4 × 4
matrices β and α1,2,3 . These are idempotent Hermitian and mutually anticommute. This
renders the evaluation of the wavefunction at some point a bispinor. This fits the electron
fine, which has half–integer spin and comes in elecron/positon flavor. Dirac augments this
crazy expression with an even crazier interpretation. This was indeed necessary, because the
expression implies a sea of negative energy states, causing the structure to self-explode like
an atomic bomb! But Direct simply declares all negative energy states to be fully occupied
and is done with the problem. Then if you kick an entity out of a negative energy state you
would create an electron/positron pair. Crazy indeed, but an interesting notion. This is neither
mathematics, nor physics. It is simply crazy. Dirac deserves to be considered a genius.
6
Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac (1902–1984) was a theoretical physicist who made funda-
mental contributions to quantum mechanics and quantum electrodynamics.
7
See http://morethanmudpies.com/art-tips/
sculpture-techniques-live-course-preview-the-clay-board
8
Sprezzatura derives from Baldassare Castiglione’s Il Cortegiano. He defines it as “a
certain nonchalance, so as to conceal all art and make whatever one does or says appear to
be without effort and almost without any thought about it”. It is an important concept in art
theory. Personally I’m always struck by the sprezzatura in a work, both in art and in science.
That it is so often lacking I experience as a very sad fact. In the sciences, sprezzatura is
actively discouraged and suppressed by the main stream. But some people escape. Dirac was
hardly your courtier-type, but his sprezzatura was genuine enough.
9
See www.behance.net/Kvitka.
10
Méret Elisabeth Oppenheim (1913–1985), Le Déjeuner en fourrure, 1936
11
Anna Maria Tussaud (born Grosholtz 1761–1850) was a French artist . She was of
German descent. She is remembered for her wax sculptures. During the French revolu-
tion she prepared the death masks of people like Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette, Marat, and
Robespierre, having herself bare escaped the guillotine. Eventually, she founded “Madame
Tussauds” at London.
12
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley.

22
Part III

Shape

23
 “Shape” or “form” has to do with geometry, ignoring other qualities. In properties. To the painter a rose is a red globular object with a leafy texture,
practice this is not really possible. However, shape is an important quality the hair of a person a volumetric object with “locky” texture. You don’t paint
although it does not occur in isolation. But the same is true for possibly all the hairs just as you don’t paint the leaves of a tree. Not just because that is
qualities. The crumpled paper is a good example. It has evidently retained impossible—which it is—but because visual awareness does not present you
hardly any traces of its sheet origins. with that.
This should be important for the phenomenology of visual presentations.
Visual presentations are like hierarchical trees of Gestalts. To some extent
you can change your resolution and then there will be transitions between
Gestalts proper, Gestalt–trees, or contexts, and texture, or material quality.
Experimental phenomenology still has a long way to go here. It would be
advantageous to take a hint from centuries of artistic practice.

This crumpled paper started up as a sheet, but gained a form.

Although a sheet, it has become a volumetric object, and thus has acquired
a surface. This type of surfaces is very common. Examples include a rose,
a treetop, a bush, the hair of a person, a tangle wool, and so forth. The vol-
umetric object may be made up of points (mosquito swarm), curves (tangle
of wool), sheets (rose), or smaller volumetric objects (heap of pebbles) as the
case may be. And, of course, this may be iterated ad infinitum. Many artists
have observed that branches of trees look much like trees themselves, and so
forth.
For your visual awareness there is a target resolution on which you see ob-
jects. Super objects appear as context and sub-objects as texture, or material

24
 Consider the landscape with the tree. Suppose you had to paint it. Then
Where IS the shape? you need a notion of “the shape of the tree”. If you understand it as the
configurations of twigs and leaves then you’d better not start painting. I see it
as a blob. The sphere indicated in the image will do, the size isn’t that critical.
“Where is the shape?” is a good question for a start. It is asking the question
Notice that the “actual” surface is ragged, there are twigs sticking out of the
of where the “surface” is. Remember that surfaces and shapes are in the mind,
blob and there may be sky holes inside it. No big deal! Simply start with the
not in the world. Consider the puffer fish.
blob and articulate it—though not farther than necessary. That will paint you
a distant tree top.

Landscape with lonely tree. Notice the surface of the treetop.

A puffer fish with some initial approximations of its “surface”.
What happened here is that you created the tree top, rather than perceived
I drew two likely “surfaces”. Which one your visual awareness adopts de- it. This is typical of a great many cases. Seeing is a creative process, it is
pends upon your current situational awareness and so forth. There is evidently not a passive receiving of optical structures. That can hardly be otherwise,
much room for interpretation here. Such “interpretations” are partly forced because optical structure—as all physical structure—is utterly meaningless.
on you by the psychogenesis of your visual awareness, partly adjusted vol- “Meaning” is an intentional reference, you impose it. In seeing it you supplied
untarily in reflective thought. Notice that the surface definition is not a mere the tree top with its surface and its shape. Other people might see a different
formality, but may have consequences for your potential interactions with the tree. Other painters will paint a different tree. Next day you look at the tree
creature. it may again be a different tree1 . Maybe you feel induced to “correct” your

25
painting. That is to say that visual meaning is necessarily subjective.
Next look at the rose. It is not far away like the tree, it is seen close up. The Made and the Grown
How to paint it? A possible way to start is with a pink blob as indicated by
the blue outline. That outline suggests a globular shape that “catches” that Some things are made, others grow. The difference is categorical. For
of the rose. Indeed, by articulating your paint a bit you can turn it into a instance, clockwork is made, except for the “clockwork of heavens”.
rose image. The rose is a globular shape with leafy texture. These leaves are
subordinate forms that have some geometrical nature themselves. In this case
they are curved sheets in some overlapping, spiral order.

Clock work. Isn’t it beautiful? I think it is. This is purely artificial, for clocks
do not grow on trees and are not made in the likeness of some object in the
A rose and its overall shape. natural environment. Perhaps the rotating globe of heavens comes closest,
but that is hardly a visual equivalent of this mechanical cogwheel train.
Such a view captures the botanical formula for the rose flower. Indeed,
Christopher Dresser (1834–1904), one of the most creative designers of the Things can be made in countless ways, but the major distinctions are the
Art Nouveaux period, thought exactly like that in his floral designs. His de- assemblage of parts, tooling the outside, such as sawing, chiseling or filing
signs are all the better for it. Once understanding becomes intuitive, it be- or plastic deformation. In all cases the bulk material is not affected, except
comes a powerful artistic tool. through overall bulk treatments, such as cooking, glowing, aging, and so forth.

26
Because of that, artificial objects exist at one or a few levels of scale. In many them. This is Giambattista Vico’s VERUM FACTUM EST.
cases you could change one scale without affecting the others. Thus you can In contradistinction, we may never be able to fully understand natural ob-
often replace parts with rather different ones, or replace a vacuum tube with a jects, although—of course—we are able to understand them in multiple par-
transistor or a microprocessor. If the wooden handle of your knife wears out, tial ways. One reason is simply that natural objects, like organisms have no
you can replace it with a bone one. function. They were not designed to fulfil any function. There were no design
Grown objects are very different. They grow from the inside out, there is criteria. Maybe there is nothing to “understand”! All we can understand is
neither assemblage, nor tooling, nor plastic deformation involved. They have some of the physicochemical processes generically going on in such systems.
essential structure at all scale levels, from that of the full organism down to Most of the understanding of such objects in daily life (like your spouse, the
the sub-molecular scale. neighbour’s dog, or the tree in the lawn) is of an empathic nature. Indeed,
although thoroughly subjective, it serves us better than the sciences. Science
comes in when we get ill, and so forth. Then we repair by assemblage (ar-
tificial hips, wooden legs), addition or removal (breast implants, double chin
correction), or plastic deformation (corsets and so forth). The many drug
treatments fit in a similar story.

Some things grow others are constructed. Babies and eggs grow from the
inside out. Sculpture in stone is made by removing from the outside, in clay
by adding, or removing material, or indenting the surface. Other artificial
objects, like the clock work, are made through assembly of parts.
This is “constructed skin”, which is no skin at all, it never bounded anything,
There could hardly be a greater difference! There are many consequences nor was it designed to do so2 . This face did not “grow” as natural faces did.
of less importance here, but still of some interest. For instance, we can under-
stand the objects we have constructed, exactly because we have constructed Your vision is immediately sensitive to such things. You directly notice

27
whether something has grown from the inside out or is assembled, sculpted, see a process continued in the past. Drying mud forms a skin which cracked,
or forced. Because your vision does this on the (meagre and ambiguous) basis leaving the present situation, which looks fairly stable for the time. Only
of the optical stimulations, you can easily be wrong in this. Science fiction continued heavy rainfall is likely to change it.
movies, and so force, strive on this. In real life you are rarely fooled. If you So, perhaps surprisingly, you are visually aware of an integral skin of
are, the reaction is often negative. Positive reactions to artificial freaks are cracked mud.
usual in the case of obvious “as ifs”. This is the uncanny valley again. Compare this with the view of a city square. It has been tiled with bricks.
Your visual reaction is immediate and often to the point, even in cases not You immediately see that it was constructed by the hand of man. It is very
involving organisms. Consider the image of the Dead Vally mud flat. How difficult to construct a pavement that appears as it was formed by natural
non-organic can you get? causes. I have never seen one, despite the fact that many garden architects
throughout the centuries have tried hard.

A city square is tiled. These tiles have been patiently assembled and put into
place. City squared are not formed by natural causes. They are formed by
A mud flat in Death Valley. Look at this: you see parts but they look as assembly of parts.
belonging to an integral surface! These mud tiles are “natural” and are part
of a single skin. There is no sense of “assemblage by parts”.
These perceptions are interesting because they are apparently rather au-
tomatic, yet involve very complicated factors that are only partly and very
You are likely to see the mud tiles as natural parts of the mud flat. You implicitly implied by the optical structure. Such aspects of visual awareness
immediately see that they were never assembled. In a sense, you implicitly immediately remind me of the various Gestalt phenomena.

28
 I know of. If done so, skin, surface and interiors may change places in any
Going Bananas conceivable way. The world is as mysterious as you make it out to be. It is
not even hard to surprise yourself.
I won’t push the point, but the artificial/natural dichotomy is up for grabs!
No point whether you go lattearte (coffee art), apple art, or whatnot.

This is obviously an apple. However, it has been made into a face by cutting
some skin away. The cut-outs are not “scars”, nor “wounds”, but eyes and
teeth (notice how the apple-head bites the knife!). This is neither assemblage, Here is another apple. Notice how both the interior and the skin assume entirely
nor (strictly speaking) sculpting—the skin retains its function. Notice how novel functions. Skin becomes object (hair or teeth) and “apple stuff” turns into
the shreds of removed skin are mere waste (sheets in a shabby condition) and various objects (eye sockets, cheek bones, and so forth).
retain only a vacuous relation to the apple—or rather, “head”.
This has far reaching implications for object oriented ontology3 and phe-
No doubt, anything can be made into anything else, this is important! There nomenology. Not to speak of art. (You can easily go bananas too. In fact,
is no limit to what visual awareness may present you with, at least, none that many people already did.)

29
 is full of them. Remember that Cezanne tells us to treat nature by the sphere,
Local Shape of Relief the cube and the cone. He was right, at least the majority of artists, before and
after him, have fully agreed on the topic. Thus mathematics (formal geome-
Is a “cylinder” a possible visual object? try) is a likely tool to describe aspects of visual awareness!
So let us consider a simple question: what are possible surface shapes on
the local scale? Here local is crucial. Without it we would have to discrimi-
nate Donald Duck from King Kong. Restricting to local all points on an egg
shell have similar shapes. We consider the deviations from planar—which
represents “shapeless”—in the immediate neighbourhood of a point.
The first person to come up with a purportedly complete list was Alberti.
He lists “as the outside of eggs”, “as the inside of egg shells”, “as columns”,
“as the inside of reeds” and “like a water surface”. Intuitively this makes a lot
of sense. Can you think of alternatives?

A tree trunk. Would you say a cylindrical object? If not, what shape do you
see?

This is an important question. How else can the shapes of visual objects be These medals show Alberti4 and Gauss5 . The medals indicate that they are
described as in formal, mathematical terms? Many people are convinced that important people. In this case not generals or kings, but academics, intel-
they know what a cylinder looks like. But just consider: a perfect cylinder lectuals. Alberti was a universal mind of the renaissance, Gauss a great
does not, and never will, exist as a physical object. Even our best engineering mathematician of the nineteenth century. I show them here because both
can at best approximate a cylindrical object. In “the world” as understood in considered the taxonomy of local surface shape. Alberti came up with the
modern science, cylinders simply don’t exist. They are “ideal objects” and first purportedly complete inventory. Gauss came up with the definitive for-
can be said to subsist in Meinong’s terms. mal taxonomy.
Look at the tree trunk. Isn’t it cylindrical? Sure it is, it is in your mind.
Ideal objects indeed exist, but only as mental objects. Your visual awareness People were happy with Alberti’s list for centuries. Then Gauss did the for-

30
mal mathematics in the early nineteenth century. He ignored the planar case We are really at a quandary here. Were people unable to notice saddle
as singular—could be any shape in the large. He also ignored the cylindrical shaped patches? It would certainly seem so.
cases, treating them as mere transitions between the generic cases. He was The range of possibilities described by Gauss can be arranged in a linear
left with two possibilities: elliptic or hyperbolic6 . order which has a rather natural metric. With minor assumptions we can
calculate the relative probability of encountering a shape on a random surface.
We find that you are more likely to encounter a saddle than the inside or
outside of an egg shell.

The surface types described by Gauss in a natural linear order. Notice that
the cylinders are mere transitional cases. Thus you are left with caps, cups
and saddles.
Elliptic and Hyperbolic surface patches.

Thus the standard Bayesian explanation is of little help here. Apparently

Elliptic patches are like the inside or outside of egg shells. Here Gauss we deal with a form of collective blindness. What might be the reason?
and Alberti agree. Gauss saw no difference because he considered formal One possibility is that people tend to think mainly of “objects” and not
surfaces, essentially sheets, whereas Allberti considered skins. so much of just “surfaces”. All elliptic surface patches can bound volumes,
Hyperbolic patches are like the surface of a horse’s saddle. This case was whereas all hyperbolic ones cannot. A flask has almost necessarily an ellip-
fully missed by Alberti, although it is (historically) likely that Alberti rode tical “belly” and a hyperbolic orifice. But it is the belly that is object-like,
horses whereas Gauss did not. This is interesting! whereas the orifice is a mere appendage.
Why did people—over several centuries—not notice this? Certainly, Al- Another possible explanation has to do with the shape of the human body.
berti was very widely read, both by scientists and artists. How come that The shape of the body is due to the skeleton and the muscular masses.
nobody noticed the omission? I’m pretty sure that if somebody had done this The shape is “smoothed over” because of superficial layers of fat and—of
it would not have remained a secret. Any scientist would have been proud to course—the skin. This smoothing is more obvious in women than in men.
claim the discovery. Many artists would have spoken too, although it would The muscles are attached to the bones. Near places on the boundary where
hardly have changed their artistic practice. the bone is close to the surface there are attached muscle masses.

31
 That is why a bony part does not stick out on a well developed body, but
more often appears as a depression. The muscular masses typically appear as
elliptical patches on the boundary.
It has long been common knowledge among sculptors that one should shape
the convexities, the concavities taking care of themselves. This is evidently
in line with the anatomical discussion above. But that would imply that the
sculptor would put a blind eye to the saddle shapes.
This is almost exactly what we see in many plastic art forms, throughout
the centuries and over cultures. The Venus of Willendorff is a good example.
Notice that the sculptor only represents the convexities. Where convexities
meet we see sharp V-grooves: this is where the hyperbolic parts should have
found a place!
These really interesting observations suggest that we (Homo Sapiens I
mean) do not possess God’s Eye. We may have blindnesses to important
natural phenomena and structures. This does not surprise me, but it is good
to have such examples, as so many people tend to doubt what you try to tell
them.

This is the famous “Venus of Willendorff”. Willendorff is a small Austrian

village, the object was found in 1908. It is only eleven centimeters high.
It has been evaluated as dating from 28000–25000 BCE. This figurine was
carved during the Paleolithic Period, also known as the “Old Stone Age”.
The figurine is now in the Naturhistorisches Museum in Vienna.

32
Notes
1
I’m really understating the case here: any moment you look at the tree you see a different
tree and it you don’t look there isn’t any tree. Bishop Berkeley speculated that God’s Eye sees
the tree in the latter case. Physics has given up on God’s Eye. Quantum states only exist when
you observe them and in doing that you destroy them. In that sense you can’t see the same
electron twice, although all electrons are identical.
2
A digital sculpture by Sophie Kahn (http://www.sophiekahn.net/).
3
On “OOO” see Harman, Graham (2005). Guerrilla Metaphysics: Phenomenology and
the Carpentry of Things. Peru, Illinois: Open Court, and Timothy Morton (2013). Realist
Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality. Michigan Publishing, University of Michigan Library.
4
Leon Battista Alberti (1404–1472) was an Italian humanist author, your perfect Renais-
sance Man. He was author, artist, architect, poet, priest, linguist, philosopher and cryptogra-
pher. His shape taxonomy can be found in his Della Pittura of 1435.
5
Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777–1855) was one of the greatest mathematicians of
all time. He worked in number theory, algebra, statistics, analysis, differential geometry,
geodesy, geophysics, electrostatics, astronomy, matrix theory, and optics. His work on shapes
is Disquisitiones generales circa superficies curvas, Commentationes Societatis Regiae Sci-
entiarum Gottingesis Recentiores. Volume VI, pp. 99146. 1827.
6
Roughly, the simples deviation from planar is quadric. The deviation from the plane
z(x, y) = 0 is thus z(x, y) = ax2 + bxy + cy 2 . Does this surface cut the plane? It does when
b2 − 4ac > 0. This is the hyperbolic case, the surfaces has two intersecting straight lines in
common with the plane. When b2 − 4ac < 0 the surface lies on one side of the plane. Thus
the surface touches the plane only at the single point x = y = 0. This is the elliptic case. For
b2 = 4ac one has the parabolic case, the surface is cylindric.

33
Part IV

Optics

34
 In this chapter I’ll superficially cover some important optical factors as they
apply to the visual awareness of material qualities and shape. Marble
Optics is a branch of physics that is of obvious interest to the experimental
phenomenology of visual presentations. It is a wide ranging topic that is also Marble is a wonderful material, both for the sculptor and for the physicist.
of interest to the history of science, since almost any breakthrough in physics
was closely connected to progress in the understanding of optical phenomena.
There are in fact many “optics”. There are various types of “ray optics”,
“particle optics”, “wave optics” and “quantum optics”. There is also a type of
optics as a structural information theory, often misunderstood as the “emission
theory of vision”. All these are valid formalisms that have in no way lost their
utility through modern quantum field theory.
What is needed here are aspects of all these theories as they pertain to our
Umwelt. This may be called “ecological optics”, a term attributed to James
Gibson1 , although I would trace it to Fritz Heider2 . We still have to wait for
a textbook on ecological optics. It would be a great service to experimental
psychology.

At top the Carrara quarries, at bottom left a chunk of marble, at bottom right
a piece of marble shaped by Bernini.

Marble occurs in numerous forms. The perfectly white and uniform mate-
rial has been queried at Carrara, Italy, for centuries. Michelangelo and Bernini
used it for their famous works. It was also used for the numerous boring pieces
produced in the late nineteenth century. It is not the stone that makes the art,
it is the person.
The stone is made up of randomly oriented transparent calcite crystals. As
a result there is bulk scattering, but photons may diffuse through the stone for
several millimeters. Thus marble is a translucent white material. The surface
can be treated in numerous ways, thus the surface scattering and reflection
can be controlled to a large degree by finishing.

35
 Translucency

Many people confuse transparency and translucency, don’t! A window

pane is transparent, a glass of milk is translucent. As a result you cannot
see transparent objects against a dark background, whereas translucent ob-
jects work best against such a background. Translucency, transparency, in
bulk and combined with surface treatments are commonly used in the design
of objets d‘art.

Bernini’s Medusa, ca. 1630’s (Capitoline Museums).

This yields the sculptor an enormous scope. The head by Bernini shown
here is a spectacular example. Notice that you see the translucency and the
surface finishing. The psychogenesis of your visual awareness apparently
reckons with such optical effects. Experiencing these is fully effortless, un-
At left Lunaria Annua seed pods are nicely translucent. At right a Daum Pate
derstanding them in terms of optics requires more of an effort.
De Verre3 sculpture by Andre Deuol, taking advantage of the translucency
of the material.

The translucency has important and noticeable optical effects. For instance,
it has a huge influence upon the appearance of cast shadows. Consider the cast
shadow of the nose on a cheek, due to a beam of sunlight. Radiation will enter
the surface at the irradiated cheek and, after diffusion through the bulk, may
emerge in the cast shadow area. Such effects are evidently strongest near the
cast shadow boundary. Thus the cast shadow boundary becomes fuzzy and the

36
shadow is lightened. In the case of a human face the radiation that traveled
through the bulk will have lost high energy photons, thus will appear reddish. Surface reflections and scattering
This is an effect that has been noticed and painted for centuries.

Bronze and marble are very different materials for many reasons. Here I
talk only of optical effects, and I only refer to the conventional glossy black
finish of the bronze, obtained by chemical treatment and subsequent polish-
ing. Cordier’s “African Venus” is a typical example.

Bernini, head of an angel (detail), San Andrea delle Fratte.

At left Charles Cordier’s African Venus4 , at right Livio Scarpella’s (a con-
The Bernini angels are so breathtaking that the Pope had copies placed on temporary Italian sculptor) Ghosts Underground.
the bridge for which they were designed. They are huge full figures, only a
head is shown here. The translucency is noticeable, but so are various sur-
The bronze has no translucency at all. The radiation strictly interacts with
face effects. For instance, notice the reflections (highlights) and the contrast
the surface. Since a mirror-like surface would render the shape very unclear,
between the polished face and the rough surface finish of the hair. Also no-
the surface finish is smooth, yet slightly more diffuse than a perfect mirror.
tice the deep recessions in the curls, which appear dark through vignetting.
Since the colour is very dark, almost black, almost all one sees are highlights,
Bernini really “paints” on the marble with his tools.
essentially diffuse reflections of the light source. As a result, the most con-

37
spicuous details are the lights and these occur at the convexities, especially parts and move in any direction as the light source moves.
those that stick out and “catch the light”.
This is very different from the case of marble. Here highlights are not very
conspicuous because the surface itself is light. The most contrasty details are
the darks and these occur predominantly in the deep recesses.
Thus a sculptor will design very differently for bronze or marble. On the
bronze one paints with light on the elevations. On the marble one paints with
dark on the recessions.
Indeed, on marble you can paint with a drill, whereas the result would be
hardly noticeable on bronze.

Cherries

The highlights on glossy surfaces are indicative of local shape. Look at

the image of the cherries. An annular highlight reveals the dimple where the
stem connects. It stays put—although it may vanish—as the light source is Cardinal Scipione Borghese (1631-1632) by Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1632).
moved. It indicates a planar parabolic curve. A split highlight reveals the rut Galleria Borghese, Rome.
that divides the cherries into two convex parts. A pair moves along the rut as
the light source moves. Single highlights sit somewhere in the middle of such Bernini’s portrait of Cardinal Borghese is a wonderful example of “paint-

38
ing in marble”. Notice the dark cleft between the lips and the pupils with
“highlights”. They work great when seen from the intended distance. Bernini Surface Reflections
would draw the pupils on the marble with charcoal to get the expression just
right and an assistant would do the mechanical drilling. Bernini would even Smooth surfaces of uniform, isotropic bulk matter interact with radiation in
indicate the common bluish tint beneath the eye through concavity of the mar- a standard manner5 .
ble, he was an unusually sophisticated craftsman. Part is reflected, the remainder is refracted and enters the bulk matter. The
reflected part immediately influences your perception, the refracted part is
either lost, or somehow emerges from the surface again after some optical
interactions in the interior. If so, it will carry the signature of that in its spectral
composition.

A painted red blob, slightly developed into different directions.

Of course, all these optical effects can be combined and often are in paint-
ing. Starting with the red blob, you can render it translucent or opaque, render
its shape, and so forth, through rather simple modulations in paint. It is a good
exercise to try to list all the optical effects rendered here. Your visual aware-
ness contains qualities, not optical effects, though the psychogenesis must
some take some of these into account.
Black paint.

Superficial reflections can be decisive of the visual appearance. Look at

the car picture. It is “painted black”, but what do you actually see? You
see the environment reflected in the surface of the paint. The radiation that

39
entered the paint got lost, it was fully absorbed. The “colour of the car” in the forth. The rain washes of the dust and fills the minute cavities. As a result
colorimetric sense is determined by the environment. However, your visual the diffuse scattering is highly diminished and radiation enters the material.
awareness lets you see a black car and “explains the reflections away”. There is a shift from surface scattering to bulk scattering. This has an impor-
Most surfaces are not smooth enough to produce obvious surface reflec- tant effect on colour.
tions. This is easy enough to change by doctoring the surface. Look at the The diffuse scattering is hardly spectrally selective, so it yields a diffused
image of a street after rainfall. The water film on the pavement has taken over beam that has the same colour as the incident radiation. The bulk scattering is
and yields a specular reflection. often spectrally selective though, due to absorbing pigments in the material.
This effect is very common, and not specific for rain. You get much the That is why all colours, after a rainfall, are so vivid.
same effect when you polish stone or wood, as is often done in floors, or
furniture items. When you pay some attention you will often notice that such
polished objects can appear to “look wet”. Indeed, the optics is pretty much
the same, psychogenesis has to decide on the wetness issue from the context,
it is not “optically specified” unambiguously.

After a pour down. Samual Michlap, 2014.

You may notice that the colours in the wet street image are unusually satu- Your visual awareness has to deal with the scene, but equally with the set-
rated. This is another effect of rain that has to do with the surface treatment. ting, in this case “after a rainfall”. In the city scene image that is the core
Dry surfaces usually cause a diffuse scattering of incident radiation. This is message: this is very wet! The painting is effective because it shows the sur-
due to the presence of minute pores or clefts, adhering dust particles, and so face reflections of city lights. It is similar to the black car. The main topic is

40
“after the rain”, all else is sacrificed to that. A very effective painting—for a
range of optical reasons! Examples: Metals and Water

The Fresnel theory takes the refractive index as a major parameter. In prac-
tice one distinguishes two cases, that are conductors and dielectrics. For all
practical purposes the instances of conductors are blank metals, whereas di-
electrics are all the rest. I’ll discuss both cases, although only summarily.

Metals

A blank metal surface is a mirror. You don’t see mirrors. You see yourself
“in” the mirror.
Leonid Afremov (born 1955), The song of the rain, a palette knife oil paint-
ing.

The work by Leonid Afremov shows that many different treatments may
lead to very vivid visual presentations. The “cues” that work here are the vivid
colours—all colours are much more vivid when the materials are soaked—and
the reflections. Notice that the reflection patterns are like vertical columns,
this is very typical for ruffled horizontal mirrors.

Knife.

41
 Why is that? It is because all incident radiation is reflected by a blank roughened up that gold ground. Otherwise it would have been like a mirror.
metal. The knife is only visible because of context, surface markings, and Remember that you cannot see mirrors.
incomplete polish.
This blank metal is in many respects like the black car, except that all the
incident radiation, instead of a small fraction, is reflected.

An Art Nouveaux metal plate, probably silver-plated pewter. Because silver

gets black when exposed to air, it had to be polished often by patient servants.
The result has been that the silver plating has been partly lost. I enjoy the
look of such antiques! This example looks German, perhaps WMF8 to me.
A painting by Duccio6 and a sculpture by Brancusi7 . Both use metallic sur-
faces, Duccio in the gold background, Brancusi for the whole piece—don’t
touch it, any fingerprint will show! In a dark church a mirror would show only the candle flame you held before
the painting. In order to let the ground light up you need diffuse scattering. In
a metal, that implies roughening up the planar surface. Duccio used stamping
The Brancusi sculpture only “works” because of the reflection of the envi- tools. Many metals are roughened by sandpapering, brushing, or chemical
ronment and because of the slight yellow tinge. It is easily possible to render etching. These are standard production methods, and most metal objects are
it invisible, or make it look like plaster. Any professional photographer of designed for particular surface treatments. Pure, mirror-like reflections are
“goods” can do that. rare. They are used when the surface is used for other than optical reasons,
The gold ground in the Duccio painting is only visible because the painter like in the balls in ball-bearings, which are never seen from the outside. The

42
major exceptions are the balls traditionally hung in Christmas trees. This For bronze sculpture—the most common case—that meant either black or
latter application works because each ball is certain to catch the beam of any some shade of green.
candle in the room because of the spherical shape. A flat surface would hardly The statue of liberty is a good example. How do you think it looked like
catch any of the candle beams, thus would simply remain dark. when the parts were delivered from the foundry? It had a yellow-reddish
Most metal surfaces are not “blank”. Indeed, if they are it won’t last long. bronze colour. You can see that on contemporary paintings.
Almost all blank metal surfaces oxidize and are soon covered with an oxide
layer. Some metals, like aluminium, oxidize so fast that they really need an
oxide layer as a protective coat. Only the “noble” metals like gold resist
oxidation for centuries.

Rusted barbed wire. What you see is the rust, not the iron.

Miss Liberty appears green. What you see is an oxide layer.

Look at the barbed wire image. This is iron! Of course, it doesn’t look
like the (blank metal) iron at all, what you see is an oxide layer. For iron it
Most metals look better when covered with a chemically stable oxide layer. is usually called “rust”. It looks way better than the blank metal, and indeed
Gold and silver are the main exceptions. Some metals are never seen without renders it visible.
an oxide layer, because they would “burn” in the air. Thus oxide layers are a
good thing!
Indeed, metal sculptures are almost always covered with oxide layers.
Artists use chemical treatments in order to arrive at the surface they fancy.

43
 Water

The image of the lake shows a slightly rippled water surface. What you
see is the reflection of the sky in the water. The various local surface attitudes
yields variety because different parts of the sky are reflected, and the reflection
factor depends upon the attitude too. Notice that you indeed see the reflection
of the cloud, but that is has been “chopped up”.
Because of perspective foreshortening, there is a strong bias in the statis-
tical distribution of surface element spatial attitudes. One way this shows is
that the reflected cloud is much nearer to the horizon than its original in the
sky. You may need to make a little drawing to make this clear to yourself.

Speckles.

If you are a mathematician you will appreciate that the speckles are all the
time created and annihilated in pairs. It may be hard to see that because things
change so rapidly, but in some cases you can actually witness the pair creation
and annihilation. This has to do with the distribution of surface curvature. The
pair creation or annihilation occurs on the curves of inflection of the water
surface.
The third lake image is interesting because it shows both reflection and
refraction. At the foreground the refracted beam is diffusely scattered by the
bottom of the lake and emerges from the surface again. Notice the change
of hue with height in the picture plane. It yields a pictorial illustration of
Fresnel’s reflection laws.
That is the case because for a horizontal surface at floor level the height
A lake. in the visual field can be immediately translated into obliquety of the rays.
Thus, in the foreground, your visual rays hit the water surface almost head-on,
When the various directions allow for it, you will see reflections of the sun. whereas, in the far ground, they almost graze the surface. That has immense
These are so strong that they usually dominate the impression. The water consequences for the Fresnel theory. Nearby you look mainly into the water,
surface appears dark and you see a flock of “speckles”9 . Although frozen in at the far distance you cannot penetrate it, but see mostly sky reflections.
the photograph, they of course, are in continual movement. Thus, nearby you see the bottom of the lake through the water, whereas in

44
the distance you see sky reflections. Of course, the whole problem is compli-
cated by the fact that the bottom is less deep nearby than far off, at least in Skins as optical machines
this particular scene.
Many organisms, both animals and plants, have remarkable skins. They
can be remarkable (and often are) for their colour, pattern, texture, but here
I want to remark on some examples that exploit sophisticated laws of optics,
often at the nanoscale!
A familiar example are fish scales. They come in great variety and are
remarkable optical machines.

Another lake.

Moreover, the water itself absorbs spectrally selective, especially if it is

suffused with all kinds of biological organisms and dead matter. This makes
it very hard to account for “the colour of the water”. A general account is
impossible, but in any special instance you can no doubt account for your
observations. It makes for good exercise. Next time you stand by a lake
consider reflecting on your visual presentations.
Fish scales often look “metallic”, these ones silvery

Fish scales10 are optical machines based on precisely dimensioned and po-
sitioned guanine crystals. The scales are part of their defence mechanism.
Fishes are very vulnerable to predators because the latter may attack from any
direction, also above and below. This is very different from our problems,

45
because we can usually feel fairly safe when we are sure to have covered our Because these animals live in air they have a slightly easier problem than the
ass. Predators below are especially problematic because these would spot the fish. They can effectively use air spaces for scattering and thus can rely on
fish silhouetted against the light that seeps in from above. So most fishes vul- open array structures.
nerable to such attacks cover their body with arrays of mirrors that redirect Fish scales are actually harvested, and used as an ingredient in certain nail
any light that may come from below downwards. This works in shallow wa- polishes.
ters. The reflectors are dielectric mirrors based on periodic layers of guanine A spectacular example are the metallic blue colours of the wings of Morpho
crystals. This is why so many fishes look metallic. butterflies. They are much sought for by collectors, used as jewelry and in a
variety of more or less artful designs. They are indeed very durable, because
composed a chitin and air, both chemically very stable materials.

Some remarkable skins. Fishes, insects and birds use antenna-like dielectric
structures, next to absorbing pigments and screening. The chameleon uses
chromatophores based on absorption and screening. It can change colour to Blue Morpho wing structure.
what the occasion calls for. Several other species of fishes and invertebrates
like squids can do the same.
You need an electron microscope to gain an impression of the optical ma-
chinery in the scales that cover the wings. They are huge antennae arrays
Fishes are not the only species that discovered optics. One finds remarkable easily as complicated as modern astronomical radio telescope arrays, and that
instances of optical machinery in the skins of birds, reptiles and insects too. at a very minute scale.

46
 Organic skins are extremely complicated organs from numerous Notes
perspectives—including the optical.
1
Gibson, J.J. (1950). The Perception of the Visual World. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
2
Heider, F. (1925). Ding und Medium. Symposium, 1, 109-157; Heider, F. (1930). Die
Leistung des Wahrnehmungssystems [The function of the perceptual system]. Zeitschrift fr
Psychologie, 114, 371-394.
3
See http://www.warmglass.com/pate_de_verre.htm.
4
Charles Henri Joseph Cordier (1827–1905) was a French sculptor of ethnographic sub-
jects. He was official sculptor of Paris’s National History Museum. Here he made busts for
the new ethnographic gallery. These are now at the Musée de l’Homme, Paris. His “African
Venus” became well known. It was first submitted as a plaster cast to the Paris Salon of 1848.
5
So called Fresnel reflection. Any introductory book on optics will fill you in on “Fres-
nel’s Laws”.
6
Duccio di Buoninsegna (c. 1255-1260 – c. 1318-1319) was a Siennese painter. He is
often made out to be the father of Sienese painting.
7
Constantin Brâncusi (1876–1957) was a Romanian sculptor. He made his career in
France as a pioneer of modernism. Brancusi is doubtless one of the most influential sculptors
of the 20th–century.
8
WMF AG stands for Württembergische Metallwarenfabrik. It was founded 1853 in Geis-
lingen an der Steige, by 1900 it was the world’s largest producer of Jugendstil household
metalware. Albert Mayer (director from 1884 to 1914) was a major designer in the WMF Art
Studio.
9
Koenderink, Trieste in the mirror, Perception, 2000, volume 29, pages 127–133.
10
T. M. Jordan, J. C. Partridge. & N. W. Roberts, Non-polarizing broadband multilayer
reflectors in fish. Nature Photonics 6, 759–763 (2012).

47
 Part V

Mechanics of sheets and skins

48
 Notice that there is hardly such a thing as the mechanics of surfaces. There If so, then you will also know that it is often necessary to make cuts. Using
is such a thing as the mechanics of skin, however, it is highly dependent on cuts and gluing enables assembly, a construction method that is quite different
the structure of the interior bulk matter. Here I mainly remark on some simple from bending.
properties of sheets.

Peter Gentenaar, floating paper sculpture.

The piece by Peter Gentenaar is constructed from paper. In this case the
paper was probably sculpted under the influence of moisture. A dry, flat paper
sheet is less malleable, for instance, you cannot force it into an egg shell
shape. Folds on body.
A planar sheet can be bended into a variety of shapes without stretching it.
There will always be a congruence of straight lines that will remain straight.
An example is a congruence of mutually parallel lines, this leads to general When you roll a piece of paper into a cylinder, it becomes very stiff. That is
cylindrical shapes. Another example involves a congruence of lines intersect- the case because the generators of the cylinder, the straight lines that remained
ing in a common point, this leads to general conical shapes. These examples invariant under your bending, cannot change shape. Either something has to
will be obvious to you when you have ever attempted paper sculpture. give, or the roll will retain its shape under applied forces and thus be stiff.

49
You can easily put a brick on an upright cylinder rolled from a sheet of letter Euler buckling was the first form demonstration of “symmetry breaking”.
paper, I often used this as a classroom demonstration.
Of course, the alternative possibility is that “something gives”. This is
known as buckling. A rolled paper cylinder will buckle in a variety of ways
depending on whether you “break it” or “twist it”.

Giovanni Strazza (1818-1875), The Veiled Virgin.

Buckling is a phenomenon discovered by Euler1 as he investigated the be-

haviour of beams under compression along their elongation. For not too large
forces the beam will simply get a little shorter as you apply force. But at a Aert van den Bossche, about 1500?
certain critical force the beam will suddenly bend and lose its straight shape.
From then on more force will simply increase the bending. Notice that the
beam could bend out in any direction whereas the problem is symmetrical: Buckling is often a good thing. For instance, a leaf of grass is not crushed

50
under a snow load, it simply buckles and gets rid of it without breaking. Buck- The painting by Aert van den Bossche represent a simpler case.
ling has this “judo” character. Here the drapery falling from the knees shows pure bending and buckling.
On the clothed body we see all these phenomena of bending and buckling, Most of the morphology can be mimicked by buckling empty beer cans. I
complicated by gravity and the mechanical constraint of the body2 . have used that in demonstrations to good advantage. You can buckle a can
with your hand in front of an audience, and after the act pass it around, as it
will retain its new shape.
The detail from Bernini’s Rape of Proserpina shows an instance of me-
chanical deformation of human skin. Notice the dimples made by the fingers,
showing tension of skin and mechanical properties of muscle and fat below
it. Visual awareness reads it effortlessly, yet the physics is quite complicated.
Would you believe this is a mere piece of stone? Amazing!

Bernini’s The Rape of Proserpina, c. 1622-23. (Galleria Borghese, Rome)

Bernini was only 23 years old at the completion of the work!

“Drapery” has always been a major art form, comparable with a “fugue” in
music say. A spectacular example is the sculpture by Strazza. Notice how the
Virgin’s face “shines through” the drapery. Although perhaps not mechani-
cally possible the sculpture “reads” remarkably well. Here mere surface relief
somehow represents optical phenomena that relate to material qualities, rather
than shape.
Such cases are extremely involved and not at all fully understood by the
vision sciences. Even the pure phenomenology is hard to capture.

51
Notes
1
Leonhard Euler (1707–1783) was a Swiss mathematician and physicist.
2
The buckling of folds in drapery is a remarkably interesting and complicated phe-
nomenon. Nowadays computer graphics mainly relies on simulation of the basic physics,
which works, but takes all of the fun out of it. What I mean is that these simulations cannot
replace understanding. The result of a simulations is much like the rabbit pulled out of the
magician’s hat. A good feeling for the effects of buckling on folds can be obtained through
experimenting with empty beer cans. Just try to bend them and twist them and see what
happens. Typically nothing happens until the thing very suddenly and unexpectedly changes
shape. You will be able to mimic most buckling effects seen in the drapery of the Northern
Renaissance with your beer cans. This will give you some appreciation for the remarkable
vision of these “primitives”.

52
 Part VI

The Representation of Human Skin

53
 Consider the painting by Cabanel. It is a great painting in the sense that it
measures 130x225cm. However, it is perhaps less appreciated today than it
was at the time. I show it here because of its generous display of human skin.
Such academic paintings are interesting from many perspectives. For in-
stance, it is visually quite obvious that the main model was drawn when pos-
ing on a display table. It doesn’t even look like she is lying, perhaps she was
posed on a soft blanket. You see some effects of gravity, but these don’t push
her on the ground.

Left Eric van Straaten (contemporary Dutch); right Saint Lucy, Iglesia de La
Concepción Santa Cruz de Tenerife.

Throughout the centuries this has been a big deal. Religious sculptures
were gessoed1 and painted, often by the best professionals. Nowadays artists
Naissance de Venus by Alexandre Cabanel (1823–1889). It was painted in paint 3D printed objects with rather the same effect.
1863, now at Musée d’Orsay, Paris. It was the great success of the Paris You may notice a distinction in what may be denoted “acceptable taste” for
Salon of 1863. want of a better term though.
Saint Lucy, in my view the true patroness of vision research, looks naively
demure. Even the fact that her eyes were cruelly gouged out is only related
One wonders how Cabanel handled the putti. Did he hang children from to by what she carries on her platter. Eric van Straaten’s creature looks inten-
the ceiling of his studio? No doubt he used models, because these academic tionally weird and might be an illustration taken from a pedophile postorder
painters needed to get everything “right”. catalogue.
But look at the skin. Does it look like “real skin” to you? Opinions are That painting skin is not easy becomes clear when you follow the evolution
bound to differ, to me it looks like good, though not spectacular, painted skin. of skin representation in computer graphics. This also serves to introduce
Painted skin is not real skin. Sometimes it looks that way though. some of the relevant phenomenology and optics.

54
 Bernini: Costanza Bonarelli (c. 1630). Museo Nazionale del Bargello in
Death mask of Goethe, unfortunately burned after a bombardment at Frank- Florence, Italy.
furt end of WW–II

Now look at Bernini’s portrait of Costanza Bonarelli2 . This looks much

Consider the death mask of Wolfgang von Goethe for a change. Don’t better! What happened here is that, due to the polishing of the marble, we
worry about the disfiguring black blotch due to an unfortunate accident during have specular reflections. The surface looks semi-glossy, as skin does. This
the second world war. Does it look like skin? No! Why not? Eh . . . , it looks was done in second generation computer graphics skin. People loved it! Now
more like paper. Exactly! skin looked like plastic.
The death mask is plaster that probably received some surface treatment
What is missing? An obvious quality is translucency. This is something
at the time. Whatever the cover was, it was changed in the fire due to the
that can even be achieved in stone, as the alabaster piece shows. Now it looks
bombardment. It is fortunate enough that we are only left with the burn marks.
as if there is actually some flesh beneath the skin. This was implemented
Anyway, the surface is diffusely scattering, indeed almost like paper,
in the third generation computer graphics. It made a huge difference, albeit
In computer graphics this effect is obtained by the Lambertian approxima- at the cost of considerable computation. One has to simulate the diffusion
tion to diffuse surface scattering. It applies reasonably well to paper, not so of photons through the volume. Of course, one takes numerous engineering
well to skin. Your visual awareness is sensitive to that. This is how dead short cuts that violate the physics, but are hard to detect. This makes sense.
people look.

55
 the lingerie advertisement. Doesn’t it really looks like skin? Yes and no.

Real human skin in an lingerie advertisement.

Why is that? Well here the full texture is captured at a fine scale. The
texture is due to pores, minute hairs, and micro-chromatic modulations due
to the subcutaneous circulation. No one could paint that, or sculpt that. No
one would actually want to do so. The result would look much worse than a
Madame Tussaud puppet. It would be far beyond the uncanny valley, and at
the wrong side of it. It would appear like a beautifully stuffed human body, a
A Decision, Alabaster, Italy, 1870–1890.
piece of conceptual art in the worst of taste. It might actually sell big on the
international art market—I’m not even kidding.
Are we done? I would say no! Why not? Well, eh . . . , the alabaster skin Apparently we need another, novel approach. Indeed, in the visual arts
still looks hard, you can see it is stone, not skin. What to do then? Most of several routes have been explored. Here I will only mention an aspect that I
the resources of the optics tool box have been used up. happen to have worked on myself.
Of course, when looking closer, there are many qualities of human skin that Notice that optics is not everything. In painting you can also doctor the
might be emulated in paint or computer graphs. Look at the skin displayed in pictorial representation. A head start was made by Leonardi da Vinci who

56
introduced the notion of sfumato. Edge quality can be used to create atmosphere, shape, depth, and material
Sfumato is a painterly technique that has hardly any roots in ecological qualities.
optics. It has a strong effect on the psychogenesis of visual awareness though. One way to use edge quality is to suggest a certain softness of materials.
It is nowadays often named “edge quality”. Controlling edge quality is a That makes it a tool that allows one to avoid the appearance of hardness of
major technique in painting and drawing. skin. Look at the Renoir painting of a young girl. The child has a wonderfully
soft skin.

Leonardo’s Gioconda.

“Edges” are transitions between qualities such as tone, hue, or texture. Auguste Renoir, Margot Berard (1879).
Edges come in a full spectrum of width and strength. From a formal, mathe-
matical perspective any image can be understood as a superposition of edges, Notice that Renoir hasn’t even done much on the skin as such, the effect
a given image can be analysed into a spectrum of edges and these can be syn- is almost purely due to a heavy sfumato. The edge quality is well controlled,
thesised again so as to regain the image. If one applies some pick and choose for instance, notice the contrast between the edges used to paint the eyes and
in the synthesis one obtains powerful image processing methods. The painter those used for the cheek. The effect on visual awareness is immediate.
somehow does an analysis of edges by eye measure and a synthesis by paint- I think Renoir actually discovered an optical cause for the sfumato effect.
ing. During the painting analysis and synthesis go hand in hand. The aim is At first he made studies of roses in preparation for his nude studies, but later
to produce an image that has intended effects on a viewer’s visual awareness. he discovered peaches.

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 The latter two effects are due to a combination of perspective and scattering.
Consider how your visual rays will strike the surface of the peach. Before
they hit the skin, they have to traverse the atmosphere of scattering hairs. The
effect of scattering and partial occlusion grows with the distance the ray has
to travel through the atmosphere. This distance depends on the obliqueness
of the ray.
If you look straight at the surface the ray simply meets the thickness of
the atmosphere. As the obliqueness is increased the distance will grow. A ray
that runs parallel to the surface—as oblique as it gets—will have an arbitrarily
long way to go. If the surface were flat an infinite distance! Because peaches
are spherical it will be a finite distance, but one much larger than the thickness
of the atmosphere.

Renoir, Peaches.

Peaches have a skin that grows numerous soft hairs, sticking out from the
skin and forming a tenuous “atmosphere” as it were. This atmosphere strongly
scatters incident radiation in a diffuse manner. Yet the atmosphere is not at all
opaque, you can see through it, in that sense it is similar to the atmosphere of
the earth.
This has very important optical effects.

◦ the surface colour of the peach is affected through a thin, somewhat

bluish veil; A puffball.

◦ the contour is slightly hidden and “fuzzified”, leading to a soft edge;

As a result, an oblique ray will meet many more scattering events than a
◦ in many illuminations the contour gains a luminous halo. ray that hits the surface head–on. This makes that the effects of the scattering

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atmosphere are most pronounced at the contour. Here we have an optical different from peaches. When radiation hits the surface head-on the spaces
effect that specifically targets visual contours. between the hairs become effective light traps3 , causing the reflectance to be
The effect of the scattering atmosphere can be conveniently studied in the unexpectedly low.
puffballs produced by dandelion flowers. Different from the peach they have
no interior, all there is is the scattering atmosphere. Depending on the illumi-
nation the visual impression changes. They make good objects to study the
effects of scattering and perspective.
A man-made material that exploits the same principles is velvet. Velvet is
a woven tufted fabric with an evenly distributed, short dense pile. It is very
smooth to the touch and has striking optical properties. They can be seen on
the image of a velvet dress.

Albrecht Dürer4 ’s Madonna with the monkey (1498).

A velvet dress. Notice that it “looks velvety”, that is soft.

The peculiar optical properties of velvet have intrigued artists for centuries.
The light contours are a striking visual property. They are caused by the An example is Albrecht Dürer’s Madonna with the monkey. The Madonna has
scattering of the tips of the hairs. In velvet the hairs stand nearly at right a velvet sleeve. Compare the Madonna’s arm with the legs of the Child. The
angles to the surface and are very dense, this makes them optically somewhat legs and the underarm are cylinders in similar spatial attitudes, they are illu-

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minated similarly. But notice that the arm and the legs are shaded oppositely!
This “wrong” shading of the arm causes your visual awareness to present it
as “velvet”, a material property.
You can see this trick used in many paintings. If you overdo it the velvety
impression makes place to one of glow. In Dürer’s print the arm is at the edge
of appearing self-luminous, the velvet effect “only just” works.

Two face profiles in different illumination.

Now let’s apply these discoveries to human skin. Consider the nature of the
contours in the two profile (or three-quarter) views of young women’s faces.
Obviously, the illumination is very different for the two photographs5 . In the
right one there is one source behind the model, a “hair light”, whereas the
main illumination is diffuse and frontal, slightly from above. The hair light
causes a nice halo about the head. But notice that you also get a thin halo
about the skin! Although the woman certainly doesn’t need a shave, her skin “Vogue Beauty”.
is covered with numerous short hairs.
Notice that the effect of hairs is not visible in the left photograph, where

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the illumination is not very different from the viewing direction. The source Notes
is small so we have a sharp beam slightly from the side. (Notice the position
1
and size of the highlight in the pupil and the cast shadows of the strings of Gesso is a white paint mixture consisting of a binder mixed with chalk, gypsum, and
hair.) perhaps pigment. It is used to prepare a “ground” for painting on a variety of substrates,
including wood and stone. A thick layer of gesso smoothes over the ground and can be very
In many illuminations the tiny hairs will scatter radiation towards the precisely tooled, for instance by sand-papering. It was used almost universally on painted
viewer. This is especially noticeable at the contour, because of the perspec- sculptures, for instance on religious art. In case the sculpture had to be gilded a layer of red
tive effects. As a result one often notices that the contour is light, where one shellac assiette was applied over the gesso .
2
would have expected it to be dark. For instance, an egg in the same illumi- At the time of the creation of the bust Bernini was madly in love with Constanza, the
nation would show a dark instead of a light edge, for the egg has no hairs. wife of one of his pupils. Later, as he saw his brother Luigi leave her house, he send a hood
to cut up her face with a razor and tried to kill his brother who fled into a church. Bernini was
Although this might be a minor optical effect, it has huge visual impact. It pardoned by the Pope, and Constanza imprisoned for lewd behaviour. Times were different
makes the skin look “velvety” and soft. then.
The effect can be caught in painting, but obviously not in sculpture. 3
A “light trap” is a cavity of longish, usually conical shape, a slightly tapered tube say,
Almost all the effects that serve to cause the visual impression of human with blackened interior. Light enters the trap at one end, the tube is closed at the other end.
skin can be seen in the “Vogue Beauty” image. The photograph is a real A photon that gets in has very little probability to ever get out, so the orifice of the light
traps looks darker than the blackest paint. A box with a small hole, its interior walls painted
professional job that must have taken major planning and probably many ex- black, works just as well. The hole looks blacker than the darkest paint. In black velvet the
periments. Notice how different this skin looks from that on the Cabanel spaces between the hairs act as such light traps. That is why black velvet also succeeds in
painting. looking blacker than the blackest paint and is often used by professional photographers for
that reason.
4
Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528) was a German painter and printmaker. He was also an
amateur mathematician and theorist of art. He visited Italy, first during 1494–95. The style
of the Virgin and Child echoes that experience, whereas the background shows a scene from
the environment of Nuremberg where Dürer lived. It is a somewhat strange mixture.
5
In portraits you can see the main sources reflected in the pupils of the eyes. This usually
allows you to “see” the illumination scheme right away. But watch out: modern photogra-
phers often “Photoshop” their portraits and are especially keen of getting the highlights in the
eyes “right”. In this cottage industry it is just as important as the ever present breast correc-
tions. After some practice you will be able to spots such incongruencies — in my view in
very doubtful taste — immediately.

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 Part VII

Conclusions

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 This discussion of surfaces, sheets and skins goes itself not more than skin
deep, merely scratching the surface. In my view, it is an important topic in
the experimental phenomenology of visual presentations. There is evidently
a connection with what might be termed “ecological optics”, but this is in no
way a causal connection.
The phenomenology of artistic presentation reveals that similar visual pre-
sentations can be induced by diverse means, not necessarily closely connected
with any physics at all.
Here lies a huge field of scientific endeavour for the taking! I hope that the
challenge will be taken up seriously at some point in the future.
Understanding the nature of visual awareness surely implies an in depth
understanding of how the daily environment looks. So far, the experiments
due to painters over the centuries have proved to be far more revealing than
the efforts of vision science and experimental psychology. I see no pressing
reasons for that.

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 “eye measure” proof of the parallelogram of forces.
OTHER E B OOKS FROM T HE C LOOTCRANS P RESS :
The key argument is
1. Awareness (2012) de cloten sullen uyt haer selven een eeuwich roersel maken, t’welck
2. MultipleWorlds (2012) valsch is.
3. ChronoGeometry (2012)
4. Graph Spaces (2012) Simon Stevin was a Dutch genius, not only a mathematician, but also an
5. Pictorial Shape (2012) engineer with remarkable horse sense. I consider his “clootcrans bewijs” one
6. Shadows of Shape (2012) of the jewels of sixteenth century science. It is “natural philosophy” at its
7. Through the Looking Glass: on Viewing Aids (2012) best.
8. Painting to Marble (2012)
9. Experimental Phenomenology: Art & Science (2012)
10. The Spirit of the New Style (2013)
11. World, Environment, Umwelt and Innerworld (2013).

(Available for download here.)

A BOUT T HE C LOOTCRANS P RESS

The Clootcrans Press is a selfpublishing initiative of Jan Koenderink. No-

tice that the publisher takes no responsibility for the contents, except that he
gave it an honest try—as he always does. Since the books are free you should
have no reason to complain.

T HE “C LOOTCRANS ” appears on the front page of Simon Stevin’s

(Brugge, 1548–1620, Den Haag) De Beghinselen der Weeghconst, published
1586 at Christoffel Plantijn’s Press at Leyden in one volume with De Weegh-
daet, De Beghinselen des Waterwichts, and a Anhang. In 1605 there appeared
a supplement Byvough der Weeghconst in the Wisconstige Gedachtenissen.
The text reads “Wonder en is gheen wonder”. The figure gives an intuitive

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