DETROIT - Wayne State University's Department of Physics and Astronomy will host the 2013 Vaden W. Miles Memorial Lecture on April 4, 2013, at 4 p.m. in the Law School's Spencer M. Partrich Auditorium. Guest speaker Charles M. Falco, professor of optical sciences and physics and chair of condensed matter physics in the College of Optical Sciences at the University of Arizona, will present "The Science of Optics: The History of Art."

Renowned artist David Hockney made the revolutionary claim that artists of the prominence of van Eyck and Bellini must have used optical aids to create their paintings. In a long and productive collaboration between a scientist and an artist, Falco and Hockney discovered a wealth of information to support this claim.

The Hockney-Falco thesis recognized that certain elements in specific paintings were the result of the artist using concave mirrors or refractive lenses to project images onto the canvases. Manipulation of light allowed the artist to capture elements of realism in their paintings.

Falco discusses the imaging properties of the "mirror lens" and the implications this work has for the history of science and the history of art, along with the modern fields of machine vision and computerized image analysis.

Reserve your seat for a fascinating look into how scientific tools of the present help decipher the artistic works of the past.

The Vaden W. Miles Memorial Lecture is free and open to the public, however, registration is required. To register, please visit http://events.wayne.edu/2013/04/04/vaden-w-miles-memorial-lecture-the-science-of-optics-the-history-of-art-pro-45846/.

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Wayne State University is one of the nation's pre-eminent public research universities in an urban setting. Through its multidisciplinary approach to research and education, and its ongoing collaboration with government, industry and other institutions, the university seeks to enhance economic growth and improve the quality of life in the city of Detroit, state of Michigan and throughout the world. For more information about research at Wayne State University, visit http://www.research.wayne.edu.