• Korean Association for Visual Culture
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• v.23
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• pp.329-368
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• 2013

This thesis investigates the relationship of the 18^th century European landscape painting and the scientific (optical) instruments like Camera obscura and Camera lucida. Based on the fact that some landscape painters, 'veduta painters', at that times might have used or surely used these optical instruments in their sketches/drawings, it explores the reasons for using them and their working process with them, and analyses the advantages/disadvantages here as well as the aesthetic problems in the cases of the Italian painter Antonio Canaletto (or Canal, 1697-1768), the British topographic artist Thomas Sandby (1721-98) and the British chemist/optician Willian Henry Fox Talbot (1800-77). Advantages of using Camera obscura/lucida are rapidity in drawing, truthful representation of nature/reality and 'accurate' fulfilling of perspectival structures. But partly 'inaccurate' or simplified depictions as disadvantages can be traced in drawings/sketches made by using these instruments. Another problem lie in the subordination of the artistic work to the technical devices, but for artists still remain the creative working process in painting like coloring, tone and chiaroscuro etc. Therefore, it can be maintained that the optical instruments have played a role of the subsidiary tool as an aid to painting.