Revelin Camera obscura
Revelin is a house of lights. Appearing through closed shutters, the outside comes inside in the form of coloured light. The natural phenomenon of camera obscura is an unforgettable experience.
Φ Revelin Destination & Community Initiative in cooperation with Muzej Staroga Grada Stari Grad Museum
Revelin is the location for the 2022 photographic collection, ‘Nihil Occultum: Nothing is hidden’, by local artist Vilma Matulić. It captures the camera obscura at Revelin, a house inside the Tvrdalj Castle in Stari Grad, island of Hvar, Croatia. The images are of breath-taking beauty, appearing through small openings around the closed shutters.
Camera obscura is the natural phenomenon that occurs when light enters a dark room through a small opening.
Camera obscura at the Tvrdalj Castle
Image: Engraving of the principle of the pin-hole camera obscura in the 1646 Ars magna lucis et umbrae by Athanasius Kircher.
The light forms an image on the wall opposite the opening. It is a projection of what is outside, but upside-down and reversed, owing to the way light travels in straight lines. The physics is quite simple. It is how cameras work. Human vision is also camera obscura, but the brain flips the upside-down image without us noticing. Revelin is ‘camera obscura’ on a large scale.
It is rare to find camera obscura naturally. We are not sure why it is happening at Revelin. But it is wonderful to see.
The beautiful camera obscura images are of the area that surrounds Revelin. We see the Tvrdalj Castle, the Renaissance palace built by Croatian nobleman and poet Petar Hektorović (1487-1572).
This historic fortress is a Grade 1 protected Croatian monument, inscribed in UNESCO’s list of World Heritage Sites. In Hektorović’s poem, Fishing and Fishermen’s Conversations (1568), the description of his romantic garden, the fishpond and its stone inscriptions is of a place essentially little different to today.
The Tvrdalj Castle is the number one attraction for visitors to Stari Grad (TripAdvisor, 2021) and its beauty has ‘won over’ Instagram (Journal.hr, 2021).
The camera obscura at Revelin was recently featured in an article in Boutique Homes.
The images appear at Revelin when the exterior shutters are closed and the light outside is bright. If you don’t want to see them, simply block the small hole on the side of the shutter. But we feel this is unlikely.
“It is impossible to express the beauty [of camera obscura] in words. The art of painting is dead, for this is life itself: or something higher, if we could find a word for it,” Constantijn Huygens II, 1622.
Camera obscura has intrigued some of the greatest minds in history, such as Aristotle, Ibn al-Haytham, Leonardo da Vinci, Vermeer and John Locke. It is an ideal subject for photography, as can be seen by the popularity of works by leading artists Abelardo Morell and Marja Pirilä. Abelardo Morell has commented that Revelin’s camera obscura is ‘unusual indeed’.
Vilma Matulić’s Nihil Occultum collection shares this extraordinary, rare phenomenon at Revelin, in the UNESCO Renaissance Tvrdalj Castle, Stari Grad. Photographers get ready - don’t forget the tripod.
Φ Revelin Destination & Community Initiative in cooperation with Muzej Staroga Grada Stari Grad Museum