Down underground in the College Inn Pub on the edge of the University of Washington, it looks like a Caravaggio. The painter Joe Park and I are sitting in a carved-up wood booth under an interrogation-style lamp. The carvings include toast and a cock and balls. In Europe this morning, a clutch of scientists have announced their intention to dig up the bones of Leonardo da Vinci in order to reassemble the skull for comparison to the Mona Lisa's face, in the hope that forensics can be harnessed in support of speculation about Leonardo depicting himself as a woman, liking to crossdress, being queer, etc. The trouble is that Leonardo's bones were displaced by the destruction of a church during the French Revolution, and then when the mess was cleaned up, what was reburied was probably but maybe not Leonardo's bones, and so the first order of business will be figuring out whether the bones are Leonardo's in the first place. On this night in Seattle, Park and I have another theory, about why Leonardo's images are draped in sfumato, or smokiness: He's hiding his use of optics, yeah. We'd be as crazy devotional as the rest of them if we didn't know we were.

We've just come from a lecture given by Charles Falco, at the University of Washington across the street. Falco is the physicist who worked with British artist David Hockney in developing the claim that artists as early as Jan van Eyck—around 1425—were using optical devices like mirrors and lenses, which would explain the sudden jump of the Renaissance from flatness into an almost photo-realism. The theory isn't new; it was the subject of a controversial book by Hockney published nine years ago. Some people felt like Hockney was demystifying the paintings; I felt like he was remystifying them with all his theatrical eavesdropping on the studios. The lure of eyewitnessing: It's why you'd want to use optics in the first place—to get as close as possible, to touch the bones.

The best part of the talk was the science jokes (I can't tell them here; this is a family newspaper). As we walk out, and it's a cold night, I ask Park if he's convinced. I've heard Park casually referred to as the best painter in Seattle, and I have no argument with that. "Oh, there's no doubt it's true," he says. Hands in pockets, he explains that he happens to be at work on a painting for the upcoming Armory Show in New York that includes a distorted version of the famous golden chandelier from van Eyck's Arnolfini portrait—a Rosetta stone of the Hockney-Falco Thesis. As he says this, I know we're both having a vision of the chandelier. I imagine it hovering over our heads as we cross 15th Avenue in the dark.