Errors of Fact and Reasoning in Four Papers by David Stork on “ The Hockney - Falco Thesis ”

In this document I point out numerous fundamental errors in David Stork’s four recent papers in which he disputes evidence David Hockney and I have presented about use of optical devices by Renaissance painters. Stork’s papers are filled with technical-sounding language that provides them with a veneer of scholarly credibility (lichtkroon, trefoils, sfumato, chiaroscuro, Purkinje shift, Poggendorff illusion, cross-ratios, Gaussian probability density, etc.). However, the contents include only a very deceptive selection of a small portion of our evidence. As a result of omissions, misrepresentations, and outright errors, his four papers are not only wrong, they are so fundamentally misleading as to violate any acceptable standard for academic work. Scientific manuscripts can be controversial, and their content can require additional testing, but they cannot be based on systematic omission of relevant evidence, one-side selection of data, be misleading, or known ahead of time to be incorrect. As I show in this document, Stork’s four papers all fail this standard by a wide margin.