Film and glass don't have the same versatility that eye and brain do, in combination. When you look at the world with your eyes, the landscape doesn't in fact go dark because you see a lot of sky. So to judge the accuracy of the old masters to what you can see of the world by what you can get out of a camera without washing out the sky, well, it's bollocks, is what it is. Likewise is claiming photos exposed for sky are somehow more true than those exposed for ground. If you prefer the old masters to the impressionists, fine. No one got sunlight through a window into a darkened room better than Vermeer. But if you want to claim that Rubens' palette is somehow more true than Monet's, well, you haven't walked through a rhododendron grove lately, that's all.

As for Van Gogh, if you think he was trying for the reproduction of surface color as we see it, you simply haven't been paying attention. I can't think of a painter who was more brilliant than Van Gogh at his best (and you absolutely have to see the paintings themselves rather than prints to get this), but you've only to look at one of the self-portraits in which he uses skin tones of green or yellow to know he wasn't aiming at faithfully reproducing surface colors. Van Gogh is also a painter who is rather woefully misrepresented by popular media. If you only see "typical" images of irises and starry nights, you don't realize that there wasn't really any such thing as a typical Van Gogh.