The migration of the aura
or how to explore
the original through its fac similes
*
A chapter prepared by Bruno Latour & Adam Lowe
for Thomas Bartscherer (editor)
Switching Codes, University of Chicago Press
(2010)
Final version –after editing by CUP
To Pasquale Gagliardi
*
We thank the participants at the dialog held in Venice in San Giorgio on “Inheriting
the Past” for many useful conversatins and especially the director of the Cini
Foundation, Pasquale Gagliardi.
108- Adam’s Veronese –Switching codes
2
Something odd has happened to Holbein's Ambassadors at the National Gallery
in London. The visitor does not immediately know how to describe her malaise.
The painting is completely flat; its colors bright but somewhat garish; the shape of
every object is still there but slightly exaggerated; she wonders what has happened
to this favorite painting of hers. "That's it," she mutters, "The painting has lost its
depth; the fluid dynamics of the paint has gone. It is just a surface now." But, what
does this surface look like? The visitor looks around, puzzled, and, then, the
answer dawns on her: it resembles almost exactly the poster she bought several
years ago at the Gallery bookshop, and that still hangs in her study at home. Only
the dimension differs.
Could it be true? She wonders. Could they have replaced the Ambassadors by
a fac simile? Maybe it's on loan to some other museums, and, so as to not
disappoint the visitors, they put up with this copy. Or maybe they did not want to
trick us, and it is a projection. It is so flat and bright that it could almost be a slide
projected on a screen… Fortunately, she composes herself enough
to not ask the
stern guard in the room whether this most famous painting is the original or not.
What a shock it would have been. Unfortunately, she knows enough about the
strange customs of restorers and curators to bow to the fact that this is, indeed, the
original although only in name, that the real original has been irreversibly lost and
that it has been substituted by what most people like in a copy: bright colors,
shining surface, and above all a perfect resemblance with the slides sold at the
bookshop that are shown in art classes all over the world by art teachers most
often interested only in the shape and theme of a painting but not by any other
marks registered in the thick surface of a work. She leaves the room suppressing a
tear: the original has been turned into a copy of itself looking like a cheap copy, and no
one seems to complain, or even to notice, the substitution. They seem happy to
have visited in London the original poster of Holbein's Ambassadors!
Something even stranger happened to her, some time later, in the Salle de
la Joconde in Le Louvre. To finally get at this cult icon of the Da Vinci code,
hundreds of thousands of visitors have to enter through two doors that are
separated by a huge framed painting, Veronese's Nozze di Cana, a rather dark giant
of a piece that directly faces the tiny Mona Lisa, barely visible through her thick
anti-fanatic glass. Now the visitor is really stunned. In the Hollywood machinery
of the miraculous wedding, she no longer recognizes the fac simile that she had the
good fortune of seeing at the end of 2007 when she was invited by the Fondazione
Cini to the island of San Giorgio, in Venice. There it was, she remembers vividly,
a painting on canvas, so thick and deep that you could still see the brush marks of
Veronese and feel the sharp cuts that Napoleon's orderlies had to make in order to
tear the painting from the wall, strip by strip, before rolling it like a carpet and
sending it as a war booty to Paris in 1797 — a cultural rape very much in the
mind of all Venetians, up to this day. But there, in Palladio's refectory, the
painting (yes, it was a painting even though it
was produced through the
intermediary of digital techniques) had an altogether different meaning: it was
mounted at a different height, one that makes sense in a dining room; it was
delicately lit by the natural light of huge East and West windows so that at about
5pm on a summer afternoon the light in the room exactly coincides with the light
108- Adam’s Veronese –Switching codes
3
in the painting; it had, of course, no frame; and, more importantly, Palladio's
architecture merged with admirable continuity within Veronese's painted
architecture giving this refectory of the Benedictine monks such a trompe l'oeil depth
of vision that you could not stop yourself from walking slowly back and forth and
up and down the room to enter deeper and deeper into the mystery of the miracle
[see the photo essay].
But here, in the Mona Lisa room, even though every part of the painting
looked just the same (as far as she could remember), the meaning of the painting
she had seen in Venice seemed entirely lost. Why does it have such a huge gilt
frame? Why are there doors on both sides? Why is it hanging so low, making a
mockery of the Venetian balcony on which the guests were crowding ? The bride
and groom, squashed into the left hand corner, seemed peripheral here, while in
Venice, they were of great importance, articulating a scene of sexual intrigue that
felt like a still from a film. In Paris, the composition made
less sense. Why this ugly
zenithal light? Why this air conditioned room with its dung brown polished plaster
walls? In Venice, there was no air-conditioning; the painting was allowed to
breathe by itself as if Veronese had just left it to dry. And, anyway, the visitors
could not move around the painting to ponder those questions without bumping
into others momentarily glued (queued) to the Joconde turning their backs to the
Veronese.
A terrible cognitive dissonance. And yet there was no doubt that this one,
in Paris, was the original; no substitution had occurred, no cheating of any sort --
with all its restoration Veronese would certainly be surprised to see the painting
looking as it does, but that's different from cheating. She remembered perfectly
well that in Venice it was clearly written: "A facsimile". And in San Giorgio there
was even a small exhibition to explain in some detail the complex digital processes
that Factum Arte, the workshop in Madrid, had used to de- then re-materialize
the gigantic Parisian painting, carefully laser scanning it, A4 by A4,
photographing it in similarly sized sections, white light scanning it to record the
relief surface, and then somehow managing to stitch together the digital files
before instructing a purpose-built printer to deposit pigments onto a canvas
carefully coated with a gesso almost identical to that used by Veronese. Is it
possible that the Venice version, although it clearly states that it is a facsimile, is
actually more original than the Paris original, she wonders? She now remembers that
on the phone with a French art historian friend, she had been castigated for
spending so much time in San Giorgio with the copy of the Nozze: "Why waste
your time with a fake Veronese, when there are so many true ones in Venice?!"
her friend had said, to which she had replied, without realizing what she was
saying: "But come here to see it for yourself, no description can replace seeing this
original… oops, I mean, is this not the very definition of 'aura'?…". Without
question, for her, the aura of the original had migrated from Le Louvre to San
Giorgio: the best proof was that you had to come to the original and see it. What a
dramatic contrast, she thought, between the Veronese and the Ambassadors, which
claims to be the original in order to hide the fact that it is an expensive copy of one
of its cheap copies!