The viewfinder

I stumbled upon this while rummaging in some old Albertini recordings; the picture caught me off balance: an iron hand reached into my chest and squeezed my heart for an instant. The shadow on the cheek of the dying woman; the white pearl against her pink neck; her open mouth gasping for air; the skin on the hands, transparent like fish gulls. I couldn't stop gazing.

I kept thinking that I had seen it of course; the technique was unmistakable: Italian, mid 1600's. The scene must have been the death of Cleopatra (what else). For a long while I thought this may have been something by Lavinia Fontana and kept flipping through her catalogues, to no use. I also googled images of Cleopatra and finally stumbled upon it. Here:


The painter is Guido Cagnacci. The painting is 153 x 168,5 cm, dated to 1659, and hangs in Kunsthistorisches in Vienna.

The contrast between the two pictures -- the fragment and the whole -- could not be greater. It is interesting how the choice of what one shows, what one places in his viewfinder so to speak, makes for a totally different picture. I can't help feeling that the designer of the CD who had decided what bit of the picture to cut -- and how -- was much more successful at composition than Guido who had gone to all the trouble to paint the thing.

Of course, the cut fragment shows us the best part of the picture -- skips the less than successful crying maids for example; but more importantly, the magnification of the fragment shows us more technical detail -- the texture of the canvass, the near-transparent clarity of the skin of the girls; it shows us more of the pleasure of seeing a picture, which is as much a physical object as it is a bunch of color patches and therefore rarely done justice to by reproduction.

I wonder whether Russell, who dedicates so much time to color patches in his philosophy of perception, has ever looked closely at a painting. But I do not wonder at all whether Walter Benjamin has looked closely at paintings: Work of art in the age of reproduction makes it clear he didn't.