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COMMONS
A painting from the 1860s has a detail seemingly swiped
from modern times: a woman hunched and walking with her eyes
seemingly glued to a phone.
As a man crouches in wait to spring a flower on her, she doesn’t
even look up.
Yup, nothing really seems to have changed beyond the
nineteenth century garments.
Picture: Hajotthu / Wikimedia
Commons
Glaswegian Peter Russell spotted the ‘iPhone’ on a visit to
the Neue Pinakothek[1] museum in Munich
where the painting – The Expected One by
Ferdinand George Waldmüller – hangs.
But it turns out she is not a bored time-traveller swiping her
way through historical Tinder (we bet that’s a
wasteland). Rather, she is engrossed in perusing a hymn book,
according to the gallery[2].
Russell, who now occasionally blogs about culture,
told Motherboard[3]:
What strikes me most is how much a change in technology has
chance the interpretation of the painting, and in a way has
leveraged its entire context.
He added:
The big change is that in 1850 or 1860, every single viewer
would have identified the item that the girl is absorbed in as a
hymnal or prayer book.Today, no one could fail to see the resemblance to the scene of
a teenage girl absorbed in social media on their smartphone.
Post Views: 2
References
- ^
Neue Pinakothek
(www.pinakothek.de) - ^
gallery
(www.pinakothek.de) - ^
Motherboard
(motherboard.vice.com)