D’ja hear about this guy who took a bunch of absurdly high-resolution pictures of the Mona Lisa? The news story plays up the so-clichéd-it-makes-my-head-hurt “enigma” angle — why no eyebrows? why that smile? — but the interesting part is buried down near the bottom.
“Age, varnish and restorations performed by later conservators’ hands have resulted in a painting that, in its permanent home behind bulletproof glass at the Louvre, appears saturated with heavy greens, yellows and browns,” AP writer Marcus Wohlsen tells us. “Cotte created a reproduction of the Mona Lisa with the light blues and brilliant whites he thinks represent the painting in its original form.”
Companies like Technicolor and Colorlab and Cinetech have huge operations dedicated to performing just the sort of digital restoration on motion pictures. They take the original camera negatives, scan them into a computer and use software to figure out what each frame would have looked like when it was brand new. The resulting images are recorded back to film, creating an new “master.”
But isn’t it a little different with a painting? I mean, say somebody takes the Mona Lisa down off the wall and scans it. Over a year or more, experts painstakingly create a digital version that perfectly represents what the painting looked like the day it was finished.
Then they take the original, chuck it in the bin, and replace it with a framed print of the digital restoration.
Wouldn’t that be a travesty? I mean, paintings are more than just what they look like. Paintings aren’t merely pictures. They’re things. When you look at the Mona Lisa, you’re looking at the actual canvas and the actual paint, brushstrokes made by the actual hand of the actual artist nearly five hundred years ago. By scanning it into a computer you can preserve the color of the painting, but that’s all. None of its other properties — its texture, the way it catches light, its smell, for cryin’ out loud — can be reproduced that way.
But movies are different. Movies are nothing more than light and sound, and sometimes they’re just light. There’s nothing tangible there. If you scan the camera negative from Gone with the Wind and create a digital master, that master will have all the important properties of the original, stored in a medium that won’t face or age or decay. You’ve captured the essence of the thing.
Not a painting, though. There’s more to a painting than what it looks like.
That’s why I don’t believe those little hand-held electronic book reader device things will ever take off. Sure, you’ve captured the words, encoded them into a computer where they can be stored. But you haven’t captured the essence of the thing. The feel of the paper. The weight of it in your hands. The sound of a page being turned, a cover closing. And yeah, it has a smell. Even brand new books have a smell. A smell that can’t be stored or reproduced, and that’s destined to change over time.
The Mona Lisa has properties that can’t be reproduced by a photograph. And a book has properties that can’t be reproduced by one of those plastic-and-silicon gadgets the gadget-companies keep trying to sell us.
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But in the sense that paintings are atoms, films and pictures are atoms too, its just that most people don’t deal with the atoms as much as the information. To a photographer, the smell of the negative, the chemicals, the print itself may mean as much as the information encoded in the picture.
And if the difference between a photograph and a painting is the labor and time put into the creation of a unique piece, what about the recording of a live concert. Does it really capture the essence of the piece, regardless of the fact that it captured all the relevant information about the music itself?
Not that I’m disagreeing on paintings and books, just arguing the fine subjective line between atom- and information-appreciation.
John Knight
Monday, October 22nd, 2007, 2:20 pm
Those are excellent points, John.
I guess if I were going to try to generalize it — which is purely an exercise in recreational thinkery, with no practical application at all — I’d say that the distinction to me is how much of the experience of consumption can we capture? If you go to the movies and watch a first-generation print of Gone with the Wind, and then go to another theater and watch a print made from a digital master, I’d say you’re getting the whole experience in both cases. But there’s a big difference between seeing the Mona Lisa hanging on the wall and seeing a picture of the Mona Lisa hanging on the wall.
The smell of the chemistry might mean something to a photographer, but I’m not sure it means anything to me, as the consumer of the photographer’s art. If that picture was shot on film and then scanned into a computer before being printed for display, it makes no difference to me.
Music is different, though. Can anybody argue that listening to a choir performance on your iPod is the same experience as listening to it in St. Paul’s Cathedral? Even if you close your eyes, we’re talking about categorically different experiences. We can try to capture the whole thing, but we won’t succeed.
Of course, audio recording and reproduction has evolved to the point now where we can get pretty darned close. Close enough, surely, for most of us.
But my whole point of this post — assuming there was one — was to question the value of the work Cotte did in scanning the Mona Lisa. Sure, as a research exercise, it has value. But does it mean anything to me, personally? If I see a picture of this color-corrected and remastered Mona Lisa, is it the same as seeing it in person? Surely not. So I see the whole thing has being of limited utility, from the point of view of the art-consuming audience.
But hey, that’s just me. It’s a Monday, and I tend to ramble on Mondays.
Jeff Harrell
Monday, October 22nd, 2007, 2:27 pm
Our relationship to art … either film, novel, painting or scuplture … is really a personal and emotional experience. And the more symbolic of the arts … painting, sculpture, the more subjective we are as audience to finding meaning in the work.
IMHO this is why there was so much controversy on the restoration of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel paintings … years of darkening via smoke from candles/incense gave the paintings a somberness, a brooding quality. To see them in the bright, vibrant colors that he used in trying to make an engaging narrative really knocked some for a loop.
I wouldn’t want the original Mona Lisa ‘tossed out’ but I’m fascinated with all the information that has been ‘hidden’ by years, and what it can tell us about Da Vinci’s intent in his own narrative.
Darleen
Monday, October 22nd, 2007, 3:50 pm
“Thinkery”. What a nice word.
And I tend to agree with Jeff on this one. (Of course, as an art major, I’m a bit biased.) But like the others were saying, you can no more capture the essence of a painting with a photo than you can capture the essence of a live concert with a tape recorder. It just doesn’t work that way.
I think that the main difference between paintings and photography is that a photo can be reproduced time and time again, nearly without effort. But paintings…paintings are one-of-a-kind. I’m not saying that photography isn’t art, I’ve seen some photos that move me nearly to tears alongside paintings that leave me cold, but they’re much easier to reproduce. Nothing is “lost in translation,” so to speak.
And I like Darleen’s point—it would be nice to see what it may have looked like when it was first painted. It would be awesome to see the things that the years have taken away.
Sammi
Tuesday, October 23rd, 2007, 12:44 am
If there’s one thing I’ve learned about human nature in my short lifetime thus far, it is that we are both curious and sentimental, hopelessly so. And that really seems to be what’s in conflict in this case. Personally, I’m very curious to SEE what the Mona Lisa looked like when it was completed, but I would be devastated if someone actually messed with or replaced the painting itself. It’s a classic, an icon. It’s instantly recognized by almost anyone. I don’t really feel that the years took away anything, but rather added to its character. If all it needed was a cleaning to reveal its original colors, like the Sistine Chapel, I wouldn’t complain. But what we’re talking about here, I think, is simple wear and tear… and fading of the paint, which I think should be left right the hell alone. Where it’s been and what it’s been through is, in my opinion, as vital to its legacy as WHAT it is. If someone wants to digitally enhance the thing to show us what it might have looked like when it was new, I think that’s cool as hell, just leave the original alone.
A note about the Sistine Chapel: I saw it when I was 16 and I remember thinking, as I looked up at the ceiling, “It looked darker in the Renaissance Art book I found in the attic.”
Well the tour guide covered this for us. The controversy attached to the restoration of the Sistine Chapel rooted from a fear that we were going to lose certain details in the cleaning process. Experts decided that Michelangelo had used a technique called “buon fresco”, which simply means the paint went on before the plaster was completely set. The result you get is plaster saturated with paint. It’s the comparative equivalent of a baked on paint job vs. the cheaper sprayed on air dried method at an auto body shop. One’s virtually indestructible, the other is, well, cheap. The solvent that they used to clean the ceiling would strip away absolutely everything on that ceiling that wasn’t buon fresco, which means that if Michelangelo had gone back and touched anything up after the plaster had fully set, and we’re talking mere hours, or simply changed his method during the 4 1/2 years he worked on it, those details would have been lost too, and may very well have been for all we know. We don’t know if we lost any of his work in the cleaning process or not. We DID lose all of the touch-up work that was done on the ceiling over the years.
Elissa
Tuesday, October 23rd, 2007, 11:26 am
I don’t want to break into a very good comment thread, but there are means of reproducing the texture of a painting as well. I believe it is possible to create a “restored” Mona Lisa with a very good approximation of the texture.
Granted, this would not replace the original work of art, but it would be close.
Derek G.
Tuesday, October 23rd, 2007, 11:44 am