Schlagwort-Archive: Copy

2007: The Facsimile of Veronese’s The Wedding at Cana

Commented by: Matilde Cartolari

In 1563 the rear wall of the refectory of S. Giorgio Maggiore’s monastery in Venice was decorated with the large-scale painting The Wedding at Cana by Paolo Veronese. Taken to Paris after the fall of the Venetian Republic in 1797, the painting was never returned. In 2007 the bare wall of the refectory in S. Giorgio Maggiore was filled with an extremely accurate digital facsimile of the missing painting held in Paris. Such replacement challenges our notions of authorship, uniqueness and originality, while indirectly testifying to the sense of loss created by the displacement itself.

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1905: Photograph of the Laikom Palace after the German victory over the Kom Kingdom

Commented by: Mathias Fubah Alubafi, Margareta von Oswald, and Verena Rodatus

In 1905, despite fierce resistance from the Kom Kingdom, the German colonial officer Hans Caspar zu Putlitz led his troops into the capital city of Kom (one of the kingdoms in today’s Western Grassfields of Cameroon) in 1905 and looted the palace. These looted elements are today in the possession of the Berlin’s Ethnologisches Museum. How can the pair’s absence be dealt with in an exhibition context today? And how can the pair’s absence be evaluated today, from an art historical perspective from Cameroon?
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