Facsimilies

Facsimiles

Last week in Manhattan, at the Ambassador Hotel, were shown 20 reproductions of famed paintings. These were not prints, photographs, copies, but facsimiles, produced according to a new and secret formula, to be known as Belvedere Facsimiles. Made in Vienna by one Ulf Seidl, painter, aided by scientific associates, their purpose was to reproduce, not merely the drawing, the light and shade, the color, the texture of the original painting, but to reproduce perfectly and precisely all these details, so that the appearance of the reproduction should be identical with the appearance of the original. In this purpose the Belvedere facsimiles succeeded to an amazing degree. From the walls of the small gallery in which the facsimiles were displayed, Da Vinci's Mona Lisa smiled down with an inscrutability which seemed no different from that which she bestows upon her admirers in the Louvre. The Blue Boy, Gainsborough's polite urchin, wore his own shiny silk breeches and not a shabby imitation. The cracks across a Michaelangelo fresco were so perfectly reproduced by the lines across the facsimile, that, until inspected from a distance of less than six inches, it seemed possible to trace them with an inserted fingernail. In actual finish, the facsimiles are smooth; although they catch and reflect light with the warm lustre of oil paints or the glitter of watercolors they do not reproduce roughnesses of brushwork. But such roughnesses leave tiny shadows against each other; for the eye, this is the only evidence of their presence. These tiny shadows are duplicated in Belvedere facsimiles.

The process by which Belvedere facsimiles are produced is a carefully guarded secret. In outline, it consists of a combination of photography succeeded by a chemical process which echoes, to microscopic detail, upon a similar material and in most cases a surface of the same size, the colors of the original. The effect, while it has none of the impersonal cold quality of a copy or print, misses being a duplicate of its original by the same distinction that makes a phonographic reproduction, however much perfected, not necessarily inferior to but indubitably different from its model. Facsimiles are not however intended to be imitations.