DETAIL

Detail is my pencil drawing copied from an image in a 1952 edition of a book on Leonardo da Vinci’s work. At the time of making, I imagined my drawing was an exact reproduction of Leonardo’s Sala Delle Asse. I imagined that, through fidelity to the reproduction, I would come to ‘know’ this work, assimilating it through verisimilitude. Such was the blinkering effect of the book’s apparent authority that I assumed that Leonardo’s work was a monochrome drawing roughly the size of the page. In fact this work is a coloured fresco painted in tempera that covers the ceiling and vault of a room in the Castello Sforzesco in Milan. My own work stemmed from shaky assumptions based on a partial view and visual information showing a poor restoration obscuring Leonardo’s work, and, perhaps, his intentions. As more recent restorations reveal new dimensions of the work, shifting its shape and its meaning, my own version of this work also alters its meaning, raising questions about the impregnation of modern sensibilities in any reconstruction and also about whether such mimetic representation can extend beyond a personally inflected inquiry.