Painting Aura

            In The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction Walter Benjamin puts forward the idea of the aura. The aura of something is an intrinsic part of it, the emotional or spiritual part of it. With distance and reproduction the aura is lost. Replicas can never hope to attain the same aura as the original, and therefore they are all less than it. In my opinion this is wrong. Just because something is not the original does not mean it can never attain a similar aura. Each replica of an original grows its own aura through its experiences or the experiences it causes in others. This leads to each object becoming unique, its own original.

            In episode 1 of Ways of Seeing by John Berger he introduces us to The Virgin of the Rocks by Leonardo DaVinci which is kept at the National Gallery in London. He then goes on to declare that there is another copy of the The Virgin of the Rocks kept in the Louvre in Paris. Both English and French art historians work tirelessly to prove that the copy in their country is in fact the original and the other is a replica. By proving one is definitively the original over the other they seek to enhance it by giving it the aura of authenticity – that this painting is an original touched by the hand of DaVinci himself. By doing so they also seek to diminish the other painting by diminishing its aura.

            But would proving authenticity really enhance or diminish the aura that much? The one in the National Gallery has probably been visited by millions of people each one who has thought they were looking at the original. The same has probably been done with the copy displayed in the Louvre. Despite not knowing which the original is each painting has been viewed as the original and many have experienced it with the aura of the original. Each of these paintings has furthermore developed an aura of their own through their individual histories. Even if one of them was definitively proven to be the original this aura created by the painting’s history would remain. For everyone who has seen the painting before the aura for them would remain the same. For the people who would come to see the painting it would still have the aura it had built up throughout its history. So for these paintings the aura is not solely dependent on which painting is the original. Each painting has built up its own aura during its history which cannot be dissociated from the painting. No matter which side, French or English, discovers their painting is the original and the other is a fake the paintings will always have their own auras built up through their experiences.