In my college days, all of our studies of art history were conducted in the form of slides projected on a wall in a darkened room. This is actually a very curious way to study art, as light projected on a white wall doesn’t actually look anything like what a painting does in real life. This manner of viewing also takes away the importance of scale and texture and leads to a skewed impression of what art actually looks like. (A few years later, it also lead to an embarrassing incident in a major museum where, on a search for Vermeer, I walked right by the painting I wanted to see. In slide lectures, it was always wall sized. I had no idea the real painting was only about 8 inches high.)
I think that looking at art on the internet may be an even worse way to view art than the slide lectures back in college. The two images above are versions of a drawing by Henry Fuseli, found by using Google image search. Stand back for a moment and notice what a radically different first impression each one gives.
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