ica. Rom oeping Veruca SOB Gernaidegalern Alte Meister Dresden Net Maja. 1757-1800 (ston canvas; 98 191 em ‘Musto Nacional del Praca Madd Ecuara Mane (yng, 1863 ‘Man with a Golden Helmet, removing the atteibution to Francisco de Goya or Rembrandt van Rijn, respectively, those works cease to be objects of veneration, Even a small doubt that they are not by the artist's hand will re- sult in the loss of public affection. In the uncertainty over whether a work is or is not by Leonardo, the “faithful” will remain aloof, keeping an emotional distance, so long as the unanimous opinion of the scientific community (the priest to whom André Grabar refers) fails to off cially consecrate the image. Yet again, even the name of the artist is not, in itselia sufficient condition for consecration, Forexample, Ane} Warhol's eccentric personality, perennially in the meds spotlight, was clearly a determining factor for the sue ‘cess of his images. One cannot say the same for Hens Matisse, who led an uneventtully long, bourgeois fe.» whose Dance has left a global legacy. id how This brings us to two last factors: whats said a itis said Goya's Naked Maja is an example of + work that has become an icon because it describes something scandalous, in this case within the context of a mullet nial series of depictions of the nude Venus—which Goyas hands was transformed from a classical deal into a realistic figure, complete with pubic hair and & name identifying the model. We might add to this grouP Grant Wood's American Gothic and Edward Hoppe'®Ros sommee + Nighthawks. Both paintings communicate the quint essence of America, respectively the rural America of the Midwest and the urban America of the East Coast. ‘They are therefore images with precise and very strong messages that succeed in enduring, even leaving the art- ists in their shadow. In other words, the recipe for success is complicated; there are some basic ingredients, as we have seen, but the mixture can vary. There is, however, a fundamen: tal moment to which we can trace the success of all of these images: the 1960s, when low-cost reproduction, advertising, travel, and popular access to exhibitions and museums resulted in a massive expansion of the visual panorama, now available to all. Since that time, posters, television, movies, and packaging have brought images into an arena where all are potential objects of veneration—as if in flashback to the sixth century, when prevailing taste consecrated what would henceforth be considered “miraculous images” Indeed, it was during the 1960s that certain icons unexpectedly emerged, others n (particularly conee for \cient sculptures) reappeared, and still others consolidated their fame. In short, the mass reproducibility of images, far from causing them to lose their aura, as Walter Benjamin predicted in his celebrated essay, in factenhances their sacred allure and, consequently, the desire for pilgrimage, to see in personon owas 1s Museu Schwann the originals so often admired in reproductions as the quintessence of beauty. As during the Roman, Renais- sance, or Mannerist eras, the copy reverberates and am- plifies the fame of the original, arousing a desite to stay as close to it as possible—the same impulse that compels. one to touch a holy relic. Whereas the Louvre counted a million visitors each year during the 1960s, by the 1980s its audiences had grown to around three million, arriv. ing at approximately ten million in 2012. The ubiquity of the image, which now exists everywhere—in the pages of newspapers, on television, on candy boxes, on bill boards. Brants it the power of an increasingly popular and niversal fetish, one that can establish itself trans ly in cultures the world over: Given this force of attraction, a work of art must com- pete, to no greater or lesser degree than sacred images, with the reverse: the fury of iconoclasm, the most sen: sational cases of which were recorded in the twentieth Century, with targets ranging from Michelangelo's Pieta to Rembrandt's Night Watch. The latter has been struck some three times, and on the last occasion was attacked with a knife and defaced with sulfuric acid by a man who maintained that he was acting by divine command. The mentally ill individual who shot at Leonardo’ Virgin and Child with Saine Anne and the Infant Saint John the Baptist at the National Gallery in London also claimed a hotline to God; he said he acted because the Madonna had looked at him askance. The Frenchman Pierre Guillard, who attempted to attack The Virgin with Angels by Rubens, had an identical obsession. “I couldnot tolerate the Virgin looking at me in that way, so 1 decided to kill her’ he stated Ificonoclasm has shifted from the sacred to the pro fane in museum-temples, the fault lies in large part with publicity. During the Belle Epoque, advertising graphics ‘were just emerging; they occupied an area contiguous to that of art. This can be seen, for example, in the extremely elegant Art Nouveau posters designed by Alphonse Mucha for Bisquit Dubouché & C. cognac or by Privat Livemont for Van Houten cocoa. By the 1920s Earnest Elmo Calkins, the great American advertising execu- tive, could quite rightly assert that the art of advertising, which reached millions of people, was in fact “the poor gallery man's pictur In this context, certain artistic icons were immediately‘wa ia rat identified as preferential spokespersons, ‘The Venus de Milo, for example, was used to sell cereal in the 19105, aspirin in the 19208, corsets and pens in the 19308, speakerphones in the 1960s, and mineral water in the 19808, But it was during the 1960s, when there was an explosion in consumer goods, that the gh nd take be: tween advertising and art became truly cieeul appropriating advertising lar, with art dvertising in turn, Indeed, by this point id become the don nt visual landscape, ane that artists could no longer ignore. Andy Warhol élearly understood this when he painted his Brillo boxes, and Coca-Cola bottles Ht history nonethel Campbell's Soup ¢ The classics of less continue to, be reintroduced and reinvented through modifi ations of posture and gesture nd through semantic interpre1-17 : ssic is a book that has never finished say ¢ has to say” according to Italo Calvino, ‘The the ancient is not an idea that emerged thing that ack to the Renaissance, when the Italians copied, sted, and modified models of classical sculpture, and i Created new works of art in direct dialogue their ancient sources. And indeed even then, the oriety of a w k could be called truly universal only recognizable am sometimes only through a telling detail tions, ied and repurposed in new composi ichelangelo did this, for example, on the ceiling ce hs for eample onthe ealing fra tine Chapel: in his painting of the Crea “nsformed a tor: °f God the F 80 from Laocodn and His Sons into that ather. Similarly, Botticelli’s Birth of Venus row oncou aco Medici’ evokes the Medici Venus, but with the face Vespucci, the object of his patron Giuliano And eve and Imperial eras had done the same, copying Greek love. earlier, Romans of the late Republicat sculpture This attitude of (vertical) competition with the au of Western a thority of the model is typical Asian n of the iconographic Western art art prefers the (circular) repetit canon, without modification, And so in icons often emerge precisely because of confrontation with the authority of the model. Yet because of this, the competition must be fearless, embracing parody, des ecration, irony, manipulation, or publicity. It is this con: fident and unprejudiced stance that allows the work to live over the centuries. Otherwise the work will fail