Buboni, Lost In The Woods, parts 212 - 215

Richard Britell June 6, 2012

212. By 1975 the Vatican had set up a fellowship at the University to provide funds, a workshop, and time and working materials and in exchange the University made specific copies at the Church's request, and so gradually the most famous pieces were replaced with excellent copies.

213.  The church did not publicize these changes, and no one noticed them,  for one simple reason, the modern tourist has usually never seen the original, and the original was never illuminated by electric lights. When the modern-day tourist, or art historian stands in front of an old master painting and puts a coin into a slot to turn on the blazing electric lights, he is lucky to emerge without serious damage to his retinas, and he will have little recollection of the painting he was attempting to view.

214. At the end of the article about the consequence of the Lazlio Toth attack was a long list of the paintings the Vatican had replaced with reproductions, third on the list was one Raphael, replaced in 1974, which was of great interest to Thomas Aimes for his article on Buboni.

215. This Raphael, "Madonna and Child", the vary same painting that Buboni claimed was the beginning of his "Theory of Historical Distructivism." 

Buboni, Lost In The Woods, 184 - 187

Richard Britell May, 30, 2012

184.  Historical note on Buboni's "Destructivist Theory". Buboni said of it, "The germ of the idea struck me in a church in Rome where I had been admiring a Raphael Madonna. I was thinking about how perfect the color of the tan background was to bring out the blue drapery, and how these two colors most perfectly combined to accent the colors of the flesh of the face."

185.   Just then, I heard an old woman praying, she was sitting in a pew, behind me.  I did not speak Italian but it was easy to understand what she was saying. She was pleading with the Mary of the painting to preserve her husband's life, the said gentleman undergoing surgery that morning.

186. Just then I felt the profound shallowness of my artistic appreciation of that Raphael, whose true meaning I was destroying in the process of admiring it as a work of art.

187.   At the entrance of the church I passed a plastic statue of Mary with hundreds of candles burning in front of it; it was the sort of plastic statue produced by the millions from casts, in which the features have a sand-blasted meaningless vague character like cheap funeral monuments, and I thought, "We have taken  away all the meaning from these things, and now  it comes down to this."