Pliny the Elder’s Natural History contains the founding myth of Western art: Butades of Sicyon’s daughter, Kora, in love with a young man about to leave, traces his shadow on the wall by lamplight. Her father presses clay into the outline and hardens it in the kiln. Drawing and modelled sculpture both begin there, in a shadow cast by a lamp.

Hunter Dukes’ collection for the Public Domain Review gathers roughly twenty paintings and prints that retell the scene between roughly 1625 and 1850, and reads them as a single argument about what images cost.

  • The motif’s heyday was short. Robert Rosenblum dates it to about 1770–1820; Marina Warner suspects it survived until the 1840s and died “just as appearances began to be created and fixed by the new instrument of light, the camera”
  • In Alexander Runciman’s version (1773), Cupid guides Kora’s hand, and the couple never meet each other’s eyes. Her lover is already a memory even as he sits beside her
  • Jean-Baptiste Regnault (1785) stages the same unmet gaze, while a dog may already be fooled by the new image and lean in to be nuzzled by a shadow
  • Joseph Wright of Derby (ca. 1782–84) follows a variant in which the lover is asleep and never knows what she did
  • Joseph Benoît Suvée (1791) makes it darker: the man is awake, grasping her waist, and she is unmoved — her attention entirely absorbed by the representation

The essay’s theoretical spine is the claim that a shadow was never neutral. Hans Belting: “A Greek understood his shadow as a premonition of his shadowy existence in the underworld… when he would no longer be able to cast a shadow but would himself be a mere shadow.” George Didi-Huberman traces the secular scene back to the acheiropoieton, the icon “made without hands” like the Manoppello image or the Shroud — what touches the god becomes untouchable, “constituted forever as an object of desire.” Victor Stoichita supplies the punchline: the first painting was “nothing more than a copy of a copy.”

The most interesting work in the set is Jeanne-Élisabeth Chaudet’s Dibutade Coming to Visit Her Lover’s Portrait (ca. 1810), which drops the father and the lover entirely. What remains is the barest outline on a wall that looks more like a tombstone than a canvas — and Kora leaning in to kiss it. She has lost the man and kept the image, and she is content. “The source of her desire will never leave again.”