| The original of the Burne-Jones, which is the first painting you saw when you entered the Pre-Raphaelite gallery at the Tate in London, well, it's simply huge. All the women in the painting are life-sized. That, plus no photographic reproduction or print is going to pick up the nuances of paint on canvas. The lighting is different, the paint is 3-dimensional which also affects how light reacts with the surface and your eye, and the color range is more than can be reproduced on film.
At the Museum of Modern Art in NYC, there are a lot of famous paintings and paintings by really famous artists of the 19th and 20th centuries (and I was surprised to see works by Renoir, Van Gogh, Picasso, Klimt, Mattisse, and Cezanne, among others there), and I spent most of the day (after the surprising Dali exhibit) going "Woah! I didn't know this was here!"
I think what affects me at a gut level when viewing Great Art is not the "fame" of the work, but how it appears in real life. A well-made "fake" could probably elicit a similar or the same emotion. But the faker would have to be quite skilled. |
