A technical expert has solved the mystery of a time traveler who appears to be holding a smartphone in a 160-year-old painting. A 19th-century artwork believed to contain a modern piece has recently surfaced online.
The painting in question was painted by Austrian artist Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller in 1860 and is titled Die Erwartete, The Expectation in Hungarian. It shows a woman walking alone in the countryside, while a man waits for the woman with a flower, who appears to be talking on the phone as she walks. Unilad.
source: Wikimedia Commons
It's no surprise that there's no smartphone on board.
The work is currently on display at the Munich Kunstmuseum. The object in the woman’s hand was noticed by a Scottish tourist who was one of the first to notice the strange details in Waldmüller’s painting in 2017. In a conversation with Vice, Peter Russell reflected on how the perception of an artwork changes depending on the context in which it was created.
“What struck me most was how much technology has changed the interpretation of the painting, and in a sense, the whole context. The big change, of course, is that in the mid-19th century, everyone would recognize the thing the girl was immersed in as a hymn book or a prayer book, but today everyone would notice the similarity to the scene of a teenage girl immersed in water on social media on her smartphone.
Many didn’t care that the first smartphone was released in 2007, and clung to the crazy time travel theory. However, art expert Gerald Winbolter settled the question once and for all. Winbolter is an expert in 19th and 20th century art, and he knew exactly what the woman was carrying. Speaking to Vice, he said that the girl in this painting by Waldmüller is not pulling out a new subscription iPhone, but heading to church with a small prayer book in her hand.
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