But is there really a 19th century painting that portrays a young woman holding a modern smartphone in her hands during a walk? This is what many people asked themselves when faced with the painting The expecteda work from 1860 by the Austrian painter Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller. Doubts began in 2017, when Peter Russell, a retired civil servant from Glasgow, noticed the detail during a visit to the Neue Pinakothek museum in Munich, where the painting is exhibited.
In the work we see a young woman walking along a country path and looking downwards, observing a small object that she holds with both hands. Behind a bush, there is a boy on his knees with a flower, ready to woo her. Looking at the girl, Russell noticed how she actually looked like she was looking at a phone.
Let’s immediately eliminate any doubt: obviously it is not a mobile phone, given that the first one arrived a hundred-odd years after the painting was made, with the Motorola Dynatac X8000Xpresented in March 1983, nor the first smartphone, a term that only appeared in 1997 when Ericsson thus described its GS88 “Penelope” (although the first ever smartphone, called Simonwas designed by IBM in 1992 and marketed by BellSouth since 1993). Perfect: so what is the girl holding in her hand?
It was he who answered Gerald WeinpolterCEO of the art agency austrian-paintings.at to Motherboard (Vice newspaper): “The girl in this painting by Waldmüller is not playing with her new iPhone, but is going to church holding a small prayer book“. An easily resolved mystery, which however reminds us how much our gaze is now accustomed to associating objects and situations close to us with ancient images. A phenomenon similar to the so-called pareidoliathat is, the psychological tendency to trace random patterns to familiar shapes (for example, seeing faces or animals in clouds).
