As a rule the Last Supper is displayed in the final room, with symphonic background music and a son et lumière atmosphere. Not infrequently you are admitted to a room where the waxwork Supper is behind a curtain that slowly parts, as the taped voice, in deep and emotional tones, simultaneously informs you that you are having the most extraordinary spiritual experience of your life, and that you must tell your friends and acquaintances about it. Then comes some information about the redeeming mission of Christ and the exceptional character of the great event portrayed, summarized in evangelical phrases. Finally, information about Leonardo, all permeated with the intense emotion inspired by the mystery of art.
At Santa Cruz the Last Supper is actually on its own, the sole attraction, in a kind of chapel erected by a committee of citizens, with the twofold aim of spiritual uplift and celebration of the glories of art. Here there are six reproductions with which to compare the waxworks (an engraving, a copperplate, a color copy, a reconstruction “in a single block of wood,” a tapestry, and a printed reproduction of a reproduction on glass). There is sacred music, an emotional voice, a prim little old lady with eyeglasses to collect the visitor’s offering, sales of printed reproductions of the reproduction in wax of the reproduction in wood, metal, glass.
Then you step out into the sunshine of the Pacific beach, nature dazzles you, CocaCola invites you, the freeway awaits you with its five lanes, on the car radio Olivia Newton-John is singing Please, Mister, Please; but you have been touched by the thrill of artistic greatness, you have had the most stirring spiritual emotion of your life and seen the most artistic work of art in the world. It is far away, in Milan, which is a place, like Florence, all Renaissance; you may never get there, but the voice has warned you that the original fresco is by now ruined, almost invisible, unable to give you the emotion you have received from the threedimensional wax, which is more real, and there is more of it.
But when it comes to spiritual emotions nothing can equal what you will feel at the Palace of Living Arts in Buena Park, Los Angeles. It is next to the Movieland Wax Museum and is in the form of a Chinese pagoda. In front of the Movieland Museum there is a Rolls-Royce all of gold; in front of the Palace of Living Arts there is Michelangelo’s David, in marble. Himself.
Or almost. An authentic copy, in this case. And for that matter he won’t come as a surprise, because in the course of our trip we have been lucky enough to see at least ten Davids, plus several Pietas and a complete set of Medici Tombs. The Palace of Living Arts is different, because it doesn’t confine itself—except for some statues—to presenting reasonably faithful copies. The Palace reproduces in wax, in three dimensions, life-size and, obviously, in full color, the great masterpieces of painting of all time.
Over there you see Leonardo, painting the portrait of a lady seated facing him: She is Mona Lisa, complete with chair, feet, and back. Leonardo has an easel beside him, and on the easel there is a two-dimensional copy of La Gioconda: What else did you expect? Here is the Aristotle of Rembrandt, contemplating the bust of Homer; and here is El Greco’s Cardinal de Guevara, the Cardinal Richelieu of Philippe de Campaigne, the Salome of Guido Reni, the Grande Odalisque of Ingres, and the sweet Pinkie of Thomas Lawrence (she not only has a third dimension, but a silk dress that stirs slightly in the breeze from a concealed electric fan, for the figure, as everybody knows, stands against a landscape where storm clouds loom).
Beside each statue there is the “original” painting; but here, too, it is not a photographic reproduction, but a very cheap oil copy, like a sidewalk artist’s; and once again the copy seems more convincing than the model as the visitor is convinced that the Palace itself replaces and improves on the National Gallery or the Prado.
The Palace’s philosophy is not, “We are giving you the reproduction so that you will want the original,” but rather, “We are giving you the reproduction so you will no longer feel any need for the original.” But for the reproduction to be desired, the original has to be idolized, and hence the kitsch function of the inscriptions and the taped voices, which remind you of the greatness of the art of the past. In the final room you are shown a Michelangelo Pietà, a good copy this time, in marble, made (as you are duly informed) by a Florentine artisan, and, what’s more, as the voice tells you, the pavement on which the statue stands is made from stones that came from the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem (and hence there is more here than in St Peter’s, and it is more real).
Since you have spent your five dollars and have a right not to be tricked, a photocopy next to the statue reproduces the document with which the management of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher confirms that it has allowed the Palace to remove twenty stones (from where is not clear). In the emotion of the moment, with shafts of light cleaving the darkness to illuminate the details as they are described, the visitor doesn’t have time to realize that the floor is composed of far more than twenty stones and that, moreover, the said stones are also supposed to make up a facsimile of the adjacent wall of Jerusalem, and therefore the authentic archeological stones have been amply added to. But what matters is the certainty of the commercial value of the whole: the Pietà, as you see it, cost a huge sum because they had to go specially to Italy to procure an authentic copy. For that matter, next to Gainsborough’s Blue Boy there is the notice that the original is now in the Huntington Art Gallery of San Marino, California, which paid seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars for it. So it’s art. But it is also life, because the didactic panel adds, quite pointlessly: “The Blue Boy’s age remains a mystery.”
The acme of the Palace, however, is reached in two places. In one you see Van Gogh. This is not the reproduction of a specific picture: Poor Vincent is sitting, with his electroshock look, on one of the chairs he painted elsewhere, against the background of a rumpled bed as he actually painted it, and with some little Van Goghs on the walls. But the striking thing is the face of the great lunatic: in wax, naturally, but meant to render faithfully the rapid, tormented brushstrokes of the artist, and thus the face seems devoured by some disgusting eczema, the beard is palpably moth-eaten, and the skin is flaking, with scurvy, herpes zoster, mycosis.
The second sensational moment is provided by three statues reproduced in wax, and therefore more real because they are in color whereas the originals were in marble and hence all white and lifeless. They are a Dying Slave and a David of Michelangelo. The Dying Slave is a great hulk with an undershirt rolled up over his chest and a loincloth borrowed from a semi-nudist colony; the David is a rough type with black curls, slingshot, and a green leaf against his pink belly.
The printed text informs us that the waxwork portrays the model as he must have been when Michelangelo copied him. Not far off is the Venus de Milo, leaning on an Ionic column against the background of a wall with figures painted in red. I say “leaning,” and in fact this polychrome unfortunate has arms. The legend explains: “Venus de Milo brought to life as she was in the days when she posed for the unknown Greek sculptor, in approximately 200 B.C.”
The Palace is inspired by Don Quixote (who is also present, even if he isn’t a painting), who “represents the idealistic and realistic nature of man and, as such, is the chosen symbol of the Palace.” I imagine that with “idealistic” they are referring to the eternal value of art, and with “realistic” to the fact that here an ancestral desire can be satisfied: to peer beyond the picture’s frame, to see the feet of the portrait bust. The Palace of Living Arts achieves with masterpieces of the past what the most highly developed reproduction technique through laser beams— holography—does with original subjects.
The only thing that amazes us is that in the perfect reproduction of the Arnolfini double portrait by van Eyck, everything is three-dimensional except the one thing that the painting depicted with surprising illusory skill and that the Palace’s artisans could have included without the slightest effort—namely, the convex mirror in the background that reflects the back of the painted scene, as if it were viewed through a wide-angle lens. Here, in the realm of three-dimensional wax, the mirror is painted. The only credible reasons are symbolic.
Confronting an instance where Art played consciously with Illusion and admitted the vanity of images through the image of an image, the industry of the Absolute Fake didn’t dare venture to copy, because it would have come too close to the revelation of its own falsehood.*
Enchanted Castles
Winding down the curves of the Pacific coast between San Francisco, Tortilla Flat, and Los Padres National Park, along shores that recall Capri and Amalfi, as the Pacific Highway
