The woman in this painting, painted in 1860, seems to be holding a mobile phone in her hand: a time traveler or a simple devotee walking around?
It’s a mystery that regularly comes back into fashion and always causes a stir: in an 1860 painting by Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller, a young woman walks through a bucolic landscape, holding in her hands what, at first glance, really looks like. .. to a laptop.
If science fiction enthusiasts immediately see the proof of a time traveler, others wanted to give a historical-cultural explanation, revealing the true nature of the object held by the young woman.
As several art critics have pointed out, time travel is not in question here: the young girl is actually holding a prayer book or, according to the Twitter account The Daily News Opinion, a small Bible, in a very popular version in the middle of the 19th century, barely larger than the palm of a hand.
This isn’t the first time we’ve discovered (supposed) time travelers in old paintings: another example is Italian artist Umberto Romano’s 1937 painting Mr. Pynchon and the Settling of Springfield, where the one of the characters (bottom right) seems to be observing a smartphone – which is probably just a mirror.
What most surprised Peter Russell, the retired civil servant who was the first, in 2017, to notice the strange object on Waldmüller’s painting, was how the context in which we live influences our ability to interpret what we see: “In 1860, any observer would have identified the object that the young girl holds in her hands as a prayer book; today, we all see a young woman absorbed in the notifications of his smartphone.