““The object of art is not to reproduce reality, but to create a reality of the same intensity.”
Alberto Giacometti

The term “metaverse” is new—it was coined in the 1992 science fiction novel Snowcrash by Neal Stephenson. It means a network of three-dimension virtual worlds that permit social interaction with other virtual occupants of those worlds. Its etymology combines the Greek “meta,” meaning “beyond” and an abbreviation for “universe.” Even the name implies a sort of inter-world travel. In the recent past it was theorized as a future invention in which humans in the real world could inhabit a parallel single, universal virtual world that would allow for interconnection and social dynamic, but free from the constraints of physics and biology. You could create avatars of any sort, with any type of power you could imagine. That universal, single metaverse remains a future concept, but technology has now allowed for the creation of numerous stand-alone metaverses, which might be best understood as planets in an internet solar system. One can visit Decentraland or the metaverse created by VFXRio, and even take virtual objects—NFTs—with you between them, but they are not, as yet, seamlessly interconnected. The internet equivalent of a spaceship flight, from one website to another, is required to move between them.

15th century humanists, like Marsílio Ficino, were so taken with the rediscovered ancient (primarily Greek) philosophy texts for which scholars hunted in wayward monasteries and dusty libraries that they wound up adapting the ideas they found there and syncing them with their Christian world and belief system. A successful painting, it was argued, was like a window through which you could see the perfection that exists in Heaven. Raphael’s religious paintings try to create a virtual reality view of Heaven, populated by perfectly beautiful, nearly identical figures living in peace, grace and balanced harmony. Raphael painted the happiest crucifixions one could imagine—without emotional or pain, just poses. Each of his figures, whether male or female, wear matching faces, sometimes with beards added for the men, but otherwise indistinguishable. But Raphael would have argued, according to Neo-Platonic thought (a new, Christianized theory based on Plato) that it did not matter if anyone ever looked at his paintings. They were great works of art even if they existed in a vacuum. Whether or not they were experienced was irrelevant.

CONTROLLING LIGHT

Raphael’s paintings have little drama and much of this is down to their overall lighting scheme. There is not much shadow, they appear to take place in the light of midday, and this means that much of the potential for drama is stripped away.

Raphael’s great rival in Rome, Michelangelo, created the illusion of controlled spotlighting when he painted the Sistine Chapel ceiling. Not only was this revolutionary in terms of illusionism but also when we consider the experience of the viewer. Today, the Sistine Chapel is a flood of tourists jostling for space and craning their necks skyward to see the ceiling. But when it was finished in 1512, it was accessible only to Vatican clergy and invited guests. To them, it was walking into another world. It was immediately the most talked-about artwork to visit in Rome, perhaps in Europe. And it spread out across a vast ceiling, telling a series of biblical stories the viewers would have been familiar with, but relating them according to Michelangelo’s own rules of how and what to see. It was a metaverse unto itself, where the creator—in this case a painter rather than a programmer—could determine that the people he painted would possess musculature that could not exist in real life, and pose them in contortions that were either unrealistic or impossible, only existing—and working beautifully—in the painted world he created. Before anyone had heard of graphic novels or films, this ceiling, divided into “panels” of action sequences, like pages in a graphic novel or scenes in a film, allowed for a form of expansive story-telling that no single painting could contain.

The leading painter of Rome after Raphael and Michelangelo, Caravaggio, was a wielder of light and darkness. He championed a technique called chiaroscuro, meaning the play of light emerging from darkness. Caravaggio used what we might describe as spotlighting, a revolutionary technique that brought tension, mystery and intrigue to his paintings. To look at his work is to see shadows even more than the light required to create them. A world without shadows feels unreal.

He also played a game in which he would mirror his painted light to match whatever natural light shone on the painting, based on the architectural space it would occupy. His first famous works in Rome were the Saint Matthew Cycle (1598-1599), three paintings for a chapel in the Roman church of San Luigi dei Francese. In his Calling of Saint Matthew, he paints light flowing in from the top right corner of the painting, over the shoulder of Jesus, who indicates to an as-yet-unaware Matthew that he should join him as an apostle. Caravaggio did this because a clerestory window (a plain glass window to let in light) in the chapel would allow sunlight to flow in from the same point, melding the natural and painted light, creating an illusion of not quite being sure where the real world ends and the painted world begins.

VR goggles are equipped with light modules that help the user willingly accept that suspension of disbelief. Without proper, naturalistic light (and its accompanying shadows) an artwork will be unconvincing. The light projected into your eyes using VR goggles is a modern technological manifestation of Aristotle’s concept of how we see. Aristotle postulated we see by emitting beams of light out of our eyes that bounce back off of what we see, reflecting back into our eyes, at which point our minds process that reflection. The eye as a mirror. Aristotle’s idea is not actually how we see, biologically, but it was prescient in imagining how we see in virtual reality, with light projected onto our eyes through the VR goggles. Artists and architects use light to fill space and shadow as a boundary, border and outline that defines edges. If light is projected onto our eyes when it comes to VR, then we might wonder if we are outside or actually inside the artwork.

This game of whether the viewer is in the artwork or not was taken to a higher level during the Baroque period (circa 1600-1700). Gian Lorenzo Bernini was among the first artists to recognize that the viewer was requisite to the successful completion of an artwork. If the world’s greatest masterpiece exists but no one can ever experience it, then it has no value and one might ask whether it really exists at all, if it can never be experienced? This is a creative equivalent to Schrodinger’s Cat: the supposition that a cat may be simultaneously dead and alive, in theory, if we cannot check on its status for certain. Imagine a cat inside a box that also contains a radioactive poison. If a radioactive particle decays, the poison will be released and kill the cat. But if we view the box from the outside, we cannot know if the particle has decayed. So until we check, until we experience for ourselves, the cat remains both dead and alive in theory (though of course not in practice).

WINDOWS AND MIRRORS

Including convex mirrors is an inside joke for artists. Convex mirrors were less expensive than flat ones during the Renaissance and they were a staple of artist studios. Artists would use them to paint self-portraits, of course, but also to frame other subjects they would paint. In order to select the composition for a portrait of, say, a horse, an artist would look at the horse through its reflection in a mirror, rather than directly at it. This is similar to a film director “framing” a scene by looking at it through the camera lens rather than at the actors directly.

This framing game was taken to a higher level in Diego Velazquez’s Las Meninas (1656). In this complex riddle of a painting, we see Velazquez painting the portrait of the king and queen of Spain, while their daughter, the Infanta, looks on, surrounded by her handmaidens (that is what las meninas means) and other companions. But the infanta and Velazquez seem to look directly at us, the viewers. And Velazquez stands before an enormous canvas, as big as the canvas on which Las Meninas itself is painted. So is he capturing himself in the act of painting this very painting? Why, then, is he looking at us? In fact, he is probably looking at a mirror. Imagine if the surface of Las Meninas were a one-way window of the sort used in police suspect lineups. To those on one side, the window appears to be a mirror reflection. From the other side, we can see through it. Just to add to the mix, in background there is either a mirror or a painting of the king and queen. Are the king and queen standing where we are, being looked at by Velazquez and the Infanta? Or are they elsewhere in the room and the mirror at the back reflects them at an angle? Or is that a painting of them and not a mirror at all?

Las Meninas, though made in a traditional style and medium, was so revolutionary and fascinating in theory that, centuries later, the founder of Cubism and artistic Modernism, Pablo Picasso, created 44 studies of it in his own style. 44 perspectives exploring the complexities of perspective and realism. Like 44 lovingly broken shards of the mirror that is Las Meninas.

It may seem that we’ve tumbled through the looking glass, as mirrors used to be called. That’s an intention reference to the sequel to Lewis Carrol’s Alice in Wonderland. Passing through the looking glass, tumbling down the rabbit’s hole, stepping through the back of the wardrobe into Narnia—all of these are literary portals into alternative worlds, which function under their own rules. Before the conceptualization of computers, programming and the creation of digital worlds, artists and writers conceived of alternative worlds accessed via the imagination, with paintings and texts serving as aids to stimulate the immersive experience of the audience. That audience must meet the creator halfway, offering themselves up by willingly suspending their disbelief.

in collaboration with Noah Charney – professor of art history and an expert in fine art forgery and theft.