The Invention of Painting

There is an old story, told by the Roman writer Pliny, about how painting began. A young woman in Corinth, about to lose her lover to a long journey, traced the outline of his shadow on the wall by lamplight so she would keep his likeness once he was gone. That is the moment shown here, painting inventing itself out of love and a cast shadow. The picture even carries a Latin line saying that the beauty we admire in famous painting was born in shadow. It is given to Bartolome Esteban Murillo, the great Seville painter of the mid-1600s, though the attribution is not settled and scholars have gone back and forth over whether the hand is really his. Painters of that century loved this legend because it let their craft claim a noble, ancient origin, and here the whole drama comes down to one girl, one lamp, and a line drawn on a wall.