Fotoreproductie van een tekening van het interieur van de Dom van Milaan c. 1860 - 1880

Curator: Looking at this stereo card, a gelatin-silver print attributed to Giorgio Sommer from the late 19th century, what strikes you most? It's titled "Fotoreproductie van een tekening van het interieur van de Dom van Milaan"—a photographic reproduction of a drawing of the interior of Milan Cathedral. Editor: Its dreaminess. Like a faded memory pressed between the pages of a very old book. All that paper… It makes me think about how we carry the weight of the past, layered and fragile. Curator: The choice of printmaking on paper, a "reproduction," seems important here, doesn’t it? A removal from the sheer overwhelming materiality of the Cathedral itself. A cathedral's not just stone, it's the human effort… the masons, the hauliers, the whole network sustaining the ambition of creating these monumental spaces. Editor: Absolutely! You’re talking about tangible effort. I imagine armies of skilled laborers meticulously carving stone for decades. But then, to distill it all into a fragile paper object… to flatten that immense labor into a decorative souvenir for the rising bourgeois… What a way to capture both majesty and control! Curator: Indeed! Perhaps this echoes the era's tension: a reverence for the spiritual married with the burgeoning industrial age's need to quantify, package, and consume the unquantifiable. It’s melancholic. Editor: Yes, but consider the craft of the drawing before the print itself! Before any kind of photographic intervention, the act of observation, sketching, meticulous tracing and recreation must involve immense creative interpretation on the part of an artist. Perhaps that's how we feel the melancholic through the geometric details: it passes from human to object in a continuum, made whole in the artist's process, from building, to hand, to material. Curator: The interplay between artistic labor, faith, and capitalism all caught in one fragile artifact! That little card truly holds so much of that era, doesn’t it?