it does not require excessive foresight to maintain that digital facsimiles offer a remarkable new handle to give to the notion of originality what is required by the new time. Since all originals have to be reproduced anyway, simply to survive, it is crucial to be able to discriminate between good and bad reproductions.

Surely the issue is about accuracy, understanding, and respect-the absence of which results in “slavish” replication

If there is one aspect of reproduction that digital techniques have entirely modified, it is certainly the ability to register the most minute three-dimensional aspect of a work without putting the work at risk.

The same is certainly true of availability.

We should not, however, wax too mystical about the notion of an “original location” in the case of the Veronese, since the very refectory in which the facsimile has been housed is itself a reconstruction.

by bringing the new version back to the original location.

What is so extraordinary in comparing the fate of the Ambassadors with that of the Nozze di Cana is not that both rely on reproduction-this is a necessity of existence-but that the first relies on a notion of reproduction that makes the original disappear forever while the second adds originality without jeopardizing the earlier version-without ever even touching it, thanks to the delicate processes used to record it.

not so much how to differentiate the original from the facsimiles as how to tell the good reproductions from the bad.

a painting has always to be reproduced, that is, it is always a re-production of itself, even when it appears to stay exactly the same in the same place.

but is it possible to imagine the migration of the aura in the reproduction or reinterpretation of, say, a painting? After all, it is the contrast between the Nozze and the Ambassadors that triggered our inquiry, which would have proceeded very differently had it been limited to the performing arts.

once there is no huge gap in the process of production between version n and version n + i, the clear-cut distinction between the original and its reproduction becomes less crucial-and the aura begins to hesitate and is uncertain where it should land.

Before printing, the marginal cost of producing one more copy was identical to that of producing the penultimate one

The situation appears to be entirely different when considering, for instance, a painting. Because it remains in the same frame, encoded in the same pigments, entrusted to the same institution, one cannot resist the impression that a reproduction is much easier to make and thus there can be no comparison, in terms of quality, between the various segments of its trajectory.

The trajectory of a performance, then, is composed of segments that are made, more or less, of the same stuff or require a similar mobilization of resources.

Is this segment in the trajectory of the work of art barren or fertile?

It is because-and not in spite-of the thousands and thousands of repetitions and variations of the songs that, when considering any copy of the Iliad, we are moved so much by the unlimited fecundity of the original

A work of art-no matter the material of which it is made-has a trajectory or, to use another expression popularized by anthropologists, a career

the obsession of the age is with the original.

If no copies of the Mona Lisa existed, would we pursue it with such energy? Would we devise so many conspiracy theories concerned with whether or not the version held under glass and protected by sophisticated alarms is the actual surface painted by Leonardo’s hand?

But it’s just a facsimile!

Without question, for her, the aura of the original had migrated from Paris to Venice: the best proof was that you had to come to the original and see it.

Why this air-conditioned room with its dung brown polished plaster walls? In Venice, there was no air conditioning; the painting was allowed to breathe as if Veronese had just left it to dry. Anyway, here she cannot move around the painting to ponder those questions without bumping into others momentarily glued to the Joconde, their backs turned to the Veronese.

Something even stranger happens to her, some time later, in the Salle de la Joconde in the Louvre. To get to this cult icon of the Da Vinci code, hundreds of thousands of visitors enter through two doors that are separated by a huge framed painting, Veronese’s Nozze di Cana, a dark giant of a piece that directly faces the tiny Mona Lisa, barely visible through her thick antifanatic glass. Now the visitor is really stunned. In the Hollywood machinery of the miraculous wedding, she no longer recognizes the facsimile that she had the good fortune of seeing at the end of 2007 when she was invited by the Fondazione Cini to the island of San Giorgio, in Venice. There it was, she remembers vividly, a painting on canvas, so thick and deep that you could still see the brush marks of Veronese and feel the cuts that Napoleon’s orderlies had to make in order to tear the painting from the wall, strip by strip, before rolling it like a carpet and sending it as a war booty to Paris in 1797-a cultural rape very much in the mind of all Venetians, up to this day. But there, in Palladio’s refectory, the painting (yes, it was a painting, albeit produced through the intermediary of digital techniques) had an altogether different meaning: it was mounted at a different height, one that makes sense in a dining room; it was delicately lit by the natural light of huge east and west windows so that at about 5 p.m. on a summer afternoon the light in the room exactly coincides with the light in the painting; it had, of course, no frame; and, more importantly, Palladio’s architecture merged with admirable continuity within Veronese’s painted architecture, giving this refectory of the Benedictine monks such a trompe l’oeil depth of vision that you could not stop yourself from walking slowly back and forth and up and down the room to enter deeper and deeper into the mystery of the miracle.

Unfortunately, she knows enough about the strange customs of restorers and curators to bow to the fact that this is, indeed, the origi nal, although only in name, that the real original has been irreversibly lost, replaced by what most people like in a copy: bright colors, a shining surface, and above all a perfect resemblance to the slides sold at the bookshop, the slices shown in art classes all over the world by art teachers most often interested only in the shape and theme of a painting, not in any other marks registered in the thick surface of a work. She leaves the room suppressing a tear: the original has been turned into a copy of itself that looks like a cheap copy, and no one seems to complain, or even to notice, the substitution. They seem happy to have visited in London the original poster of Holbein’s Ambassadors!

Why this air-conditioned room with its dung brown polished plaster walls? In Venice, there was no air conditioning; the painting was allowed to breathe as if Veronese had just left it to dry. Anyway, here she cannot move around the painting to ponder those questions without bumping into others momentarily glued to the Joconde, their backs turned to the Veronese.