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ART fans are baffled by a 150-year-old “time travelling” painting appearing to show a woman with her eyes glued to a modern gadget.
Ferdinand George Waldmüller’s painting titled ‘The Expected One’ is sending people crazy as the young lady looks like she’s distracted by an iPhone.
WIKIMEDIAThe woman appears to be holding an iPhone in her hands in the 150-year-old painting[/caption]
The Austrian’s painting shows a young woman walking through the idyllic countryside as a lovestruck lad waits to give her a flower.
And yet, her gaze is not focused on him but instead on what she is clutching – which looks suspiciously like a smartphone.
It bears all the hallmarks of a 21st Century dog walk with our eyes fixed on phones instead of our surroundings.
Eagle-eyed viewers are wondering how on earth the object got into an artwork that was painted back in 1860 – a good two centuries before smartphones entered our lives.
But while some people reckon that this “time-travelling” damsel could be the real deal, experts have insisted there is a simple explanation for Waldmüller’s stunning creation.
The woman, they say, is reading a prayer book while walking through the countryside – rather than browsing through social media.
Waldmüller’s incredible work is now housed in a Munich museum, the Neue Pinakothek, where the halls are lined with paintings dating back to the 18th and 19th century.
Retired Glasgow local government officer Peter Russell was the first one to clock the weird detail in the painting and spark the conspiracy around it.
He told VICE how the debate around what the mysterious object is shows just much society has changed in 150 years.
“What strikes me most is how much a change in technology has changed the interpretation of the painting, and in a way has leveraged its entire context.
“The big change is that in 1850 or 1860, every single viewer would have identified the item that the girl is absorbed in as a hymnal or prayer book.
“Today, no one could fail to see the resemblance to the scene of a teenage girl absorbed in social media on their smartphone.”
But it’s not the first time modern technology has supposedly been spotted in a centuries-old painting.
Former Apple boss Tim Cook claimed he had noticed an iPhone in a 350-year-old piece of artwork hanging in a museum in Amsterdam in 2016.
The mystifying painting shows a man can clutching a rectangular object while a woman and child all look at it and time travel fanatics have claimed its “proof”.
Cook earlier told a conference: “I always thought I knew when the iPhone was invented, but now I’m not so sure anymore.”
The tech giant first came out with the iPhone in 2007.
WIKIMEDIAThe mystery object continues to puzzle art fans and fuel conspiracies of time travel[/caption]
GettyApple boss Tim Cook claimed he spotted this bloke clutching an iPhone in this 350-year-old painting[/caption]
Source: https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/20003482/ ... ts-answer/