The Art History of Invisible Originals, or 'When Shadows Talk ...'

Drawings, copper engravings and photographs in which artworks are captured are different types of media that represent originals and replicate their images, i.e. representations. These images, having the status of iconographic sources, are often used in historical research as witnesses of a certain phenomenon, visual references to lost works, or analogues of existing ones. No art historical research or narrative of art history could do without them. Some of the works are known solely from media, i.e. iconographic and historiographical sources. Their originals have not survived, but their ideas, which can be newly represented or recreated, continue to exist. Physically non- existent but represented and described works - 'invisible originals' - can build an alternative history of lost or invisible but known artworks. The aim of this article is to consider how radiographic images of early paintings can be treated in the presence of invisible originals and their technical copies, how these special images of paintings function, and what meanings they acquire in the art historical discourse.