ABOUT THE COVER IMAGE I first saw John Gibson’s Hylas Surprised by the Naiades during a trip to Tate Stores. At the time, I was halfway through the first year of my doctoral studies and had spent the last few months researching Gibson and looking closely at images of this marble group, and other works by the artist, on a laptop screen….
Confronting an object that you are familiar with only through photographs and the verbal perceptions of others can be exhilarating, but I think that we ought not to be ashamed to admit that it can sometimes be an anticlimactic experience. What made mechanical, in particular photographic reproductions of art such a thrilling notion for Walter Benjamin was precisely their capacity to challenge the authority of the so-called original object, threatening what he described as its “unique existence” (einmaligen Vorkommens). Even in the aura-negating conditions of a storage site however, Hylas Surprised by the Naiades did not disappoint. It is a work whose physical presence struggles to be accommodated by the camera and grasped in two dimensions, even when captured from multiple points of view. Immediately, the unusual pose of nymph to the left of Hylas struck me in a new way. Only by seeing the work in the flesh, as it were, did I perceive of the weight 27
