Authenticity of Representation

Midway through our mini-trek into the Fjords, we stopped at the Kaupanger stave church, which dates from the 12th century. This is the largest stave church in the county of Sogn og Fjordane, which also includes the famous Briksdalsbreen arm of the Jostedalsbreen glacier.

While perusing the small gift shop, I discovered a set of postcards of watercolor drawings by architect and painter Franz Wilhelm Schiertz. Schiertz's command of watercolors lends itself to beautiful landscapes - his palette is decisive and he blends the colors smoothly. Pablo observed that the quality of the pencil lines (quick and light but precise) evidenced the use of a mechanical drawing aid, such as a camera lucida.

camera lucida (photo credits to vam.ac.uk)

The Schiertz paintings are all circa 1840, when mechanically-aided drawings were so prevalent that they created a style of drawing in which the artist sought to emulate the line quality and composition afforded by a camera lucida. One of the drawings depicts the stave church at Borgund against a mountain backdrop.

Borgund Stave Church by Hanz Wilhelm Schiertz (c. 1840)

The next day, when we indeed went to Borgund to view the stave church, Pablo and I traipsed around the church with the intent of recreating the scene as Schiertz drew it. Fences hindered our progress, but from the angle nearest to the original, we could see that something was fishy.

As close as I could approximate the view in the Franz Wilhelm Schiertz painting

Although the church sat in the landscape below as it had in the painting (the tower to the right of the church in the painting is behind the tree in the photo), the mountains behind were entirely different. The mountains as they actually appeared did not even closely resemble the formations in the painting. The mountain that slopes up to the right in the painting slopes down to the left in the photo. There can only be one conclusion: Schiertz made falsified the view. This didn't come as a surprise to me, but Pablo exhausted every possible angle to the problem, supposing that Schiertz used a mirror to reflect the mountains behind him, but since the painted mountains weren't even a conceivably accurate mirror of the actual formations, he eventually had to concede that the mountains in the painting were a fake.

I know that painters make things up all the time, or at the very least stretch the truth to fit within their desires, but never before have I been confronted with the contradiction. Rather, I've never been able to verify the physical truth of a painting. Does it matter that the artist altered reality for the sake of composition? How else can a man move mountains, if not with his hands? Does my understanding of the building change significantly between one or the other? The painting is already inaccurate since Schiertz is taking creative liberties with his watercoloring. Is a photo more real than a painting? Pablo would say that the painting in its falsity deceives the viewer as to the church's scale, siting and orientation. Schiertz does a further injustice to the vikings who, presumably, carefully positioned the church with respect to the surrounding landscape. I find it interesting that Schiertz found the situation as it stood to be incorrect, at least for the purposes of his painting. I trust the painter more than the reality, because while the reality is what's there, the painting opens me up to what could be there.