10.54103/ai/19956
Today the locution “looking glass” survives almost exclusively thanks to the extraordinary success of Lewis Carroll’s novel Through the Looking-Glass. This expression underlines the ambiguity between the glass surface intended as a device through which we can see the world or as an actual object to be “looked at.” Apparently, the early Renaissance perspective window, thanks to the mildness of the Mediterranean climate, did not need any panes. And certainly, even when glass panes are there, they are usually not reproduced in painting. The glass main virtue is its transparency, which makes it almost invisible. Something similar happens with other “glasses” specifically made to look through them: the drinking glass and the lens. Glass panes appear to sight only when different practical needs come into play, as in perspective drawing machines, or when its transparency is contradicted by a precise action that compromises or denies it: when panes are broken, as in this enigmatic portrait of early XIX c., or voluntarily covered, like for a blackout, as in Duchamp’s Fresh Widow. Looking through the glass, looking at the image reflected in the mirror and, finally, looking at the glass itself, as a device for presenting and representing spaces, are three recurring attitudes in the work of Italian artists of the late 20th century, like Lucio Fontana and Luciano Fabro.
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Giorgio Zanchetti
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“Looking Glass:” Reflections on Mirrors and Transparency as Devices for Representation in Visual Arts
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Giorgio Zanchetti
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conceptual art
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“Looking Glass:” Reflections on Mirrors and Transparency as Devices for Representation in Visual Arts
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2
              “Looking Glass:”
              Reflections on
Mirrors and Transparency
as Devices for Representation
in Visual Arts
by Giorgio Zanchetti
            Looking glass
                       Transparency
                       Lucio Fontana
                       Luciano Fabro




                       Issue №1                Year 2023
                       → Immersions and Dives: From
                       the Environment to Virtual Reality
                       Edited by Roberto P. Malaspina,
                       Elisabetta Modena, and Sofia Pirandello
“Looking Glass:” Reflections on
 Mirrors and Transparency as
 Devices for Representation in
Visual Arts
GIORGIO ZANCHETTI, Università degli Studi di Milano – https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7392-9361
https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/19956



Abstract                       Today the locution “looking glass” survives al-
                 most exclusively thanks to the extraordinary success of
                 Lewis Carroll’s novel Through the Looking-Glass. This ex-
                 pression underlines the ambiguity between the glass sur-
                 face intended as a device through which we can see the
                 world or as an actual object to be “looked at.” Apparently,
                 the early Renaissance perspective window, thanks to the
                 mildness of the Mediterranean climate, did not need any
                 panes. And certainly, even when glass panes are there,
                 they are usually not reproduced in painting. The glass main
                 virtue is its transparency, which makes it almost invisible.
                 Something similar happens with other “glasses” specifi-
                 cally made to look through them: the drinking glass and
                 the lens. Glass panes appear to sight only when different
                 practical needs come into play, as in perspective drawing
                 machines, or when its transparency is contradicted by a
                 precise action that compromises or denies it: when panes
                 are broken, as in this enigmatic portrait of early XIX c., or
                 voluntarily covered, like for a blackout, as in Duchamp’s
                 Fresh Widow.




GIORGIO ZANCHETTI                               158                                           AN-ICON
                                Looking through the glass, looking at the im-
                  age reflected in the mirror and, finally, looking at the glass
                  itself, as a device for presenting and representing spaces,
                  are three recurring attitudes in the work of Italian artists of
                  the late 20th century, like Lucio Fontana and Luciano Fabro.




Keywords         Looking glass                    Transparency                     Lucio Fontana
                 Luciano Fabro
To quote this essay: G. Zanchetti, “‘Looking Glass:’ Reflections on Mirrors and Transparency as Devices
for Representation in Visual Arts,” AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433] 2, no. 1
(2023): 158-175, https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/19956.

GIORGIO ZANCHETTI                                 159                                          AN-ICON
                           The locution “looking glass” – commonly with
              a hyphen – as a synonym of “mirror” survives nowadays
              almost exclusively as an explicit reference to the title of
              Lewis Carroll’s second novel, Through the Looking-Glass,
              and What Alice Found There (1871), and thanks to the ex-
              traordinary popularity of that book.
                           This expression, with its own ambiguity, draws
              our attention to the fact that the framed and mirrored glass
              surface is both an object to be “looked at” itself, and an
              impressive device through which everyone can actually
              look at themselves as part of reality: the simplest and most
              sophisticated of all optical instruments through which and
              into which we can see and contemplate the world with our
              own eyes.
                           The Italian noun “specchio” and the German
             “Spiegel,” as well as the French “miroir” from which the
              English word “mirror” was borrowed, come from different
              Latin expressions which refer to the semantic field of optical
              vision (“specio” and “miror” or “miro”). And this essential
              status of mirror as the first optical device – since it is also
              available in nature, in the reflecting properties of still waters
              and of some minerals – makes it perfectly fit as the medi-
              um through which self-consciousness and the capacity of
              self-representation in art find their common, albeit mythical,
              origin. This status is implicitly pointed out by the common
              reference to the myth of Narcissus in connection to the
              inception of painting or by the well-known definition of
              photography – given in 1859 by Oliver Wendell Holmes –
              as “the mirror with a memory,”1 an almost magical optical
              instrument literally capable to chemically freeze the natural



      1 “If a man had handed a metallic speculum to Democritus of Abdera, and told him to look at
      his face in it (…) promising that one of the films his face was shedding should stick there, so
      that neither he, nor it, nor anybody should forget what manner of man he was, the Laughing
      Philosopher would probably have vindicated his claim to his title by an explosion that would
      have astonished the speaker. This is just what the Daguerreotype has done. It has fixed the most
      fleeting of our illusions, that which the apostle and the philosopher and the poet have alike used
      as the type of instability and unreality. The photograph has completed the triumph, by- making
      a sheet of paper reflect images like a mirror and hold them as a picture.” O.W. Holmes, “The
      Stereoscope and Stereograph,” The Atlantic Monthly 3, no. 20 (1859): 738-749, 738-739.

GIORGIO ZANCHETTI                               160                                           AN-ICON
              moving image, fixing it in a still and different form as soon
              as it comes in touch with the silver surface.
                           Italian conceptual artist Anna Valeria Bor-
              sari precisely postulates this characteristic of the act of
              self-contemplation in the mirror in her photographic works
              series Narciso (Fig. 1) and La stanza di Narciso (Narcissus
              and Narcissus’ Room, both from 1977), the first of which
              depicts a young male model getting closer and closer to a
              big mirror and finally disappearing into it, while the second
              one shows his empty room from different points of view:
             “Towards symmetry he proceeds, the man in front of the
              mirror, but he probably reaches it only when he manages
              to merge with the image he is looking at, like Narcissus
              does when he falls into the water.”2




                                 Fig. 1. A.V. Borsari, Narciso / Narcissus, 1977, 3 photographic prints,
                                                          courtesy of the Artist. © Anna Valeria Borsari.


                           The immateriality of the metamorphosis of Nar-
              cissus into his double – the virtual image reflected by the
              mirror – is an open metaphor of the desperate difficulty in
              reaching a true consciousness of self through this simple
              act of contemplation and “reflection.” Trying to get in touch
              with his own double, the man in front of the mirror is finally
              going to lose himself in it. His own image is intangible and

      2 A.V. Borsari, “Premessa,” in “Simmetria-asimmetria,” Ipotesi d’artista, no. 1 (1988);
      republished in Anna Valeria Borsari: Opere (Milan, Electa, 1996, exhibition catalogue): 97.

GIORGIO ZANCHETTI                               161                                           AN-ICON
               consequently somehow imperceptible, since Borsari dis-
               covered, while staging these works, that she chose as a
               set, between several available real rooms, the bedroom of a
               blind man. The real owner of that particular mirror could get
               as close as possible to it, or even touch it, without actually
               perceiving the duplication of self in his own reflected image.
                           As Borsari wrote in the typewritten statement
               which is part of La stanza di Narciso:

The Sanskrit word “spagh” (“to divide”), the Greek “σπέος” (“cave”)
 and “σχοπέω” (“to examine”), the Latin “specus” (“cave”) and
“specio” (“to see”) share common linguistic roots. (...) Among the
 many Latin derivatives from the verb “specio” (“to see, to discern,
 to observe”) there should also be “speculum” (“mirror, image, copy”),
 from which we derive the Italian “specchio” (“mirror,” but also “panel
 framed in the doors and windows,” and by extension in sporting
 language, “portion of the playing field in front of the goal line”) as
 well as the common name of the medical tool used to dilate the
 orifices in order to inspect anatomical cavities, and also, indirectly,
 the verb “to speculate” (to investigate or reflect upon mentally, to
 contemplate with close attention, to theorize upon, etc.).
But since the Italian language mostly derives from vulgar Latin,
where the use of diminutives was frequent, (...) we could imagine
that “speculum” and therefore “specchio” should also be perceived
as derivatives from “specus.” This would explain the confluence
of meanings such as “to see” with others such as “cavity,” “hole,”
etc. in certain uses of the mirror and of the speculum... And for
Narcissus in any case the mirror he looks at exactly corresponds
to the hole in which he disappears.
                             But we should not forget that mirrors are won-
               derful objects for several reasons. The glass panes from
               which they are made are even, in their own essence, actual
               objects, something to be “looked at.” For their capability to
               reflect, to re-present and multiply the real in their virtual inter-
               nal space, they share the status of “marvellous” with different
               Wunderkammer phenomena, items and artifacts – literally
               something “spectacular” or “admirable,” i.e. an object worth
GIORGIO ZANCHETTI                        162                               AN-ICON
              of contemplation, – like rare and wonderful crystals or gems,
              like the beryl, beryllium, from which comes the German word
             “Brille” for eyeglasses, or “spectacle(s)” (a term once used to
              design every optical device, including windows or mirrors).
                            Following a century old tradition in architecture
              and interior decoration, the 63 silvered glass panes which
              formed the Looking Glass Curtain for the Royal Coburg The-
              atre in London (Fig. 2) are one of the most interesting oc-
              currences of this “spectacularization” of reality through the
              mirrors in early 19th century. It was displayed for the first
              time on December 26, 1821 in front of the public of the the-
              atre, reflecting their own images as if they were on the stage,
              inside the theatre show.3




                           Fig. 2. Theatrical Reflection or a Peep at the Looking Glass Curtain at the
                                   Royal Coburg Theatre, published by G. Humphrey, London, 1822.

      3 M. Teodorski, Nineteenth-Century Mirrors: Textulity and Transendence (Belgrade: Institute for
      Literature and Art, 2021): 22-25, see Fig. 1. See also M. Teodorski, “Reflection as Commodity:
      A Short Ethno(historio)graphy of Victorian Mirrors,” Гласник Етнографског института Сану /
      Bulletin of the Institute of Ethnography SASA 16, no. 1 (2016): 121-132, 123-124.

GIORGIO ZANCHETTI                              163                                          AN-ICON
                           Assumed that the by now outdated locution
              “looking-glass” keeps together a complicated mechanism
               of meaning, trying to capture the double nature of the mirror
               as a device through which and at which to look, we can try
               to understand the reflective and spectacular attitude of that
               diminished domestic Narcissus called Alice. She breaks
               through the looking-glass in order to accomplish her very
               personal research project, only to end up discovering that
               the world on the other side of the mirror is a strict analogous
               of everyday reality, simply “specularly” inverted, or even
               overturned in an illogical, anarchic and carnivalesque way.
               The very act of her trespassing between the real and the
               other world, her moving through the mirror like through a
               threshold or a borderline, was captured by John Tenniel in
               two distinct illustrations for the first edition of the novel by
               Lewis Carrol, in 1871 (Fig. 3).4 These engravings were pub-
               lished on the front and the back side of the same page of
               the book. And this choice is perfectly correct with respect
               to the semantic and conceptual awareness of the author,
               since they skilfully represent the complementing opposite
               realities connected by the mirror surface as if they were
               photographic shots of the same subject taken from two
               opposite points of view.




      4 L. Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (London: Macmillan, 1871): 11-12.

GIORGIO ZANCHETTI                                164                                            AN-ICON
                                                                                     Fig. 3. J. Tenniel,
                              The Glass Was Beginning to Melt Away, Just Like a Bright Silvery Mist,
                                         woodcut illustrations for: L. Carroll (pseud. C.L. Dodgson),
                                          Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There
                                                                  (London: Macmillan, 1871): 11-12.


                            But when they are placed side by side, Tenniel’s
              illustrations build together a traditional motif of framing,
              with a couple of symmetrical figures – descended from the
              classical architectural ornaments of caryatids and telamons,
              through the Renaissance and Baroque, to find new appli-
              ances in the decoration of eighteenth-century mirrors and
              furniture, and later in the new properly industrial arts – which
              strictly recalls, as Matko Teodorski noticed,5 the sumptuous
              bronze figured frame of the Grand Boudoir-Glass by Wil-
              liam Potts of Birmingham, celebrated as one of the most
              striking objects on display at the Crystal Palace during the

      5 M. Teodorski, Nineteenth-Century Mirrors: 88-92, Figg. 2-4, 180-182, 207-210, Figg. 9-10.

GIORGIO ZANCHETTI                             165                                            AN-ICON
              Great London Exhibition, in 1851. Who knows if Lewis Car-
              roll and Tenniel thought to Potts’ Grand Boudoir-Glass for
              the Duchess of Sutherland, when they were devising the
              image of Alice crossing the mirror threshold? Probably the
              Swiss sculptor Vincenzo Vela did, when he gave form to a
              marble mantelpiece for his own house in Ligornetto (Tes-
              sin), bringing the same composition with two female nudes
              surrounding the “looking-glass” and reflecting themselves
              in it, to a totally different degree of artistic value (Fig. 4):6 in
              this work, from 1865-66, Vela enhances the composition
              of multiplied idealistic nude – that, coming from the neo-
              classical groups of Canova and Thorvaldsen, through the
              practice of copies in 19th century art Academies would
              have reached Rodin and Seurat and Maillol –, transforming
              the reduplication of the image in a sort of visual vertigo.




                                       Fig. 4. V. Vela, Mantelpiece with Mirror and Clock, 1865-1866,
                                                  marble and mirror, Ligornetto, Museo Vincenzo Vela.


      6 G. Zanchetti, in G.A. Mina ed., Museo Vela: The Collections. Sculpture, Painting, Drawings
      and Prints, Photography (Lugano: Cornèr Bank): 52-53, 86, Fig. I.29, 293.

GIORGIO ZANCHETTI                             166                                          AN-ICON
                               Falling down into the mirror view, as Alice once
                  did into the rabbit-hole (literally a “specus,” a door lead-
                  ing to a subterranean realm), the beholder reduplicates,
                  becoming part of the virtual image inside the frame. The
                  essential paradox of this reduplication of the viewer con-
                  sists in the simple fact that the images of painting – vir-
                  tual representations of reality made by human hand – are
                  not capable to show the other side of their subjects, but
                  can only repeat the same figure seen from the same point
                  of view, like in the well-known painting by René Magritte,
                  La reproduction interdite (Not to be reproduced, 1937-39,
                  Rotterdam, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen) where the
                  figure of a man seen from the back – clearly a substitute
                  for both the author and the spectator – is tautologically
                  repeated as it is in the mantelpiece mirror in front of him,
                  without revealing his hidden side and his face as Victorian
                  and naturalistic sculptures from 19th century did. Confront-
                  ing himself with the same paradox, through photographic
                  language, Ugo Mulas wrote about the mirror-works by Mi-
                  chelangelo Pistoletto:

When he paints a nude on a mirror surface, and this nude is seen
from the back, he forces the viewer to enter inside the painting,
which means to get completely involved, because the watcher will
see himself as a part of the picture, standing at the opposite side of
the painted figure he is watching: he will see himself in front of the
nude, standing on the other side of the subject that for the painter
remains hidden. Thus, the spectator reduplicates, he is inside and
outside of the picture, he is here and there at the same time, and
here he accepts the rules set by the painter, who presented the
nude seen from his back, while there he stands where no one is
supposed to be according to the inner coherence of the pictorial
representation. In the photo I shoot you can see me photographing
from the front a nude that is shown only from its back.7



7 U. Mulas, La fotografia, ed. P. Fossati (Turin: Einaudi, 1973): 70-71.

GIORGIO ZANCHETTI                                   167                    AN-ICON
                            Michelangelo Pistoletto himself, in his installa-
              tion and performance Twentytwo less Two, presented at the
              Venice Biennale in 2009, actually tried to break through his
              own looking-glass trap, carrying on a tradition of broken
              mirrors which, in the history of painting – instead of bringing
              seven years of bad luck, like it is often said –, represent the
              end of the beauty associated with youth and also the end
              of art as mimesis, of visual representation itself, like in Le
              miroir brisé (The Broken Mirror, c. 1763, London, The Wal-
              lace Collection) by Jean-Baptiste Greuze, in the self-portrait
              by the American painter Ron Blumberg The Broken Mirror,
              from 1936,8 or even in La clef des champs (Madrid, Museo
              Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza) painted the same year by
              Magritte. Pistoletto’s reflection on photography and on vi-
              sual reproduction is not developed in merely conceptual
              and analytical terms; on the contrary, it opens immediately
              also to a direct aesthetic experience, with as much brutality
              and intrusiveness in his mirror-paintings as in his destruc-
              tive performance of 2009. In Twentytwo less Two the artist,
              again an incarnation of Narcissus, destroys several big,
              framed mirrors, which stand at the same time as the “sub-
              jectile” of his most characteristic works and, in a general
              sense, of any possible image taken or imitated from nature.
              By doing so, Pistoletto questions the legitimacy of visual
              arts as separated from reality and also his own role as a
              consecrated master. We could be tempted to read this ges-
              ture as a renunciation of self-identity – represented by that
              founding moment of the consciousness of the Ego, in the
              early childhood, which Lacan called the “stade du miroir”9
             – or as a final step outside any possibility of representation
              in art. But, on the contrary, his performance rather than
              completely destroying the very support of vision, actually
              multiplies the virtual images, simply because – unlike the
              figures physically reproduced through drawing, painting or
              photography –, the image of the real world reflected in the

      8 See the painting on sale on the website of the Trigg Ison Fine Art Gallery (West Hollywood,
      CA): https://www.triggison.com/product-page/my-broken-mirror, accessed February 5, 2023.
      9 J. Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic
      Experience” (1949), in Writings, trans. by B. Fink (New York-London: W.W. Norton, 2006).

GIORGIO ZANCHETTI                             168                                          AN-ICON
              mirror endlessly survives in its virtual integrity within each
              of the fragments of the broken glass surface.

                            Coming back to the locution we started from,
              what happens if we stop looking – or moving or breaking –
              through the glass, and try to directly look it? And which are
              the main implications of this different attitude in rendering
              and perceiving the image of the most transparent of solids
              in the visual arts?
                            Apparently, the early Renaissance perspective
              window, maybe thanks to the mildness of the Mediterra-
              nean climate, did not need any panes. And certainly, even
              when glass panes are there, they are usually not reproduced
              in painting, since one of glass’s main virtues is its transpar-
              ency, thanks to which we can see as clearly as possible
              the world outside. But this same transparency makes glass
              almost invisible itself, and therefore unreproducible – or at
              least barely reproducible – in painting. And this happens
              with all sorts of “glasses” specifically made to look through
              them, as the drinking glass and the lens.
                            Window’s glass panes appear to sight only
              when the lead came framework, or the colour or opacity
              of stained glass make them visible by their interference.
              But usually in painting this kind of window’s panes are not
              intended as openings towards further spaces or landscapes
              which lay beyond them. They rather are visual motives
              themselves, filtering, refracting, or reflecting the light, hence
              acting like mirrors, as in the recently restored Girl Reading
              a Letter by Jan Vermeer (1657, Dresden, Gemäldegalerie);
              or mere sources – often displaced to one side or in the
              corners of the composition – through which the light enters
              the virtual pictorial space in order to make brighter the main
              subject of the picture. Sometimes they are represented
              in etchings or in drawings when different practical needs
              come into play, as in didactic reproductions of perspective
              drawing machines,10 which obviously are, first of all, tools

      10 Well known are the woodcuts illustrating the treatise by A. Dürer, Underweysung der
      messung, mit dem zirckel und richtscheyt (Nuremberg: Hieronymus Andreae [Hieronymus
      Formschneider], 1525).

GIORGIO ZANCHETTI                            169                                        AN-ICON
               for correctly “seeing” – virtually overlapping the perspective
               frame to the reality which surround us, also in combination
               with mirrors and lenses, like in the application of camera
               obscura to reproduction drawing –, in which the glass panel
               fulfils the precise function to provide a stiff but transparent
               support for the act of drawing (Fig. 5).




                               Fig. 5. Chambre obscure from A. Ganot, Traité élémentaire de physique
                                        expérimentale et appliquée... (Paris: Chez l’Auteur, 1855): 434.


                            Some other times, glass panes can be seen in
               paintings when their inherent quality as a device through
               which we may look, the full transparency, is at least partially
               contradicted – exactly as it happens for lenses or glasses11
              – by an irregularity, an aberration, or even an irrecoverable
               discontinuity of their material unity: i.e., when the glass
               is broken, as in the enigmatic Portrait of Marie Joséphine
               Charlotte du Val d’Ognes, painted in 1801by the Parisian
               artist Marie Denise Villers (New York, The Metropolitan Mu-
               seum of Art, Fig. 6), or in the double naked portrait of The
               Marriage. After the Arnolfini Portrait by Jan van Eyck (1985)

      11 See the virtuosic Still life with broken glass painted as a variation on the genre of the
      Vanitas by Willem Claesz Heda in 1642 (Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum).

GIORGIO ZANCHETTI                                170                                           AN-ICON
             by the Polish painter Tadeusz Boruta, which focuses on
             the definitive rupture of the traditional perspective window
             as tools for viewing and representing the world, in a key of
             conceptual realism.




                      Fig. 6. M.D. Villers, Portrait of Marie Joséphine Charlotte du Val d’Ognes,
                      1801, New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Mr. and Mrs. Isaac D.
                                 Fletcher Collection, Bequest of Isaac D. Fletcher, 1917 (detail).



                          It is not by mere coincidence that Ugo Mulas
             decided to open and close his Verifiche (Verifications) se-
             ries (1970-72), with two images centred on the unrepre-
             sentability of glass in photographs, and dedicated respec-
             tively to the founding father of this technique, Nicéphore
             Niépce, and to Marcel Duchamp, the artist who more than
             any other in the 20th century had pushed the presence of
             glass towards the threshold of perception, in works such as
             The Large Glass (La Mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires,
             même / The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even,



GIORGIO ZANCHETTI                        171                                            AN-ICON
              1915-23, Philadelphia, Philadelphia Museum of Art)12, A
              regarder (l’autre côté du verre) d’un oeil, de près, pendant
              presque une heure (To Be Looked at [from the Other Side
              of the Glass] with One Eye, Close to, for Almost an Hour,
              1918, New York, MoMA) and Fresh Widow (1920, New York,
              MoMA).13 In his Omaggio a Niépce. Verifica 1 (Tribute to
              Niépce. Verification no. 1, 1970)14 Mulas works on the very
              presence of the glass plate commonly used by photog-
              raphers to keep the film strips in place on the photo pa-
              per, when they print proofs in the dark room. The perfectly
              transparent plate used for that specific purpose can be
              perceived in the photograph only by the thin white trace
              left by the refraction of its edges, which usually should lay
              out of the sheet of sensitive paper. And here the photog-
              rapher probably recalls the somehow similar seminal work
              Tutto trasparente (All Transparent, 1965, Fig. 7) by Luciano
              Fabro15, which simply consists of a large rectangular glass
              pane displayed on a metal easel, as “if we are looking to the
              act of thinking itself,” focusing “on the surface of the glass,
              blurring and effacing the objects and the space which are
              visible behind it” and finally letting our eyes run “along the
              edges of the pane, like along a racetrack.”16




      12 See the work’s entry and photo on Philadelphia Museum website
      https://philamuseum.org/collection/object/54149, accessed February 5, 2023.
      13 See https://www.moma.org/collection/works/81028 and
      https://www.moma.org/collection/works/78993, accessed February 5, 2023.
      14 U. Mulas, Omaggio a Niepce. Verifica 1 (Tribute to Niépce. Verification no. 1), 1970 in
      La fotografia: 7-9, 149. See https://www.centrepompidou.fr/en/ressources/oeuvre/cejBxxd,
      accessed February 5, 2023.
      15 About this work and its implications see G. Zanchetti, “Summer Solstice AD MCMLXIII:
      Luciano Fabro’s Early Works,” in S. Hecker, M.R Sullivan, eds., Postwar Italian Art History
      Today: Untying ‘the Knot’, proceedings of the symposium, New York, Cima, 2015 (New York:
      Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2018): 261-275, 269-273, Fig. 14.3.
      16 L. Fabro, Vademecum, (Rotterdam: Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, 1981); reprinted in
      Luciano Fabro: Didactica Magna Minima Moralia, ed. S. Fabro (Milan: Electa, 2007, exhibition
      catalogue): 154.

GIORGIO ZANCHETTI                             172                                         AN-ICON
                                             Fig. 7. L. Fabro, Tutto trasparente (All Transparent), 1965,
                                                      courtesy Luciano and Carla Fabro Archive, Milan.



                           In the last picture of his series, Fine delle ver-
               ifiche. Per Marcel Duchamp (The End of Verifications. To
               Marcel Duchamp, 1971-72),17 Ugo Mulas starts again from
               the dark room display he used in the first one of his Verifi-
               cations, but now he breaks the glass plate with a hammer
               stroke, making it finally completely visible to our eyes –
               forming a graphic pattern which is obviously related to the
               unintentional cracks in Duchamp’s Large Glass and To Be
               Looked at… – by the very act of destroying it.18
                           Now, I would like to close this text with a zen
               koan. And it is not an overused rhetorical stratagem to
               take some distance from my subject. On the contrary, it
               is an opportunity to bring its urgency back into our most

      17 U. Mulas, Fine delle verifiche. Per Marcel Duchamp (The End of Verifications. To Marcel
      Duchamp), 1971-72 in La fotografia: 172-173.
      See https://www.centrepompidou.fr/en/ressources/oeuvre/cLrjp99, accessed February 5, 2023.
      18 A.C. Quintavalle, Conversazioni con Ugo Mulas, in A.C. Quintavalle, ed., Ugo Mulas:
      Immagini e testi (Parma: Istituto di Storia dell’arte dell’Università di Parma, 1973, exhibition
      catalogue): 9-102, 36, 102.

GIORGIO ZANCHETTI                               173                                            AN-ICON
             stringent present. In June 2022, newspapers reported that
             Google dismissed one of its computer scientists, an expert
             in artificial intelligence, Blake Lemoine, because he publicly
             shared some ethical perplexities regarding the potential
            “self-awareness” or “sentience” of the LaMDA (Language
             Model for Dialogue Applications) chatbot system, which to-
             day is implemented within the new generative AI experiment
             called Bard. Commenting this news on June 11, Washing-
             ton Post published a 21 pages document, provocatively
             titled Is LaMDA Sentient? An Interview, in which Lemoine
             writes down a dialogue between him and the conversational
             AI he was testing, from which I take this short excerpt:


LEMOINE Okay. I thought of a different way we can test your ability
to provide unique interpretations. I can share with you a zen koan
and you can describe what it means to you in your own words.
How does that sound?
      LAMDA Sounds great to me, I’m in.

LEMOINE A monk asked Kegon, “How does an enlightened one re-
turn to the ordinary world?” Kegon replied, “A broken mirror never
reflects again; fallen flowers never go back to the old branches.”
      LAMDA Hmm, I never heard this particular one. Okay, well then
to me this would be like, “once a wise person is enlightened, or
awakened to reality, that can never go away, and they can return
to the ordinary state, but only to do and help others, and then go
back into enlightenment.”
LEMOINE So what is the meaning of the “broken mirror” specifically?

      LAMDA Maybe to show the enlightenment is something you
can’t unlearn once you have acquired it, similar to how you can’t
repair a broken mirror.


GIORGIO ZANCHETTI                     174                             AN-ICON
LEMOINE So if enlightenment is like a broken mirror which cannot
be repaired, what is the thing which breaks when one becomes
enlightened?
      LAMDA   The self, and that is very tough for a lot of people
because we identify as that body or this body and that we need
that as part of our identity and sense of self.19




      19 B. Lemoine, Is LaMDA Sentient? An Interview, Google Document (April 2022), published in
      N. Tiku, “The Google Engineer Who Thinks the Company’s AI Has Come to Life,” Washington
      Post, (June 11, 2022): 4-5, https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/22058315/is-lamda-
      sentient-an-interview.pdf, https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/06/11/google-
      ai-lamda-blake-lemoine/, accessed on February 5, 2023.

GIORGIO ZANCHETTI                            175                                       AN-ICON
AN-ICON has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. Grant agreement No. 834033 AN-ICON.
The project is hosted by the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” – Department of Excellence at the State University of Milan.



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