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The AI family history app MyHeritage allows users to animate photographs from the past. Run a document through the app and it will seemingly bring it to life, making the subject’s eyes blink and look around. Many have been turning this technology on photographs and paintings of well-known historical figures. The accompanying hashtag #DeepNostalgia has flooded social media with the reanimated faces of Charles Darwin, George Washington, Marie Antoinette and more.
In a fast-developing technological landscape, deepfakes are becoming more and more commonplace. The term refers to images or videos of people in which their faces and voices have been digitally altered. While few would claim these subdued avatars are absolutely convincing, their uncanny tangibility can be compelling.
The Grand Tour and the Global Landscape Tim Barringer
Fig. 1.
Rome from the Villa Madama by Richard Wilson (1714–1782), 1753. Oil on canvas, 37 5/8 by 52 ¼ inches.
Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.
During the eighteenth century, wealthy and privileged Britons, such as the group portrayed by Nathaniel Dance c. 1760 (Fig. 2), hastened south, to drink at the font of European civilization in Rome amid the ruins of an earlier empire, and to absorb the classics in literature and art. Habits of viewing the landscape that derived ultimately from the Grand Tour determined the ways British artists and travelers framed their visual experience of the rest of the world. The Grand Tour thus lies in the ancestry of what I will call “global landscape,” the art of the British Empire. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, British artists traveled south first to Italy, and then to the Pacific, and then across the globe. Wherever they went, they envisaged the wor