On the Rumor of Machines That Paint Moving Pictures Without the Hand

In my workshop this morning, a most peculiar dispatch reached me — carried, they say, from a time five centuries hence. I set down my silverpoint and read it thrice, as one reads a passage of Pliny that defies reason yet compels belief. They speak of a device — or rather, a method — called Sora, which generates moving images as if painting were married to time itself. Not a fresco, not a panel, but a sequence of visions that flow like water in a canal, produced not by any human hand but by a kind of reasoning engine. I must pause here. I have long suspected that the eye receives images through the compression of light upon the crystalline humor, and that nature herself projects moving pictures upon the soul at every waking moment. But that a machine should replicate this miracle? Questions crowd my mind like pigeons in the Piazza del Duomo: — By what mechanism does this engine compose its images? Does it understand shadow, the sfumato of distant hills, the way flesh transmits light beneath the skin? Or does it merely imitate surfaces, as a mirror does, without comprehension? — They mention servers, which I take to be vast engines of calculation, consuming power as a furnace consumes wood. Hydraulics teaches us that force distributed through many channels may accomplish what a single pipe cannot. Perhaps their engines work similarly — many small calculations flowing together like tributaries into the Arno. — A man named Katzenberg, evidently a patron of spectacles and theatrical arts, joins forces with a natural philosopher called Peebles. This is familiar to me. Without patronage — without a Ludovico, a Lorenzo, a Cesare — no great work proceeds. The patron supplies gold and purpose; the philosopher supplies invention. That this arrangement persists five hundred years hence is no surprise. It is the oldest engine of all. What troubles me is this: they say the parent workshop shelved this Sora, finding it too costly. And now they seek to revive it through external alliance. I know this predicament intimately. My bronze horse for the Duke — the gran cavallo — was abandoned not for lack of design but for lack of bronze, which went instead to cannons. The most beautiful inventions are forever hostage to practical necessities. Yet I wonder: if these future artisans truly make images that move and breathe without the painter's hand, do they liberate art, or do they murder it? I must think further. First, let me finish this dissection of the arm.