Could a modern gadget appear on a 19th century picture?

A couple of years ago in the picture of the Austrian artist Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller in 1860, “Expected” was noticed by the iPhone. Former government official from Glasgow, Peter Russell, said that he was in the hands of the woman depicted on the canvas.

The picture of the Austrian artist really depicts a woman who holds an object in her hands and stares at it. The former civil servant noted that today all the young people who hold phones in their hands behave this way.

“What strikes me most is how much technology changes the perception of a picture and affects the context,” he added.

“The girl in Waldmüller’s picture does not play on her iPhone, but goes to church, and she has a small prayer book in her hands,” said the executive director of the Austrian art agency Herald Vainpolter.

This is not the first time that attentive art lovers are trying to see modern gadgets on ancient works. In the same year, on the mural “Mr. Pinchon and the settlement of Springfield” in 1937, the Italian artist Umberto Romano found a smartphone. The Indian in the picture holds in his hands a rectangular object resembling an iPhone. What the painter actually portrayed is unclear.