A girl
with flowers.

For generations, the child was hidden in plain sight. The flowers were paint over paint.

Move the opening across the picture.
Or choose a detail below.

The flower image is a generated reconstruction of the documented overpainting.

Generated reconstruction: a girl holding a basket of blossoms — Flower state: generated reconstructionOil on canvas / 1632–33

Surviving Rubens fragment: an infant with serpent legs, a nurse, and other figures' limbs appear around the girl — Flower state: generated reconstructionOil on canvas / 1632–33

1939

A picture remembered
by another picture.

Ludwig Burchard recognized the composition from a print and proposed cleaning. The child returned. The canvas outside these edges could not.

Warsaw copy of the full composition: three sisters and a nurse surround the infant, before an architectural portico and fountain — Copy after Rubens / National Museum in WarsawApproximate visual registration

The surviving Oberlin fragment approximately placed within the full composition — Copy after Rubens / National Museum in WarsawApproximate visual registration

Let the missing picture return

The fragmentThe recorded whole

The hand at the left. The foot below. A cut can leave a person present only at the edge.

The Arrhephoria, reimagined

The form
holds the content.

“They don't know what they're carrying. The ritual works because they don't look.”
The Chronotope of the Virtual, §IX

Generated pottery-style cross-section of the Acropolis with a temple, a warren of passages and a garden; two figures carry sealed baskets along the route — Generated interpretive illustrationA passage, not an archaeological plan

Generated interpretive illustrationA passage, not an archaeological plan

Move through the passage

EntranceEmergence

A place holds time

Places can be
palimpsests too.

A painting conceals an earlier painting. A passage changes the people who pass through it. I bring both into another form.

“The architecture of the passage — the darkness, the narrowness, the descent and ascent — does the transformative work.”The Chronotope of the Virtual, §IX

This is the turn from the painting to the Revelatorium: hold more than one time in the same place.

The surviving Rubens fragment — The surviving object

The generated flower reconstruction — The imagined covering

The illustrated passage — The imagined passage

Three forms.
Different acts, held together.

A study in looking, framing, and carrying1 / 4

The source drawer

The history is documented. Some of the images that let you enter it are conjectures.

The surviving object: Peter Paul Rubens, The Finding of Erichthonius, 1632–33. Oil on canvas, 109.3 × 103.4 cm. Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin, 1944.96. The displayed reproduction is the project’s existing museum source file. Read the museum record.
The flowers: The museum records that the work was cut down and overpainted by 1786. Burchard recognized it in 1939. The flower plate here was generated for this project on September 2, 2026; it is not a surviving photograph of the overpaint. The movable opening compares two images, not a reconstruction of the cleaning procedure. Their details do not register perfectly.
The missing composition: A copy after Rubens, National Museum in Warsaw, M.Ob.1047. We display the project’s existing derivative of that source reproduction. It records the full composition; it is not the lost Rubens canvas or the print used by Burchard. The rectangle is an approximate visual alignment. Copy’s image record.
The myth is not a single telling: Athena entrusted the closed basket to Cecrops’s daughters. Rubens painted its opening. The museum associates this composition with Ovid’s telling, in which the sisters’ disobedience goes unpunished. The rite, the myth, and conservation are different acts; this encounter brings them into relation without making them morally equivalent. The museum’s extended account.
The passage: The Acropolis plate is an existing generated illustration from the project. Its route is an interpretive stage, not a surveyed ancient tunnel. The quoted passage comes from The Chronotope of the Virtual. The thought that places can be palimpsests appears in the September 2 Palimpsest room draft. The ending’s arrangement is a new interface composition of those existing materials.
A layer still outside this room: I chose my Outerboros sleeve as this painting’s latest “when.” The actual cover is not included in this study.

A girlwith flowers.

A picture rememberedby another picture.

The formholds the content.

Places can bepalimpsests too.

A girl
with flowers.

A picture remembered
by another picture.

The form
holds the content.

Places can be
palimpsests too.