# The company beyond the cut

7 September 2026. Local passage at `../painting-world.html`.

The larger Warsaw composition is the visual ground for this passage. A single reversible camera follows Aglauros’s face and lid, Herse’s red drapery, the nurse’s face and palm, the child, the portico, the garden fountain, Pandrosos’s reclining body and her reaching arm. It finally returns to the exact entire reproduction with which it began. Text occupies an adjacent reading space; it does not cover the painted figures. Each arrival holds before the next movement. The scene menu, previous/next buttons, playback and progress slider all address the same score.

## Design choices

The palette comes from the painting’s shadowed garden: deep green ground `#171b19`, ink `#111612`, pale lettering `#e9e4ce`, softened leaf `#b6b9a7`, and a subdued gold `#d6ba70`. Baskerville’s quiet large letters carry the current sentence; Optima/Candara carry the rest. The painting is the large field; an adjacent narrow voice names what has just come into view. There are no cards, overlays over faces, perspective tilts, or decorative navigation grids. On portrait screens the voice follows the image, with native scrolling keeping the whole passage available.

## Source distinctions

- **Warsaw copy:** `assets/source/museum/palimpsest/cleaning/warsaw.webp`, 2000 × 1404. The file is unchanged. Every source camera view enlarges this same image. The full canvas, including its edges, returns at the end. This is a copy preserving the wider composition, not the lost remainder of Rubens’s original.
- **Oberlin fragment:** `assets/source/museum/palimpsest/source/oberlin-finding-of-erichthonius.jpg`, 1126 × 1200. The file is unchanged. The comparison dialog displays this separate object and can enlarge the real surviving hand beside the child. No reconstructed line is applied to the original. The two objects are compared side by side because registration between them is approximate.
- **Imagined opening:** the approved 20-second half-orbit and the baby tail-push v2 are now scored before the source passage. `painting-space.js` reads `painting-world-media.js`; scrolling, playback and the opening slider address the same 29.042-second timeline. A brief 0.3-second dissolve enters the baby at 20 seconds; its own 1.8-second wide hold and zoom ending at 3.8 seconds are unchanged. The final second returns to the original Warsaw image. These are imagined viewpoints, gestures, added drapery and infant anatomy, not recovered Rubens surfaces. The source passage remains available through “Study the painting” and without the optional films.
- **Camera path:** our authored reading through the picture. A continuous planar enlargement is not a three-dimensional reconstruction. No character receives invented dialogue, thoughts or new gestures.

## Curatorial basis

[Marjorie E. Wieseman’s Oberlin catalogue](https://www2.oberlin.edu/amam-archive/Rubens.htm) identifies the woman in gold as Aglauros, the standing sister at left as Herse, and the reclining foreground figure as Pandrosos. The older woman is a nurse, added to the classical accounts. The portico herms refer to Vulcan and Gaea, the child’s parents. We do not individually assign the two stone figures here. The same catalogue identifies Pandrosos’s right hand at the basket and her leg at the bottom of the fragment.

These precise identifications were supplied by the root’s current research in `full-scene-camera-score.md` and `the-hand-at-the-cut.md`. That research retrieved the museum catalogue through indexed results after its direct URL returned 403. The catalogue was not newly fetched or represented as independently reread during this implementation. The [current AMAM object record](https://allenartcollection.oberlin.edu/objects/9742/the-finding-of-erichthonius) supplies the broader object history and witnesses to the original composition.

The child’s serpent limbs and the fountain’s horn-blowing figure are visible in the inspected Warsaw reproduction. The brief entry text about Athena’s charge is consistent with the existing source research. The garden passage describes visible forms without identifying the fountain sculpture or inventing an iconographic program.

[Pausanias 1.27.2–3](https://www.theoi.com/Text/Pausanias1B.html) names Pandrosos and her sanctuary immediately before the passage describing the girls with unknown burdens. This adjacency supplies the theatre’s onward route to `pottery-world.html`. It does not show that Rubens intended the Arrhephoria, that the girls carried this child, or that Pausanias describes a reenactment of this painting. Pandrosos is not made to hold the lid closed or perform a painted refusal.

The spectral cut remains available at `theatre.html?at=cut:.5`; this page does not replace or shorten that revelation. The approved first aerial take remains available at `aerial-study.html`.

## Operation

The opening holds a still from the imagined reconstruction. Scroll or Play moves through the orbit and baby before returning to the source. Reduced motion skips this opening. The source passage then opens on the still Warsaw image. Its separate Play performs the roughly two-minute source passage; pause, previous/next, scene selection, arrow keys and native progress dragging permit reversal. Return to opening restores a still exact source. Background tabs pause. Reduced motion uses settled source compositions and does not run the optional spatial film. Source comparison pauses the journey, uses a native modal dialog, supports Escape and restores keyboard focus. Local-file access does not require a server or fetch-based image loading.


## Lightweight delivery — 8 September 2026

Only the opening poster loads before interaction. The orbit MP4 gets its source when the visitor scrolls or presses Play; the baby is requested two timeline seconds before its entrance, or immediately on a jump into that shot. Paused and offscreen videos do not keep playing. Reduced-motion visitors receive the source passage without loading the films. The optional Oberlin comparison image is lazy-loaded.

Both films preserve their original duration and frame rate. Local H.264 encodes use half-second keyframe spacing for responsive seeking. Desktop uses 960-pixel-wide files: orbit 8,519,975 bytes, baby 1,482,951 bytes, total 10,002,926 bytes. Screens up to 600 pixels wide, or browsers reporting Save-Data, use 640-pixel-wide versions: orbit 3,897,785 bytes, baby 759,590 bytes, total 4,657,375 bytes. Resolution is selected once per clip; resizing does not restart the download. Larger masters and earlier playback copies remain saved but are not requested by the passage. Every derivative has source/output hashes, frame counts and encoding settings beside it in assets/painting-passage/.

No external libraries, frame-image sequence, generated assets or generation credits were added for this integration. Playback runs only by visitor action, and seeking coalesces changes while a previous seek is pending. Source comparison, source-camera geometry and the ritual passage retain their prior behavior.

Validation: verify-painting-scroll.cjs exercises real local video decoding, forward and reverse seeks, unchanged playback pace, the delayed baby zoom positions, adaptive resolution, no opening MP4 request, delayed baby loading, keyboard end, source return, missing-film fallback and reduced motion. verify-painting-world.cjs retains the original source-camera, layout, source comparison and focus checks. Local HTTP range requests return 206 Partial Content. Six measured local HTTP seeks took 26–111 ms; this is local performance, not a prediction for remote connections.

Final local HTTP measurement after deferring the comparison image: initial transfer 473,928 bytes, zero MP4 requests. Both final verification scripts passed. Playback follows the scroll: scrolling pauses the videos and seeks to the matching timestamp; a stationary scroll holds that decoded frame, reversal seeks backward, and the optional Play button runs normal video while advancing the same scroll position. There is no separately downloaded image-frame sequence.