A picture of a picture, a tableau vivant, is simultaneously an independent image, a quotation of reality, a metaphor, a projection, and a visible representation.
The Hamburg art historian Aby Warburg called image motifs that move independently through space and time "automobile Bildfahrzeuge" (mobile image vehicles) in the 1920s — motifs that encounter us on different carriers in different places, thus leading a kind of life of their own. For instance, in Renaissance painting, pictorial formulas from antiquity were rediscovered, quoted, and further developed. A particular "mobile image vehicle" were and are the so-called tableaux vivants: reenactments of paintings, living pictures of pictures, which enjoyed great popularity especially in courtly societies of the 18th century and were performed like a kind of silent theater. The mise-en-scène of an arrangement creates the performative foundation from which and through which an image becomes visible – it appears. This creative process recalls magical practices, in that an image is conjured up within a group of people. In its dialectic of animation and petrification, the iconic motif of the Last Supper by Leonardo da Vinci— created around 1500 as a wall painting — travels through over 500 years of cultural history to appear here in the exhibition in 2025 in a new context as quotation and chronoference. Chronoferences are the possibilities of a present to relate to past times. Thus the figures on the tableau vivant wear business clothing from the 21st century, and instead of bread and wine, laptops and energy drinks lie before them on the tables.
Moreover, it is the students themselves who appear in the tableaux vivants, thereby following the model of an artistic practice. Painters of past centuries frequently incorporated themselves or fellow artists into history paintings, assigned them characters, and thus appeared as masked witnesses of the depicted scenes as well as of their own art.
