The Wiki article on Everard Digby, one of the Gunpowder Plot conspirators, contains a large and very detailed painting which is seemingly totally unrelated to the article itself. The painting is of a huge room filled with artworks, paintings and sculptures, and a lot of guys standing around looking at them. It seems to be set sometime in the Hanoverian period in England. You can move the mouse around on all of the different artworks in the painting and it will tell you what they are, but if you click on them, the link is usually to a page that doesn’t exist (because of spelling or capitalization issues.) When I try to see the page’s source by clicking “edit this page,” it shows no image file for this painting.
What is the deal here? What is this painting actually called, who painted it, and why is it erroneously in this article?
The painting is not a “contemporary engraving of the conspirators.” Neither does it contain an engraving of the conspirators among the many artworks depicted in the painting. As far as I can tell there really is no connection whatsoever between that painting and the article.
It has been posted in a variety of Wikipedia articles, most of which appear to have nothing to do with the subject of the painting (the north-east section of the Tribuna room in the Uffizi [art museum] in Florence, Italy):
Looks to me like well-disguised vandalism. I know nothing about the art in question, but some quick googling reveals that the painting is The Tribuna of the Uffizi, and has nothing to do with the Gunpowder Plot. A long time ago, someone took the trouble to stick the painting in every wikipedia article relating to the gunpowder plot. Apparently, any time anyone wanted to check the accuracy, they didn’t go any further than another wikipedia page.
Nice find.
But why are you asking this here? Isn’t this what the article’s talk page is for? Why don’t you just change the article and post a note about it on the talk page?
Do you have any idea how slowly Wikipedia talk pages move on articles as obscure as that one? Posting something on the talk page for Lindsay Lohan might get me a quick response; the talk page on some obscure figure from 17th century England might go for years and never be updated.
Maybe it’s some kind of memetic weapon, like in Ghost in the Shell. Like if you look at the painting in each article, it brainwashes you into being an assassin or takes away your memories of childhood or something
Thank you, I’ll be here all week… The woods are lovely, dark, and deep.
I’m not a serious wikipedian, but the clever vandal has inserted this irrelevant painting onto EVERY page relating to the Gunpowder Plot. Including Guy Fawkes. I’m betting you can drum up some very quick discussion there.
I’m no expert here, but could it be that someone just changed the target from some other, more relevant, picture to this irrelevant one? I mean, how did this go unnoticed for so long?
Very weird! On the “Gunpowder Plot” page there’s this,
with no link to the actual page with the sketch, but the above doesn’t show up on the “Editing Everard Digby” page. This is what should, assuming it’s correct, be there,
All is right with the world. Someone had edited http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Gunpowder_plotters to use the wrong painting. Since that that template appears on many pages, it appeared as though the wrong painting was showing on those pages.
Yes, it’s absolutely amazing to me that someone went to the trouble of painting a painting of a room filled with paintings. It’s really insane when you think about how much detail went into that. Sometimes I wish photography had never been invented.
But there is no mystery as to why Zoffany went to all that trouble. The Wikipedia entry actually mentions both reasons.
It wasn’t Zoffany who chose the subject. It was Queen Charlotte who, in commissioning him, decided that this was what he was to paint. (What is usually suggested is that she wanted a painting of the Uffizi because she and George III had never had the chance to visit Italy.) I don’t suppose she was particularly bothered about how difficult Zoffany might find this.
Also, paintings showing collections of paintings had been a specific genre since the seventeenth century. The most famous examples are the variousdifferentdepictionsofthecollection of Archduke Leopold Wilhelm. The Zoffany commission was probably directly inspired by a Flemish painting already in George III’s collection.
