A man recently spotted a 21st-century technology in a 150-year-old painting, creating a buzz on social media. In the painting, you can see a woman apparently using a mobile phone which looks similar to an Apple iPhone.
The artwork titled The Expected One was done by Austrian artist Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller around 1850-60. The weird detail was spotted in the painting by a retired Glasgow local government officer, Peter Russell, at the Neue Pinakothek museum, in Munich.
It features a woman in the painting dressed up in a 19th-century dress, walking down a rocky road and her eyes glued to a smartphone – a scene which bears a remarkable similarity with today's world.
The painting also features a boy kneeling down on one knee and waiting for his 'love' with a bunch flower in his hand.
People started linking it to 'time travel' and believed it to be a prophetic painting. However, the rectangular thing she is holding in the painting was said to be just a 'hymn book'.
Just like her on the dating app in Walmüller's Die Erwartete (c. 1850): pic.twitter.com/Lakl0vCkri
— Peter A. Russell2291 (@Planet_Pedro) October 23, 2017
Russell told Motherboard: "What strikes me most is how much a change in technology has changed the interpretation of the painting, and in a way has leveraged its entire context."
"The girl in this Waldmüller painting is not playing with her new iPhone X, but is off to church holding a little prayer book in her hands," Gerald Weinpolter, CEO of the art agency Austrian-paintings told Motherboard.
Moreover, this is not the first time that a 'modern item' was spotted in an old artwork. Previously, a 1930s mural of colonial America appeared to show a Native American holding a smartphone.
These bizarre likenesses of modern technology being spotted in age-old artworks have sparked countless conspiracy theories about time travel.
However, in this case, the woman in the painting is certainly holding a prayer book and not a 21st-century device -- according to the gallery, the painting is also known as Sunday Morning and both the characters are dressed in their Sunday clothes.
