Abstract: This paper originates in the primal experience of being seen that may occur while standing in front of a late self-portrait by Rembrandt. A close analysis of the last fifteen minutes of Frederick Wiseman’s documentary film, National Gallery, which concludes with an image of Rembrandt’s next-to-last self-portrait from 1669, leads to an exploration of the very nature of vision itself. What is visibility and where does it come from? In the world of things, who is seeing whom? Themes of looking, seeing and being seen, as well as the transgressive and therefore punishable gaze, are taken up in the contexts of Western art and Greek mythology in the attempt to determine the boundaries, borders and limits of vision itself. The author suggests that vision is a streaming function of the objective psyche in its individuating aspect, and that nature and matter are continuously seeing us in order that we may fulfill their deeper strivings towards wholeness.

Key words: art, mythology, vision, the invisible, nature, matter, being seen.

In the final scene of the documentary film, National Gallery, there is a contemporary dance performance staged in a room of the museum where the exhibit, Metamorphosis: Titian, is on display. It is 2012. After a silent pas de deux prelude, baroque music by the sixteenth century composer William Byrd begins to play.

From the opening shot of the sequence, the performer, at first a single young female, shortly joined by a male dancer who gracefully circles her for a duet, stands perfectly straight in profile in the center of the screen, hieratic and supple. She is flanked by two renditions of the myth of Diana and Actaeon painted by Tiziano Vecellio, called Titian. On the left hangs the earlier Diana and Actaeon, painted between 1556 and 1559, which depicts the tragically-doomed, handsome young hunter as he unwittingly comes upon the magnificent virgin goddess Diana at her bathing pool attended by several of her handmaidens. In the painting, a startled Actaeon is parting a slight red curtain to reveal the pale golden flesh of the grand huntress goddess. She casts him a sharp, penetrating glance while partially obscuring her own face protectively with her arms.

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