ABSTRACT
During the night of 2-3 May 2003, the celebrated Old Man of the Mountains, a natural wonder that had long been a revered symbol of the “granite state” of New Hampshire, vanished from sight as a portion of its rocky hillside collapsed into rubble. A popular tourist attraction since its discovery in 1805, this forty-foot stone profile high above Franconia Notch was elevated to even greater heights in a comment attributed to Daniel Webster (1782-1852), describing it as a manifestation of divine blessing on the Old Man’s native state: “Men hang out their signs indicative of their respective trades; shoe makers hang out a gigantic shoe; jewelers a monster watch, and the dentist hangs out a gold tooth; but up in the mountains of New Hampshire, God Almighty has hung out a sign to show that there He makes men.” 1 Such phenomena, found in landscapes throughout the world, offer an experience that bears on the central mystery of artistic illusionism: how an image can appear to materialize from something other than itself when the entities involved are utterly unlike one another in scale, in substance and in kind – a face from a mountain, for example, or the same mountain face as re-presented in paintings, snapshots, tourist memorabilia, or even postage stamps (Fig. 1).
