Kagan, J., dissenting
the whole fair-use test. Ante, at 24.
Finally, back to the visual arts, for while Warhol may have been the master appropriator within that field, he had plenty of company; indeed, he worked within an established tradition going back centuries (millennia?). The representatives of three giants of modern art (you may know one for his use of comics) describe the tradition as follows: “[T]he use and reuse of existing imagery” are “part of art’s lifeblood”—“not just in workaday practice or fledgling student efforts, but also in the revolutionary moments of art history.” Brief for Robert Rauschenberg, Roy Lichtenstein, and Joan Mitchell Foundations et al. as Amici Curiae 6.
Consider as one example the reclining nude. Probably the first such figure in Renaissance art was Giorgione’s Sleeping Venus. (Note, though, in keeping with the “nothing comes from nothing” theme, that Giorgione apparently modeled his canvas on a woodcut illustration by Francesco Colonna.) Here is Giorgione’s painting:
Giorgione, Sleeping Venus, c. 1510, oil on canvas
