The picture of Dorian Gray is therefore a living image, one endowed with the power of dual metamorphosis: it soaks up wrongdoings and purges itself of them. But it is also endowed with the power to kill. We know the name of the painter and his tragic end, but this is no ordinary portrait, though it captivates with the beauty of the model. It possesses the characteristics of acheiropoieta – an image not created by human hands, at once miraculous and fatal. We do not know the source of its mysterious power, but it is surely not the salon portraitist, Basil Hallward. The painter is a sincere figure, albeit non-charismatic. He dies murdered not for his art, but because of his insistent moralising which drives Dorian crazy. The painter’s admiration for the beautiful sitter is not enough on its own to endow the painting with its superhuman power. It is also not the doing of the Mephistophelean Lord Watton. Especially since giving the power to take life away goes beyond the Pygmalion-like ability of bringing an image to life.

The portrait of Dorian Gray can also be perceived as a doppelgänger. In the context of the 19^th-century experiments to create perfect ‘human machines’, artificial bodies and prosthetic constructs, Andrzej Turowski writes: ‘A doppelgänger is a phantasm of a perfect duplication which disappears when we try to force it to become a presence. It manifests both a strangeness and an intimate connection with oneself.’ Basil Hallward, it could be assumed, is a skilful salon portraitist, enchanted with the beauty of the young sitter. The portrait he creates is only meant to capture and retain this beauty, not to create a double, superior to the model. The artist is motivated by the perfection of the sitter, not driven by his own desire to replace him with something greater. And still, the motif of ‘duality’ is at the basis of the convoluted tangle of Dorian Gray and his portrait. A double, Jean Baudrillard writes in Simulacra and Simulation, ‘is an imaginary figure, which, just like the soul, the shadow, the mirror image, haunts the subject like his other, which makes it so that the subject is simultaneously itself and never resembles itself again, which haunts the subject like a subtle and always averted death’. When the doppelgänger is embodied, it signals the looming end. Isn’t that what the scene in the dust-covered attic is, when the portrait kills its model?

In the case of Dorian Gray’s death in front of the painting hidden in the attic, there is no doubt as to the thing he sees last. It is his own likeness, which becomes so monstrous that it provokes him to attack and stab his portrayed figure with a knife. The blow is fatal, though aimed not at the body but the painted canvas. With that blow, the original relationship between the prototype and its image is restored. The portrait regains the beautiful, youthful person granted it by the painter, while the ravaged image, branded with wrongdoing, regains the physical body of the model. And it is that body that receives the murderous thrust. Such a dual transfiguration could not be achieved through a painting created by human hands. Death and resurrection happen here: a man dies and his image is revived. The Medusa motif also echoes in the background. Dorian is, however, killed not by the look itself but by the exchange of looks. Like Medusa, Gray can see his reflection in a painting which is not just a plain mirror, but a ‘mirror of the soul’. And this soul is completely depraved, capable of crime. And so the murderous image kills.

Translated by Anna Błasiak