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Renaissance slot machine

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Medici Slot Machine

This is the full view of Medici Slot Machine, which Cornell did in 1942. He has always been fascinated by vending machines, and around that time he discovered a particularly striking chewing gum machine in a New York subway station. In this version of a slot machine, a boy appears where the viewer would ordinarily find his own face reflected. He is flanked on either side by children's toys and cubes faced with prints of Renaissance paintings stacked like gum or candy (detail at right). The presence of real toys and jacks makes the Renaissance child seem less remote. In its richness and complexity, the neat order of its objects, the box might commemorate a lost and longed-for past of rational order where everything had a place.

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Detail of right side