There is a painting by Alex Katz that could have been painted by Giuseppe Veneziano. It is the portrait Stanley, painted in 1973, which Katz later donated, together with four hundred other works, to the Colby College Museum of Art in Waterville, Maine. The close-up of Bin Laden done by Veneziano in 2001 seems to be a duplicate on a different scale of that earlier 120 x 80 cm canvas with just the addition of a turban and beard. It has the same frontal pose, the same fixed stare, the same background, the same compressive framing of a face that fills the entire pictorial field, even the zones of colour are the same. We don’t know if Veneziano ever saw Stanley’s portrait-it was certainly not one of Katz’s masterpieces-nor do we believe that Giuseppe would have had to pay tribute at the beginning of his career to some hypothetical and distant master of Pop figuration. It would seem rather that Veneziano, wanting to push his work toward “flatness”, simply could not have painted in any other way. Flatness, for that matter, from Clement Greenberg onward, is a central theme in criticism of modern and later contemporary painting: if Abstract Expressionism was flat in its concept-laden incomprehensibility, Pop Art was terribly much so in its apparent simplicity. It was even flatter because what it represented, or hoped to represent, while figures, were not figures but symbols-or better, symbols stripped of the power of ambiguity, that is, simple graphic signifiers that have, by their…