I haven’t read the actual book, but I would assume that anything like that in there wouldn’t have gone ignored in all the video media created around that character.
Is it canonically any look at all does it? Because it’s always shown as him unable to look away of his own accord as the rot and ruin transferred. What if someone showed it to him for like one second then covered it back up?
Read the book first. It isn’t about physics.
Nothing. In the book he dies because he actually stabs the picture with a knife. Looking at it presses home just how decrepit he should actually have become, but it isn’t until he stabs it that he himself feels any actual injury.
It ages without him looking at it, it’s his bad behaviour and natural aging that changes the picture. Also, he covers it because he doesn’t want people to see it.
I haven’t seen the movie. In the book, the painting bears the weight of his sins. The figure in the painting ages and scars, but he does not.
Splinched