Juan de Valdés Leal, Finis Gloriae Mundi, 1671–1672. Oil on canvas, 220 x 216 cm. Church of San Jorge, Hospital de la Caridad, Seville, Spain.

Valdés Leal was born in Seville in 1622 and died there in 1690. He built his career in productive tension with a city more readily associated with Murillo’s sweetness.4 [Note: Bartolomé Esteban Murillo (d. 1682), was a major Sevillian painter best known for softer, more affective religious imagery and for his large role in the visual culture of seventeenth-century Seville. This matters because the Caridad program did not consist only of Valdés Leal’s terrifying entrance paintings. Once the viewer moved past Valdés Leal’s warnings, they encountered Murillo’s paintings of the Works of Mercy, which supplied the charitable response to the terror of death and judgment. Murillo’s art functioned as Valdés Leal’s visual counterweight inside the same institutional program]. Trained in Córdoba under Antonio del Castillo and established in Seville by the mid-1650s, he developed a pictorial language of agitation, hard contrast, and bodily strain.5 The two painters co-founded the Seville Academy of Art in 1660, and Valdés Leal served as its president from 1663 to 1666.6 Even before the Hospital de la Caridad commission, works such as the Temptations of Saint Jerome from the Buenavista cycle show a painter drawn to the unstable boundary where sanctity and assault, vision and body vulnerability, meet in the same image.7

Juan de Valdés Leal, Temptations of Saint Jerome, ca. 1657. Oil on canvas. Museo de Bellas Artes de Sevilla, Seville, Spain.

That logic found its most forceful patron in Miguel de Mañara, Hermano Mayor of the Hermandad de la Santa Caridad.8 Mañara has often been swallowed by legend, especially the attempt to cast him as the historical Don Juan, though the chronology does not sustain it.9 After his wife’s death he committed himself to the confraternity’s charitable mission, particularly the care of the sick, the poor, and the unburied dead.10 He treated salvation with administrative seriousness. Under his direction, the Caridad became a place where theology was not merely preached but arranged spatially.11

That arrangement sharpened in 1671, when Mañara published the Discourse de la Verdad.12 The text presses the urgency of repentance and the danger of delay.13 The decoration of the Caridad Church translated that pressure into visual form. Valdés Leal’s In Ictu Oculi and Finis Gloriae Mundi stood at the entrance to the nave, the first pages encountered on entry and the last seen on exit.14 They did not sit quietly on the wall as detached devotional pictures. They functioned as thresholds.

In In Ictu Oculi, the warning is blunt. A skeleton extinguishes a candle while trampling the signs of worldly office, books, armor, and the papal tiara.15 The image is severe, but legible. Finis Gloriae Mundi is harsher because it is less allegorical and more forensic. It denies the viewer the distance that symbols sometimes provide. The bodies below are not abstract reminders. They are decomposing remains, viewed from above, as through the spectator were leaning over an opened crypt.16

Juan de Valdés Leal, In Ictu Oculi, 1671–72. Oil on canvas, 220 x 216 cm. Church of San Jorge, Hospital de la Caridad, Seville, Spain.

What makes the pair extraordinary is not simply that they are macabre, but that they are positioned within a larger program of remedy. Past them lay Murillo’s paintings of the Seven Acts of Mercy, then Pedro Roldán’s sculptural Entombment at the far end.17 The church moved the visitor from terror to obligation, from the collapse of worldly prestige to the practical labor of charity. When Mañara died in 1679, he was buried beneath the threshold of the church entrance, so that every person who stepped inside would tread on his grave.18

Jonathan Brown was right to insist that this was a coherent program rather than a loose decorative cycle.19 Yet that formulation can be pushed further. These are not only memento mori. They are instruments of pressure. They were calibrated for the wealthy Sevillian men whose money sustained the institution and whose bodies, offices, and souls are mirrored in the knight and bishop below Christ’s scales.20

Valdés Leal has often been reduced to the painter of the dead, though the Prado preserves a broader picture of his range, including the Life of Saint Ambrose series.21 The 202 Factum Foundation digitization of the two Caridad paintings, using 3D scanning and panoramic composite photography, made the surface details of Finis Gloriae Mundi newly legible, while the facsimiles installed in the Spanish Gallery at Bishop Auckland permit a kind of close looking that the original church setting has long hindered.22 What the close looking reveals is a painter more controlled than his reputation sometimes suggests.

The scales in Finis Glorie Mundi hang in precarious balance, Christ’s hand holding them steady above the open graves. That balance is the painting’s true subject. The corpses below are finished. Their scales are set. The viewer’s are not. Valdés Leal built Catholic horror as a spectacle of damnation and also as a mechanism of moral pressure, one designed to force the wealthy toward charitable action in the shadow of death.

Scotch Corduroy is where I write about art, material culture, and the afterlife of images. It is also a place to share the kinds of research, object-based analysis, and historical writing that shape my broader work.

When I am not writing here, I work remotely with collectors, appraisers, cultural institutions, and other clients on projects involving provenance research, catalog writing, collection documentation, and scholarly interpretation.

What I Do

Provenance Research

I trace ownership histories, exhibition records, and scholarly documentation for artworks and objects, especially medieval, Renaissance, and early modern European works. My research draws on published sources, digital collections, auction records, archival materials, and institutional databases to produce clear, well-sourced narratives.

Catalog Writing and Object Documentation

I write catalog entries, lot descriptions, and contextual texts that bring together precision, accessibility, and historical depth. My approach is grounded in close looking, primary-source research, and careful attention to material, iconographic, and archival evidence.

Collection and Research Support

I help identify, contextualize, and document works within private and institutional collections. This includes attribution research, historical framing, and guidance on scholarly and archival resources.

Scholarly and Public-Facing Writing

I write essays, interpretive texts, and editorial content that connect objects to their broader cultural, political, and devotional contexts. My work is especially concerned with how images and objects move across time, archives, and systems of meaning.

Areas of Expertise

• Medieval and early modern European sculpture, especially Iberian

• Spanish Gothic and Renaissance funerary art

• Devotional objects, reliquaries, and liturgical material culture

• Dynastic imagery, political theology, and commemorative programs

• Provenance, attribution, and object-based research

• Digital and archival research methods

How I Work

I work remotely and on a project basis, whether the need is a single catalog entry, a provenance report, collection documentation, or longer-term research support. My work combines historical rigor, clear writing, and careful documentation.

If you’d like to discuss a project, you can send your inquiries to emailme@scotchcorduroy.com or connect with me on LinkedIn.

Rogier van der Weyden, The Descent from the Cross, oil on panel, ca. 1435 (Museo del Prado, Madrid).

Rogier van der Weyden finished this painting around 1435, and it has not stopped demanding things from its viewers since. Every figure is doing something specific with grief, containing it, collapsing under it, holding it carefully at arm's length. That insistence, that feeling must be earned through form and never simply declared, is what I look for in every object I work with. It is also what I try to bring to every word I write about them.

Francesca Woodman, Untitled, from Polka Dots Series, Providence, Rhode Island, 1976. Gelatin silver print. © Woodman Family Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy Woodman Family Foundation.

Now look at the second image. A figure sits in the corner of a decaying room, near tall windows that let in a pale, flat light. She wears a patterned garment. Her body is present in a way the figure in Polka Dots is not. She is sharp. She is grounded. She occupies the corner the way a piece of furniture occupies a corner, with the resigned weight of something that has been there a long time and expects to remain. The walls around her are crumbling. Plaster has fallen. The paint has given up. The room is in a state of slow collapse, and the figure, seated in its angle, looks less like someone visiting the ruin than like something the ruin has produced, one more texture among the textures of neglect, her patterned dress catching against the mottled wall in such a way that she begins to seem less fully separate from it, less like a woman in a room than like an image the room itself is trying to keep.3

Francesca Woodman, Untitled, Providence, Rhode Island, c. 1975–1978. Gelatin silver print. © Woodman Family Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy Woodman Family Foundation.

This third photograph asks us to look up. A figure hangs from the top of a doorframe, arms raised in a wide V, the body suspended between two rooms.4 Below, a chair stands on a tiled floor whose geometric pattern repeats with the mechanical regularity of something that will outlast every body that ever crosses it. The figure is not falling. The figure is not climbing. The figure is held in the threshold, caught between entering and leaving, between rising and descending, between the room behind and the room ahead. The face is turned away or obscured. What we see is the body as structure, the body as beam and column, the body performing the architectural function of the doorframe it grips. This is the image in which Woodman’s central proposition becomes most legible. The body is not in the architecture. The body is becoming the architecture. It has taken on the function of the frame, the weight-bearing work of the threshold, and in doing so it has ceased to be a portrait of a person and become a portrait of a condition. The condition of being suspended. The condition of being between. The condition of holding open a passage that the room, left to itself, would close.

Francesca Woodman, Untitled, Providence, Rhode Island, c. 1977–1978. Gelatin silver print. © Woodman Family Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy Woodman Family Foundation.

I want to name what these three images share, because it is not what the usual critical narratives suggest. The word that recurs most often in writing about Woodman is “haunting.” It is inadequate. Haunting implies a presence that returns, a ghost revisiting a place it once inhabited. What Woodman’s photographs describe is something more precise and more disturbing. They describe disappearance as a material process, a photographic fact, a thing the camera can document with the same evidentiary calm it brings to a landscape or a still life. In Polka Dots, the body has already begun to go. In the corner image, the body is still present, still sharp, still holding its ground against the failing room, though the failing room seems, even so, to be winning. In the doorframe image, the body is caught in the act of becoming something other than a body, a brace, a beam, a structural element performing the work of the architecture it clings to. Across the three photographs, what we observe is not a metaphor for loss. It is a demonstration of what happens to a form when the boundary between it and its surroundings begins to thin. The softness in Woodman’s work, the blur, the dissolution, the luminous vagueness that makes these prints so physically beautiful, is not the softness of tenderness. It is the softness of structural failure. It is what happens to a wall when the plaster gives. It is what happens to a body when the photograph refuses to grant it the solidity the eye expects.5

It is necessary to say something about biography, because biography has consumed this work more thoroughly than almost any other body of photographs made in the twentieth century. Francesca Woodman died on January 19, 1981, at the age of twenty-two.6 That fact has been allowed to swallow the photographs whole, to retroactively convert every blurred figure into a prophecy, every dissolving form into a rehearsal for an ending that the viewer, armed with biographical knowledge, insists was always already written. This is the reading I want to resist. Not because the death does not matter. Not because grief is an inappropriate response to the life. I resist it because the biographical reading flattens the photographs into illustrations, and these photographs are not illustrations of anything. They are investigations. Rosalind Krauss understood this when she wrote about Woodman in 1986, insisting on the formal and conceptual rigor of the work against a critical establishment that wanted to read it as the diary of a troubled young woman.7 Abigail Solomon-Godeau understood it when she argued that the self-objectification in these images was a deliberate strategy, a way of making visible the process by which a living subject becomes a photographic image. The strongest readings of Woodman’s work are the ones that take the photographs seriously as photographs, as objects made by someone who understood what a camera does to time, to presence, to the boundary between a body and the space it occupies, and who pushed the medium, with extraordinary control, to make that boundary visible, thin, permeable, and finally, in the best of the work, almost impossible to locate.

That figure in Polka Dots, standing against the wall, her body a pale streak, her dress a ghost of a pattern, the dots still faintly legible through the long exposure like the last visible trace of a form the room is in the process of reclaiming. The wall holds. The stain above her head holds. The debris on the floor holds. Everything that is not a body remains in place. Everything that is a body is leaving. That is what these photographs finally do. They do not depict a woman disappearing. They depict the conditions under which disappearance becomes possible, the soft light, the failing walls, the open shutter, the female body positioned not as the subject of the photograph but as one of its materials, no more permanent than the plaster, no more fixed than the dust. The horror, if it is horror, is not in the vanishing. It is in how beautiful the vanishing looks. It is in the recognition that the room, the light, the exposure, the medium itself, have all conspired to make the loss of a human presence into something we find exquisite. Woodman’s photographs make us accomplices to an aesthetics of dissolution. They give us images so formally assured, so luminous in their rendering of texture and surface, that we do not immediately notice what they show us. A body that is ceasing to be a body. A form that is returning to the wall. A presence that the room is absorbing, with infinite patience and the slow appetite of architectural time, into itself.

Works discussed:

Francesca Woodman, Untitled, from Polka Dots Series, Providence, Rhode Island, 1976. Gelatin silver print on paper. Collections include Tate (AR00351) and the National Galleries of Scotland.

Francesca Woodman, Untitled, Providence, Rhode Island, c. 1975–1978. Gelatin silver print. Courtesy Woodman Family Foundation and Marian Goodman Gallery.

Francesca Woodman, Untitled (self-portrait with chair), Providence, Rhode Island, c. 1977–1978. Gelatin silver print, 5 3/16 × 5 1/4 in. Courtesy Woodman Family Foundation and Marian Goodman Gallery.

Image Captions

Fig. 1. Francesca Woodman, Untitled, from Polka Dots Series, Providence, Rhode Island, 1976. Gelatin silver print on paper. © Woodman Family Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy Woodman Family Foundation and Marian Goodman Gallery.

Fig. 2. Francesca Woodman, Untitled, Providence, Rhode Island, c. 1975–1978. Gelatin silver print. © Woodman Family Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy Woodman Family Foundation and Marian Goodman Gallery.

Fig. 3. Francesca Woodman, Untitled (self-portrait with chair), Providence, Rhode Island, c. 1977–1978. Gelatin silver print, 5 3/16 × 5 1/4 in. © Woodman Family Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy Woodman Family Foundation and Marian Goodman Gallery.

Sources

Woodman Family Foundation – biography, exhibition history, and works catalogue: woodmanfoundation.org

Tate, collection entry for Untitled, from Polka Dots Series, Providence, Rhode Island (1976): tate.org.uk

National Galleries of Scotland, collection entry for Untitled, from Polka Dots Series: nationalgalleries.org

Marian Goodman Gallery – primary gallery representing the Woodman estate: mariangoodman.com

Jackson Fine Art, catalogue entry for Untitled (self-portrait with chair), 1977–78: jacksonfineart.com

Sotheby’s, lot entry for Polka Dots, Classic Photographs sale, 2019: sothebys.com

Galerie Hubert Winter, publication of Abigail Solomon-Godeau’s “Just Like a Woman”: galeriewinter.at

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, press release for the 2012 Francesca Woodman retrospective: guggenheim.org

“Reevaluating Francesca Woodman, Whose Early Death Haunts Her Groundbreaking Images,” Artsy: artsy.net

For Further Reading

Chris Townsend, Francesca Woodman: Scattered in Space and Time (London, Phaidon, 2006). The first comprehensive monograph, with over 250 reproductions and an extended essay examining the work through the lenses of American Gothic, Surrealism, feminism, and post-Minimalism. Includes extracts from Woodman’s journals edited by George Woodman.

Rosalind Krauss, Bachelors (Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1999). Collected essays on nine women artists, including the expanded reading of Woodman originally published as “Problem Sets.” Essential for understanding the photographs as investigations of photographic indexicality.

Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Photography at the Dock: Essays on Photographic History, Institutions and Practices(Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1991). Contains “Just Like a Woman,” the foundational feminist reading of Woodman’s self-portraits.

Corey Keller (ed.), Francesca Woodman (San Francisco, SFMOMA / D.A.P., 2011). Catalogue for the SFMOMA and Guggenheim retrospective. Keller argues for reading the photographs as rigorous medium-specific investigations rather than biographical documents.

George Baker et al., “Francesca Woodman Reconsidered: A Conversation,” Art Journal 62, no. 2 (Summer 2003): 52–67. The most sustained scholarly roundtable on the competing critical frameworks applied to Woodman’s practice: tandfonline.com

Elizabeth Gumport, “The Long Exposure of Francesca Woodman,” The New York Review of Books, January 24, 2011: nybooks.com

“Exposing Boundaries: Intersections of Space, Time and the Body in Francesca Woodman’s Photographs,” thesis, New College of Florida, 2019: digitalcommons.ncf.edu

Play me. 🎼

There is a woman in a photograph. She is wearing a mask that covers her eyes and forehead, fastened with what looks like surgical tape. A cross hangs between her breasts, one of which is exposed through a gap in her gown. In her hands she holds something organic, fleshy, a heart perhaps, or a piece of fruit so ripe it has become indistinguishable from flesh. The image is not clear. It is not meant to be. The surface of the print has been worked over, toned and softened until it resembles something pulled from the back of a very old drawer, a daguerreotype that has survived a fire, or a relic wrapped in cloth for a century and only just unwrapped.

This is Woman in Mask, made in 1979 by Joel-Peter Witkin. It is one of his earliest works. It is also, I think, a skeleton key to everything he would spend the next four decades doing.

Joel-Peter Witkin, Woman in Mask, 1979. Toned gelatin silver print, 10 5/16 × 10 1/8 in. Etherton Gallery, Tucson. Reproduced from Artsy.

Witkin was born in Brooklyn in 1939, the son of a Jewish father and a Catholic mother whose marriage did not survive their religious differences.1 He and his twin brother Jerome, who became a painter, were raised Catholic. This matters enormously. Because what Witkin would go on to make, for decades, in darkrooms and studios and morgues, are images that depend on the weight of Catholic visual culture the way a cathedral depends on its foundations. Without the crucifix, the altarpiece, the reliquary, the ex-voto, the memento mori, without the entire apparatus of Christian image-making that insists suffering can be made sacred through the act of looking at it, Witkin’s photographs collapse into something much simpler than what they are. They become shock. They become spectacle. They become the thing most people already think they are.

Most people, when they encounter Witkin for the first time, stop at the surface. They see corpses, severed limbs, bodies that do not conform to the classical ideal, hermaphrodites, amputees, people of short stature, conjoined twins. They see a photographer who works with the dead.2 They recoil, or they are fascinated, or they are both at once, and then they move on with a verdict already formed. The verdict is usually some version of “that is disturbing.” As though disturbance were a destination rather than a doorway.

I want to argue that Joel-Peter Witkin’s most unsettling gesture is not showing us the body that mainstream culture would prefer to keep invisible. His most unsettling gesture is composing that body with the gravity and tenderness of a devotional image, and then daring us to say it does not deserve to be there.

There is a story Witkin tells about his childhood. He was very young, being led down the front steps of his family’s tenement by his mother, when a car accident occurred in the street. A little girl was decapitated. The severed head rolled toward him on the pavement.3 He has told this story so many times and with such consistency that it has become a kind of origin myth, the primal scene from which all his work descends. Whether it happened exactly as he describes is impossible to verify. What matters is that Witkin insists on it, that he locates the source of his vision not in an aesthetic education or a philosophical position, in a moment of involuntary witness. He saw something terrible. He did not look away. He has spent his entire career asking us to do the same.

Let me return to Woman in Mask. The photograph is small, a toned gelatin silver print, just over ten inches square. The woman stands frontally, facing us. Her posture is formal, almost hieratic, the posture of a saint in a Byzantine icon or a figure on a reliquary panel. The mask prevents identification. We do not know who she is. We know what she holds and what she reveals. The cross, the breasts, the unidentifiable organic object. These three elements form a triangle at the center of the composition, and each one pulls in a different direction. The cross points toward faith. The breast points toward the body, toward nourishment, toward sexuality. The object in her hands points toward something we cannot name, something between the sacred and the abject, something we are not sure we should be looking at.

This is Witkin’s compositional signature, already present in 1979, fully formed. He constructs an image in which the sacred and the grotesque are not opposites. They are the same visual field. You cannot extract the piety from the flesh. You cannot separate the devotion from the disturbance. The photograph refuses to let you choose.

Witkin’s process is worth understanding because it is inseparable from the meaning of the work.4 He begins with a drawing, a preparatory sketch in which he plans the composition, often over a reproduction of the old master painting he intends to reference. He then builds the tableau in his studio, arranging human subjects, props, backdrops, drapery, fruit, bones, sometimes body parts obtained from morgues. He photographs on large-format film. After developing, he works directly on the negative, scratching it, sanding it, tearing it, writing on it. He prints through tissue. He tones the resulting image, sometimes applies encaustic or collage. The final object is not a photograph in the way most people understand the word. It is a constructed relic. It looks like something that has already been through time, through damage, through the kind of slow decay that happens to images left in churches or buried in the ground. Witkin does not record the world. He builds a world and then ages it until it feels as old as the traditions it invokes.

This is the first reason his work should be understood as fundamentally anti-documentary. Every body in a Witkin photograph has been transformed into allegory, into tableau, into citation. Nothing is found. Everything is made. The comparison to Diane Arbus, which critics have drawn for decades, is instructive precisely because it breaks down at this point.5 Arbus went into the world and found people living at its edges. Witkin brings people into his studio and rebuilds the world around them, a world drawn from Velázquez, from Goya, from Bosch, from Catholic hagiography, from the vanitas tradition of Dutch painting. The difference is not cosmetic. It determines what kind of ethical question the work asks.

Consider Death is Like Lunch, it’s Coming, made in 2010. The title alone is doing something remarkable, it takes the most solemn subject in Western art and makes it mundane. Death is not a horseman, not a cloaked figure, not a dramatic event. It is lunch. It is coming whether you are ready or not.

Joel-Peter Witkin, Death is Like Lunch, it's Coming, 2010. Gelatin silver print with hand-applied ink. Etherton Gallery, Tucson. Reproduced from Artsy.

The photograph shows a standing skeleton, fully articulated, positioned to the left of the frame. It faces a woman who stands opposite, nude, masked with flowers in her hair, cradling a baby at her breast. The infant is nursing. Between them, at their feet, a bowl of fruit, grapes and other offerings spilling over the rim. The composition is framed within what appears to be a proscenium or a painted backdrop, the edges of the image darkened and distressed, the word “death is like lunch” written vertically on the left margin and “it’s coming” along the bottom. A strip of vivid red bleeds in from the right edge, the only color in the image, like a wound in the surface of the print itself.

Everything here is a citation. The skeleton is the figure from a thousand vanitas paintings and danse macabre woodcuts.6 The nursing mother recalls the Madonna lactans, the breastfeeding Virgin, one of the oldest motifs in Christian art. The fruit bowl is a vanitas still life in miniature, the overripe offerings reminding us that abundance and rot are the same process observed at different speeds. The mask on the woman’s face echoes Venetian carnevale, the tradition of concealment that runs through so much of Witkin’s work. The handwritten text is a memento mori made conversational, stripped of its Latin solemnity.

What Witkin does with these elements is not collage in the usual sense. It is closer to what a medieval artist might have done when building a retable or an altarpiece, assembling known symbols into a configuration that produces meaning through proximity. The skeleton does not threaten the mother. The mother does not flee the skeleton. They coexist. They are compositional equals, facing each other across the frame with the gravity of figures in a sacra conversazione. The baby, oblivious, nurses. Life continues in the presence of death, not despite it, alongside it, the way lunch continues despite the knowledge that lunch will one day stop.

I propose that this is where Witkin’s work becomes genuinely radical, not in what it shows, in what it refuses to separate. The image does not pit life against death. It does not pit beauty against decay. It places them together and insists that the distinction we draw between them is a fiction we maintain for our own comfort. The scandal is not the skeleton. The scandal is how beautiful the composition is, how balanced, how classically composed, how much it resembles something you might find in a church.

The same logic operates in one of Witkin’s most ambitious art-historical interventions, his 1987 photograph Las Meninas, after Velázquez.

Velázquez’s original, painted in 1656, is perhaps the most analyzed painting in the history of Western art. It shows the Infanta Margarita attended by her maids of honor, her little people, her dog, and the painter himself, all arranged in a room in the Alcázar of Madrid, with the king and queen visible only as reflections in a mirror on the back wall.7 The painting is about looking. It is about who is seen and who does the seeing. It is about where power sits in the relationship between the painter, the subject, and the viewer. These questions have occupied art historians from Palomino to Foucault.

Witkin’s version, made in his New Mexico studio, keeps the compositional skeleton of the original intact.8 The Infanta is still at center. The painter is still at the easel. The mirror is still on the back wall. The dog is still at the Infanta’s feet. What changes is every body in the scene. The Infanta Margarita, the future Holy Roman Empress, is replaced by a double amputee, a woman whose legs are missing, whose torso is mounted on a metal armature that mimics the shape of the Infanta’s enormous farthingale skirt. The courtier by the door becomes a figure of Christ. The attendants include a creature that recalls the hybrid forms of Picasso’s Guernica. Witkin places himself at the easel, taking Velázquez’s position, claiming the authority of the old master while simultaneously dismantling the world the old master painted.

I found the preparatory maquette for this photograph, and it is almost as revealing as the finished work.9 It is a pencil sketch drawn directly over a printed reproduction of Velázquez’s painting, the kind of reproduction that could be torn from an art book. Witkin has drawn over the figures, annotating them with instructions to himself. “MAKE SURE YOU SPLIT IMAGE,” one note reads. Another identifies where Christ should appear, where the Guernica hybrid should go. The handwriting is impatient, loose, the handwriting of someone who already sees the finished image and is just trying to get the logistics down. What strikes me about the maquette is how literally it enacts Witkin’s relationship to art history. He does not stand at a respectful distance from the masterpiece. He writes on top of it. He draws over it. He uses it the way a builder uses a blueprint, as a structure to inhabit, to modify, to fill with new bodies.

Joel-Peter Witkin, 1st Maquette for Las Meninas, 1987. Pencil on printed reproduction, 9 1/2 × 11 1/4 in. Etherton Gallery, Tucson. A preparatory drawing in which Witkin sketches directly over a reproduction of Velázquez's painting, annotating it with instructions for the staged photograph that would follow. Reproduced from Artsy.

The finished photograph is a gelatin silver print, twenty-eight inches square, toned and distressed in Witkin’s characteristic manner. The surface has the quality of aged vellum or stained glass seen through smoke. Nothing is crisp. Nothing is clinical. The bodies in the frame, the amputee, the Christ figure, the Guernica hybrid, the dog, the photographer himself, all exist in a visual field that refuses the clarity of documentary photography. They are figures in a tableau, performers in a mystery play, icons in a chapel that happens to be a darkroom in Albuquerque.

Joel-Peter Witkin, Las Meninas (Self Portrait), New Mexico, 1987. Gelatin silver print, 28 × 28 in. Collections include the Princeton University Art Museum, the Toledo Museum of Art, and the New Mexico Museum of Art. Courtesy of Witkin.

What Witkin gains by this substitution is immense and ethically complicated. By placing a double amputee where the Infanta stood, he does not simply include a marginalized body in a canonical image. He reveals that the canonical image was already organized around the question of which bodies are permitted to be seen, to be central, to be composed with dignity and light and the full resources of artistic skill. Velázquez painted the Infanta at the center of his universe because she was power incarnate, the daughter of the king, the center of the court. Witkin places a woman without legs at the center of his universe and composes her with identical formal care. The question the photograph asks is not “why would you put her there?” The question is “why would you assume she does not belong there?”

I am not going to pretend this is simple. The ethical question in Witkin’s work is real and it does not resolve.

His subjects, the living ones, choose to be photographed. They arrive at his studio, they participate in the staging, they collaborate in the construction of the image. Witkin has always insisted on this, that his models are not exploited, they are exalted. His dead subjects are another matter. The bodies and body parts he has obtained from morgues, particularly in Mexico, raise questions that no amount of formal beauty can answer. Can consent be assumed from the dead? Can an unclaimed body, a body already abandoned by the state and by family/society, be further abandoned into art? Does the beauty of the resulting image redeem the method, or does it merely make the method more palatable?

I do not think Witkin’s photographs answer these questions. I think they are designed to hold them open, to prevent the viewer from arriving at a comfortable position. This is why the theatricality matters so much. If Witkin photographed his subjects in a documentary style, plain backgrounds, even lighting, no props, the ethical question would be simpler, perhaps more clearly exploitative, perhaps more clearly dignifying. The heavy staging, the art-historical references, the reliquary surfaces, these add layers of meaning that make it impossible to say with certainty whether what we are witnessing is an act of reverence or an act of possession. The ambiguity is the point. The photograph does not tell you how to feel. It catches you in the act of deciding.

There is a reading of Witkin that calls him transgressive, a provocateur, a breaker of taboos. I think this reading is wrong, or at least insufficient. I propose that Witkin is, in a deep structural sense, conservative. He does not destroy the categories of sacred and profane, beautiful and grotesque, normal and monstrous. He intensifies them. He depends on them. His photographs work precisely because the viewer arrives with these categories already installed, and the image forces them into collision. If we did not already carry within us a sense of what belongs in a church and what belongs in a morgue, the photographs would lose their charge. Witkin is not smashing the frame. He is putting things inside the frame that the frame was built to exclude, and then showing us that the frame still holds.

This is why I think his photographs should be read less as provocations than as devotional images that have expanded the boundaries of what devotion can include. The frontality of his figures, the symbolic density, the ritual staging, the damaged and aged surfaces, all of these align his work not with photojournalism or conceptual art, but with the icon, the altarpiece, and the ex-voto. These are images made for prolonged confrontation, not quick consumption. They ask the viewer to stand before them the way a believer stands before a painted saint, not to understand immediately, to be changed by the duration of looking.

It is worth noting that Witkin’s visual language has traveled well beyond the gallery wall. In 1984 he made a self-portrait called Portrait of Joel, now in the collection of LACMA, in which he wears a black leather mask with a white crucifix fixed across the bridge of the nose.10 The image is arresting on its own terms, Witkin staring directly into the camera, the mask transforming his face into something between a penitent and a predator. Ten years later, in 1994, director Mark Romanek made the music video for Nine Inch Nails’ “Closer,” and the resemblance to Witkin’s work is striking.11

Joel-Peter Witkin, Portrait of Joel, 1984. Gelatin silver print, 14 1/2 × 14 1/2 in. The Audrey and Sydney Irmas Collection, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA).

The crucifix mask appears on a model in the video, reproduced almost exactly. The staged tableaux, the degraded and aged surfaces, the bodies presented frontally in theatrical arrangements, the fusion of sacred and clinical space, all of this reads as fluent in Witkin’s vocabulary. Romanek drew on a heterogeneous visual archive of visual influences for the video, including Man Ray, Francis Bacon, the Quay Brothers, and Giorgio de Chirico, among others, and pushed back at the video being called a Witkin imitation.12 I am not interested in assigning blame or credit for influence. What I find remarkable is how naturally Witkin’s visual grammar translated into a completely different medium, how immediately an audience of millions recognized something powerful in it, even if most of them had never heard his name or had a notion of his photography. The masks, the distressed surfaces, the bodies arranged like altarpiece figures in rooms that feel like chapels, these elements worked in a minute music video for the same reason they work in Witkin’s gelatin silver prints. They activate something older than photography, older than the music video, something embedded in the way Western culture has always organized the relationship between the sacred body and the suffering one.

I mention this not to diminish Romanek’s work, which is visionary in its own right, to observe something about Witkin’s. When a photographic language can survive translation into moving image, into music, into fashion (Alexander McQueen also borrowed the crucifix mask), it suggests that the language is tapping into something deeper than personal style. Witkin did not invent this visual connection between suffering and beauty, between the damaged body and the devotional image. He inherited it from Catholic art, from vanitas painting, from the reliquary tradition. What he did was strip it of its institutional context and place it back in the hands of the viewer, raw, unmediated by the church or the museum. The fact that it then migrated into the darkest corners of 1990s pop culture is not a corruption of his project. It is evidence of how urgently that visual language was needed.

Once again let’s return to Woman in Mask, that earliest photograph, the one that predates the corpses and the controversy and the museum collections and the decades of argument. A woman, masked. A cross. Hands. Breasts. Something held in the hands that cannot be named. Already, in 1979, the entire structure is there. The sacred and the carnal fused into a single body. The surface of the print already aged, already worked over, already made to look like it has survived something. The figure already frontal, already iconic, already positioned not as a person to be known, as a figure to be contemplated.

I argue that the scandal of Witkin’s work lies not in what he shows, in how beautifully he insists it be seen. That is the real provocation. Not the corpse, not the amputation, not the body that mainstream culture would prefer to keep hidden. The provocation is the composition, the light, the care, the formal seriousness, the old master references, the reliquary surface, the unmistakable evidence that someone looked at this body, this specific body, and thought it deserved the same visual gravity as a Madonna, as an Infanta, as a saint.

Witkin makes the viewer complicit by aestheticizing what we expect to remain unviewable. Once you have seen the beauty, you cannot unsee it. Once you have recognized the composition as classical, the pose as iconic, the surface as devotional, you are implicated in the looking. You are no longer a spectator who stumbled upon something difficult. You are someone who stood before an altar and did not leave.

That is, I think, what Witkin has been building all along. Not a body of work that asks whether the abject can be beautiful. A body of work that reveals how unstable the distinction between the sacred body and the grotesque body has always been, and that forces us to ask why we ever believed we could tell them apart.

Thanks for reading.

Works discussed:

Joel-Peter Witkin, Woman in Mask, 1979. Toned gelatin silver print, 10 5/16 × 10 1/8 in. Etherton Gallery, Tucson.

Joel-Peter Witkin, Las Meninas (Self Portrait), New Mexico, 1987. Gelatin silver print, 28 × 28 in. Collections include the Princeton University Art Museum, the Toledo Museum of Art, and the New Mexico Museum of Art.

Joel-Peter Witkin, 1st Maquette for Las Meninas, 1987. Pencil on printed reproduction, 9 1/2 × 11 1/4 in. Etherton Gallery, Tucson.

Joel-Peter Witkin, Death is Like Lunch, it’s Coming, 2010. Gelatin silver print with hand-applied ink. Etherton Gallery, Tucson.

Joel-Peter Witkin, Portrait of Joel, 1984. Gelatin silver print, 14 1/2 × 14 1/2 in. The Audrey and Sydney Irmas Collection, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA).

Sources

Etherton Gallery, Tucson – primary gallery for Witkin’s work, including all four works discussed above: ethertongallery.com

Evi Papadopoulou, “Provoking the Spectator: Las Meninas by Joel Peter Witkin,” Interartive: Contemporary Art + Thought, October 2008: interartive.org

New Mexico Museum of Art, entry on Las Meninas (Self Portrait): online.nmartmuseum.org

Princeton University Art Museum, collection entry for Las Meninas, New Mexico, 1987: artmuseum.princeton.edu

“Framing the Body: A Critical Look at Witkin’s Photographic Legacy,” Sixty Inches From Center: sixtyinchesfromcenter.org

International Center of Photography, Joel-Peter Witkin archive: icp.org

“The Beauty of Difference: Photographer Joel-Peter Witkin,” Santa Fe New Mexican: santafenewmexican.com

LACMA Collections, entry for Portrait of Joel (1984): collections.lacma.org

The Nachtkabarett, “Joel-Peter Witkin & Closer Video Influences” – side-by-side visual comparisons between the Nine Inch Nails video and Witkin’s photographs: nachtkabarett.com/nin/closer

Kerrang!, “A Deep Dive into Nine Inch Nails’ NSFW Music Video for Closer”: kerrang.com

For Further Reading

Otto M. Urban, Joel-Peter Witkin: Vanitas (Prague, Arbor Vitae, 2012). The most comprehensive collection of Witkin’s still life and vanitas-inflected work, with an essay by Urban that situates the photographs within the European memento mori tradition.

Germano Celant, Witkin (New York, Scalo, 1995). The signed first edition is available through Witkin’s official website. At 272 pages, this remains the most complete single-volume survey of his career through the mid-1990s: joelpeterwitkin.com

Joel-Peter Witkin, Forty Photographs, with text by Van Deren Coke (San Francisco, 1985). Witkin’s first book, now a collector’s item. The full text is available as a PDF through Monoskop: monoskop.org

“Performing Amputation: The Photographs of Joel-Peter Witkin,” Text and Performance Quarterly 28, no. 1–2 (2008): tandfonline.com. An academic essay examining Witkin’s representation of amputees and the performance of disability in his staged compositions.

Despina Metaxatos, “The Spiritual Body: Regression and Redemption in the Work of Joel-Peter Witkin,” University of Western Australia (2004): research-repository.uwa.edu.au. A doctoral thesis exploring the religious and psychological dimensions of Witkin’s imagery, with particular attention to the tension between regression and spiritual transformation.

“After Joel-Peter Witkin,” The Order of the Good Death: orderofthegooddeath.com. A thoughtful reflection on Witkin’s legacy from the death-positive community, engaging with both the beauty and the ethical difficulty of his use of human remains.

Francesco Hayez, Accusa segreta (Secret Accusation), 1847–48. Oil on canvas | 153 × 120 cm. Musei Civici di Pavia, Italy. Part of the Trittico della Vendetta (Revenge Triptych), based on poems by Andrea Maffei.

This is Accusa segreta — Secret Accusation — painted by Francesco Hayez between 1847 and 1848. It hangs today in the Musei Civici di Pavia, in northern Italy, a city that has nothing to do with Venice and everything to do with the quiet afterlives of paintings that once meant something dangerous. It is, I want to argue, one of the most psychologically unsettling images of the Italian Romantic period, not despite its beauty, but because of it.

The woman’s name is Maria. We know this because the painting belongs to a triptych, the Trittico della Vendetta, the Revenge Triptych, based on two poems by Andrea Maffei, a poet and librettist who was one of Hayez’s closest friends. The poems, La Veneziana and La Vendetta, tell a story that unfolds in three acts.

In the first, Maria’s confidante Rachel reveals that Maria’s lover has betrayed her. Rachel does not counsel grief. She counsels something far more inventive. She urges Maria to denounce the man, not to his face, not to his family, to the Venetian state. To report him as a conspirator against the Republic. To convert a private wound into a political accusation, and to let the machinery of the Inquisition do what a woman’s anger, in that world, could not do alone.

The second act is this painting. Maria stands on the loggia of the Doge’s Palace with the letter in her hand. She is about to deposit it into one of the bocche di leone, the lion’s mouth letterboxes carved into the palace walls, through which any citizen could anonymously denounce another to the Tribunal of Inquisitors.1 This was a real mechanism of Venetian governance, established after Baiamonte Tiepolo’s attempted coup in 1310 and maintained for nearly five centuries. The mouths were everywhere. In churches, in government offices, in the walls of the palace itself. They accepted accusations at any hour, from anyone, about anything, though by law signed denunciations carried more weight than anonymous ones. The system was intended to surveil public officials. In practice … it surveilled everyone.

^[1]The bocche di leone were first erected after Baiamonte Tiepolo’s attempted coup against the state in 1310. By law, anonymous denunciations were accepted only against public officials, though in practice the system was far more widely used. See National Geographic, “Need to Complain? Here’s How Renaissance-Era Venetians Did It.”

In the third act, known only through a poor copy since the original painting has been lost, Maria repents.2 She confesses to an inquisitor and tries to retract the accusation. However, Rachel admonishes her for abandoning the plot. The story ends not in resolution, but in the wreckage of an act that cannot be undone.

Hayez painted the second panel first, in 1847–1848. Consiglio alla vendetta, the scene of Rachel’s persuasion, came in 1851 and now hangs in the Liechtenstein Museum in Vienna. The lost third panel followed around 1853. Each frame originally bore a line from Maffei’s verse carved into its surround. The one on the Accusa segreta reportedly read, “via dal mio cor sì vil pensiero,” banish from my heart so vile a thought. Whether the thought in question is the betrayal or the denunciation, the verse does not say.

What makes this painting extraordinary is not the story. It is the refusal to illustrate the story clearly.

Look again at Maria. She is not posting the letter. She is not reaching toward the wall. She is holding the letter loosely at her side, her fingers slack around it, as though it might fall. Her other hand rests against the column, steadying herself or perhaps hesitating. Her face is not the face of a woman executing a plan. It is the face of a woman in the corridor between decision and action, that narrow, terrible space where you still have the freedom to stop.

Hayez could have shown us the moment of insertion, the hand pushing paper into stone, the irrevocable crossing of a threshold. He chose instead the moment just before. In doing so, he made the painting about something that cannot be painted, the interior weather of a mind deciding to destroy someone.

This is the first thing to say about the composition. The second is that it eroticizes that weather.

I want to be precise about this, because I think Hayez was precise about it.

Maria’s dress is cut low. The neckline dips to reveal the swell of her breast, a whisper of her nipple, not accidentally, not through dishevelment, through the deliberate cut of the bodice, laced with dark cord in a way that tightens the waist and opens the chest. The fabric is heavy green satin, painted with a virtuosity that contemporary critics singled out, the way it catches light along her hip, the way it folds into deep shadow in the hollows of her lap. The white chemise beneath puffs at her sleeves, creating a contrast of softness against the architectural severity of the arches. The black veil, transparent, barely there, falls from her dark hair across her shoulders and décolletage, adding a layer that conceals nothing and suggests everything.

This is not accidental. The Italian exhibition review I found on the Wayback Machine, from a 2012 show at the Castello Visconteo in Pavia, describes Hayez as a man of “robusti appetiti carnali” (robust carnal appetites) who delighted in subverting classical conventions of the female body.3 The reviewer notes that in this painting, he makes a breast bloom from the neckline “as if by chance.” Nothing in a composition this controlled happens by chance. This is a painter who spent months on the fall of satin. He knew exactly where the eye would go.

This is where the painting becomes genuinely disturbing, in the way that only great art can be. The sensuality is inseparable from the act of denunciation. Hayez does not paint a beautiful woman and a political betrayal. He paints them as the same gesture. The exposed skin, the loosely held letter, the downcast eyes, the veil that hides nothing, these elements form a single visual field in which desire and destruction are compositionally fused. You cannot look at Maria’s body without also looking at what her hand is about to do. You cannot contemplate the accusation without also taking in the neckline, the softness, the warmth of flesh against cold stone.

I would argue that Hayez deliberately makes the viewer complicit. We are drawn to Maria before we understand her. We find her beautiful before we find her dangerous. When we realize what the letter is, not a love note, not a farewell, a weapon designed to activate the apparatus of state violence against a specific human being, the beauty does not recede. It intensifies. It becomes the thing we cannot resolve.

This fusion of eros and denunciation is not unique to the Accusa segreta. It belongs to a broader pattern in Hayez’s work, one that art historians have sometimes called his “coding” of the female body for political meaning.

His most famous painting, Il Bacio (The Kiss, 1859), [a painting we talked about earlier this week] wraps the Italian tricolore into the garments of two lovers, red and green on his tunic, the white of her shawl, so that the embrace becomes a figure for Franco-Italian alliance. His Meditazione (1851), originally titled Italy in 1848 before Austrian censors intervened, depicts a woman with a bared breast holding a volume inscribed Storia d’Italia and a cross etched with the dates of the Milanese Five Days.4 She is Italy as nursing mother, as mourner, as allegorical body. The exposed breast in that painting signifies nourishment, sacrifice, the nation-as-woman awaiting her children’s return. It was a visual language the Risorgimento audience understood fluently.

In the Accusa segreta, the coding is darker. Maria’s body is not the body of the nation. It is the body of a woman about to do something unforgivable for reasons that are entirely personal. The breast does not signify maternal generosity. It signifies the dangerous proximity of intimacy and violence, the fact that the same woman who was this man’s lover is now his accuser, and that the transition from one role to the other has not changed her physical presence in the world at all. She is still beautiful. She is still soft. She is about to feed him to the Inquisition.

Hayez, born in Venice in 1791 to a fisherman father of French origin and a mother from Murano, knew the city and its political architecture from the inside. He understood the bocche di leone not as an exotic historical detail, as a feature of the place that made him. He understood something crucial about the Venetian system, that it worked because it was invisible. The genius of the lion’s mouth was that anyone might use it. Your neighbor, your business partner, your lover. The denunciation entered the wall and disappeared, no confrontation, no trial of nerve, no face-to-face reckoning. Just paper into stone, and then silence, and then the knock at the door.

This is why Venice matters so much to the painting. Another city would not do. Florence had its vendettas, Rome its intrigues, Naples its revolutions. Only Venice built an entire system of governance around the anonymous letter. Only Venice made betrayal into infrastructure.

The setting is not decorative. The trefoil arches of the Doge’s Palace loggia are the actual architecture of the state that will receive Maria’s accusation. The lagoon behind her is the same water that carried prisoners to the cells beneath the palace. Santa Maria della Salute, the great votive church built after the plague of 1630, glows in the background like a promise of salvation that has nothing to do with what is happening in the foreground. Hayez positions Maria between sacred and secular power, between the church and the palace, between mercy and law, and gives her the instrument that connects them …a piece of paper.

The light in the painting deserves attention too. It comes from behind and to the left, late afternoon, golden, Venetian. It catches the satin of her dress and the marble of the columns, leaving her face in partial shadow. We see her expression, not clearly. We see enough to know she is troubled, not enough to know whether she will stop. The veil darkens her further, adding a layer of visual interference between us and her intentions. Hayez lights the scene like a stage – he was, after all, working in the same Milan that produced Verdi and Donizetti, and the triptych’s source material by Maffei was itself operatic in structure, the drama he stages is interior, almost silent. There is no gesture of triumph, no raised arm, no theatrical collapse. Just a woman leaning against a column, holding a letter, not quite ready to let it go.

There is a question worth sitting with. Does this painting ask us to sympathize with Maria, to suspect her, or to admire her?

I think the answer is that it refuses to choose, and that the refusal is the point. Hayez gives us every reason to feel for her. She has been betrayed, she is alone, her face registers anguish. He also gives us every reason to be wary. The letter is a death sentence dressed as a civic duty, and she knows it. He makes her so physically compelling that we cannot look away, which means we are implicated regardless. Whether we pity or judge, we are looking. We are held. The painting converts our gaze into a kind of complicity, we watch a woman prepare to do something terrible, and we find the watching beautiful.

This is, finally, why secrecy feels so seductive in the painting. The entire composition is structured around concealment. The letter’s contents are hidden from us. Maria’s final decision is hidden from us. The veil half-hides her face. The laced bodice half-reveals her body. Even the bocca di leone itself, presumably somewhere just out of frame, is hidden from us. Everything in the painting is about to happen. We are suspended in the erotic charge of the secret itself, the knowledge that something irreversible is imminent, that we can see it forming, and that we are powerless to intervene.

Hayez painted this in 1847–1848, on the eve of the revolutions that would convulse the Italian peninsula.5 The Trittico della Vendetta has been read as an allegory of the climate of denunciation that plagued those who were even suspected of conspiring against Austrian rule, a climate in which the anonymous letter was not a relic of the old Republic, a living instrument of oppression. If that reading is right, then the painting is not merely about a woman’s revenge. It is about how political terror operates through intimate channels. How the state enters the bedroom, how love becomes evidence, how the infrastructure of surveillance depends on the willingness of individuals to use it.

At the center of it all, Hayez places a woman whose beauty makes the whole mechanism work. Not because beauty is the cause of the denunciation, but because beauty is the medium through which we experience it. We do not see a bureaucratic process. We see green satin, dark hair, warm skin, a letter held loosely in a hand that could still choose differently. We see desire and destruction occupying the same body, and we find that we cannot tell them apart.

That is what makes the Accusa segreta such a great painting. It is what makes it, more than a century and a half later, impossible to look at comfortably.

Sources

Musei Civici di Pavia – permanent home of Accusa segreta. The painting’s official catalogue entry is held in the Italian Ministry of Culture’s database: catalogo.beniculturali.it

Liechtenstein Princely Collections, Vaduz–Vienna – home of Consiglio alla vendetta (1851): liechtensteincollections.at

Maria Paola Forlani, “La Pittura Italiana del XIX Secolo: Dal Neoclassicismo al Simbolismo,” review of the exhibition at Castello Visconteo, Pavia, curated by Susanna Zatti and Fernando Mazzocca (catalogue published by Skira), February 2012. Accessed via the Wayback Machine.

“Revenge Triptych,” Wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revenge_Triptych

“Francesco Hayez: Italy is Woman,” Google Arts & Culture, Galleria d’Arte Moderna Achille Forti: artsandculture.google.com

Italian Art Society, “Francesco Hayez was born in Venice on 10 February 1791”: italianartsociety.org

National Geographic, “Need to Complain? Here’s How Renaissance-Era Venetians Did It” – on the history of the bocche di leone: nationalgeographic.com

For Further Reading

Fernando Mazzocca, Francesco Hayez (Milan, Federico Motta Editore, 1994). The standard monograph on Hayez by the scholar who curated the 2012 Pavia exhibition. Essential for anyone working seriously on the painter.

Fernando Mazzocca and Susanna Zatti (eds.), La Pittura Italiana dell’Ottocento: Dal Neoclassicismo al Simbolismo (Milan, Skira, 2011). The exhibition catalogue from the Hermitage and Pavia show. Contains reproductions and entries for all three triptych panels and situates them within the broader arc of nineteenth-century Italian painting.

Andrea Maffei, Poesie. Maffei’s collected verse, including La Veneziana and La Vendetta, the two poems that provided the narrative basis for the Trittico della Vendetta. Maffei was also the Italian translator of Schiller, Byron, and Milton, and his friendship with Hayez placed the painter at the intersection of Romantic literature and visual art.

Paul Nicholls, “Art for a New Audience in the Risorgimento: A Meditation,” Journal of Modern Italian Studies 18, no. 2 (2013). tandfonline.com. An academic article examining how paintings like Hayez’s Meditazione functioned as political allegory under Austrian censorship, directly relevant to understanding how the Accusa segreta encoded contemporary anxieties about denunciation.

“Francesco Hayez and His Grossest Woman of the Vulgar in the Guise of Venus,” Finestre sull’Arte: finestresullarte.info. On the Carlotta Chabert scandal and Hayez’s habit of smuggling sensuality into classical and historical subjects.

“Francesco Hayez and His Women,” My Daily Art Display: mydailyartdisplay.uk. A readable survey of Hayez’s female figures across his career, useful context for understanding how the Accusa segreta fits within his broader treatment of women as simultaneously desirable and politically charged.

Images of Venice, “Mouths of the Lion”: imagesofvenice.com. On the surviving bocche di leone in Venice and their role in the Republic’s system of anonymous denunciation.

Start with the white. Jane’s satin petticoat is the brightest surface in a composition otherwise built from grays, browns, and deep reds. As Alicia du Plessis observes in her analysis of the painting, the white functions symbolically to suggest innocence, but it also does something more structural, and it isolates Jane from her surroundings, pulling her forward out of the murky interior and into the viewer’s space. She becomes a luminous body offered up against darkness. The white constructs her as sacrificial before the axe ever falls.

Paul Delaroche, The Execution of Lady Jane Grey, 1833. Oil on canvas | 246 × 297 cm. National Gallery, London (NG1909).

That leads to a harder question: does this painting invite genuine empathy, or does it manufacture a spectacle of pity? Delaroche was a master of what we could call emotional stagecraft. Du Plessis notes that the composition has been compared to a tableau vivant, a form of theatrical entertainment in which actors held perfectly still poses. The comparison is telling. There is something performative about the grief here, something composed for maximum effect. The two ladies-in-waiting on the left don’t just “mourn.” They model mourning for us. One collapses against the column, the other turns away, arms raised. They give us permission to feel, and they instruct us in how to feel. Their bodies are visual cues directing our emotional response before we have consciously processed the scene.

Gender is doing significant work throughout. Jane is not depicted as a political actor brought down by the mechanics of succession. She is depicted as a young woman in a thin white garment, blindfolded, groping helplessly for the block. Her body is vulnerable, slight, guided by a man’s hand. Delaroche understood that a female body presented this way would elicit a particular kind of horror from a nineteenth-century audience, one rooted not only in the injustice of her death but in the perceived violation of femininity itself. A male political martyr in the same composition would certainly be granted more dignity of posture, more visible resolve. Jane is given fragility instead, and the painting depends on it.

Then there is the blindfold, which may be the painting’s most psychologically acute detail. Jane cannot see the block. She reaches for it and cannot find it. The viewer, meanwhile, sees everything: the block, the straw, the axe resting at the executioner’s feet. This asymmetry between what Jane knows and what we know is where the painting generates its deepest tension. We have the knowledge she lacks. We see the death she is about to meet. That gap between her helplessness and our omniscience implicates us. We are witnesses, but we are also, uncomfortably, spectators at an event staged for our consumption.

And that raises a final question worth sitting with. The execution of Lady Jane Grey took place outdoors, on Tower Green, not in the dim Romanesque interior Delaroche invented. The setting is historically inaccurate, and I’m sure Delaroche knew that. He chose atmosphere over fact. The enclosed, theatrical space intensifies the claustrophobia and focuses attention on the figures rather than dispersing it across an open landscape. For nineteenth-century history painting, accuracy was never really the point. Emotional truth was the currency, and Delaroche spent it lavishly. Whether that makes the painting a masterpiece of empathy or a masterpiece of manipulation is a question the viewer has to answer standing in front of it.

On the surface it’s a love scene.  A man in a cloak pulls a woman close, their faces lost in each other.  The light falls on her silk dress like it’s the only honest thing in the room. It is devastatingly romantic.  But the romance is doing work.

Francesco Hayez, The Kiss, 1859. Oil on canvas, 112 × 88 cm. Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan. Source: pinacotecabrera.org.

Look at the setting.  Those vaguely medieval arches, the draped fabric, the sense of secrecy.  None of it is historically specific.  Hayez isn’t reconstructing the fourteenth century.  He’s borrowing it.  The “medieval” here is emotional technology.  It’s a device for intensifying feeling by displacing it into a past that feels ancient enough to be safe and mysterious enough to be dangerous.  This is troubadour painting logic: cloaked figures, hidden faces, stolen moments in stone corridors.  The past becomes a container for anxieties that would be too raw if staged in a modern drawing room.

And then there’s the shadow.  Someone may be watching.  The man’s face is turned away from us. Hers is pressed against him, unreadable.  The kiss itself blocks our view. We are not fully let in.  We are made complicit in something partially concealed, invited to witness what we may not be meant to see.

That tension between spectacle and secrecy, between what is shown and what is withheld is what makes this painting unforgettable and remarkably romantic.

I’ll write a bit more on this one in the future.

Huldremose Woman, c. 160 BCE – 340 CE. National Museum of Denmark, Copenhagen, Denmark. Photograph by Bradley Rentz, 2015. CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Sir John Everett Millais, Ophelia, 1852–1852. Oil on canvas | 762 x 1118 mm. Tate Britain, London, England.

I. The Mechanics of Stillness

What makes a body look “suspended” rather than simply dead? In Millais’ painting, it is the calibration of Ophelia’s posture against the current. Where her arms float upward, palms open, fingers slightly cupped, and her gown billowing a bit beneath the surface in a way that infers neither sinking nor swimming. The composition orients the viewer laterally. The viewer reads her the way we read a horizon line, left to right, face to hands to the dark tangle of roots. The water functions not as a force acting on the body but as a medium holding it in place. The riverbank vegetation presses inward, framing her in a shallow horizontal band. Time, in the painting, feels architectural. It has been built into the relationship between figure and ground.

The Huldremose Woman achieves something analogous through entirely different means. Her body, recovered from a Jutland peat bog in 1879, was preserved by the anaerobic, tannic chemistry of sphagnum moss. Radiocarbon dating places her between 160 BCE and 340 CE. She lies on her side, partially flexed, her skin compressed and darkened, her garments still legible against her form. In the museum vitrine, she is lit from above with the kind of dramatic chiaroscuro usually reserved for Old Master paintings. The result is not accidental. It produces exactly the same lateral stillness that Millais engineered, a body that appears caught between states, neither fully present nor fully absent, hovering at the threshold of legibility.

The critical difference is authorship. Millais constructed his image deliberately over months, painting the Hogsmill River landscape plein air before posing Elizabeth Siddal in a bathtub of increasingly cold water in his London studio. Every element, the poppies signifying death, the violets of faithfulness, the willow of forsaken love, was placed with symbolic intention. The Huldremose Woman’s “composition” was produced by a sequence of material processes no one designed for aesthetic effect. It was her deposition in the bog, chemical tanning of skin and textile, compression under centuries of peat accumulation, excavation, conservation, and finally the curatorial decisions governing her display. The stillness is real in both cases. Its origin couldn’t be more different.

II. Paint and Peat: The Material of Mediation of Death

Oil paint and bog chemistry are, in a sense, rival preservation technologies, and the kind of encounter each produces with death is shaped by the physics of its medium.

Millais’ Ophelia exists in the continuous present tense of oil painting. The medium permits total illusion. It perfectly preserves the light on water, the translucency of wet fabric, the flush of skin not yet drained of life. Ophelia is dying in the painting, perpetually. She is caught at the instant before submersion, her lips slightly parted in song, her eyes open. The painting “refuses” the aftermath. It will never show the bloated, discolored body that Gertrude’s speech in Hamlet only delayed. The oil paint’s capacity for mimetic precision allows Millais to hold death at the threshold of beauty, to make it appear as a gentle transition rather than a rupture. This is aestheticized stasis, it’s death rendered as something to look at with pleasure, stripped of its sensory reality.

The Huldremose Woman doesn’t offer that beautiful illusion. Her preservation is indexical rather than representational. The bog did not depict her, it kept her. The tannins that darkened her skin to a deep brown, the acidic water that dissolved her bones while preserving soft tissue and textile fibre, the compression that flattened her features into a mask-like stillness. These are chemical facts, not artistic choices. When we look at her, we are not seeing a representation of a woman who died two millennia ago. We are seeing the woman herself, materially transformed by the duration that separates her death from our gaze. Where Millais offers us death as spectacle, held safely at the distance of representation, the bog collapses that distance entirely. The body is the artifact. The preservation is the image. There is no medium standing between the viewer and the dead, only the glass of the vitrine, and the uneasy awareness that what we are looking at once breathed.

This distinction matters because it shapes what kind of time we feel ourselves inhabiting when we look. Ophelia’s time is the frozen instant, the single moment extracted from narrative sequence and made eternal through a painter’s skill. The Huldremose Woman’s time is accumulated duration, the slow chemical fusion of centuries into skin and wool. One suspends time by stopping it. The other suspends time by compressing it.

III. Gendered Meaning and the Politics of Display

Both bodies are made to speak, to carry meanings they did not choose, and the frameworks through which they speak are saturated with assumptions about femininity and death.

Ophelia, within Shakespeare’s play and within the long history of her visual representation, is legible primarily through the symbolic grammar of literary tragedy. She is the woman driven mad by male violence and indifference, whose death by drowning becomes the most aesthetically compelling event in a play otherwise dominated by masculine action and philosophical deliberation. Her passivity in the water is the culmination of her passivity in life. The Tate’s reading of the painting emphasises the lush naturalism, the symbolic botany, the technical virtuosity. What it tends to leave implicit is the degree to which the painting depends on the equation of female death with visual pleasure, an equation the Victorians inherited and Millais perfected.

The Huldremose Woman’s meaning has been constructed through a different institutional apparatus, though one no less ideologically loaded. The Textile Archaeology article emphasizes the extraordinary sophistication of her clothing, a checked woollen skirt originally dyed blue or purple, a red plaid scarf, two layered skin capes (one of dark sheepskin, one of eleven small lambskins with twenty-two patches), and beneath all of it, a garment of plant fibre, possibly nettle or linen, whose discovery reshaped scholarly understanding of Iron Age textile technology. Strontium isotope analysis conducted by Karin Margarita Frei and colleagues, published in the Journal of Archaeological Science in 2009, suggested that the woman herself may have been of non-local origin, with the wool in her garments sourced from at least three distinct Scandinavian regions, raising questions about the reach of Iron Age trade networks, human mobility, and the political life of cloth.

These are amazing findings. They position the Huldremose Woman as an agent within a network of material and social relations far more complex than the sacrificial victim narrative that has historically dominated bog body interpretation. Yet her museum display still participates in a visual logic that prioritises stillness, beauty, and the contemplative encounter over the messy specificity of her death (her right arm was severed, likely before death). In the book Bodies in the Bog and the Archaeological Imagination, Karin Sanders argues persuasively that bog bodies occupy a liminal space between ethics and aesthetics, functioning as material metaphors onto which modern viewers project contemporary preoccupations: trauma, identity, nostalgia. The Huldremose Woman, dressed and lit and labelled, becomes available to us as an image in ways she never consented to, much as Ophelia became an image through Millais’ transformation of Elizabeth Siddal’s living body into a figure of beautiful death.

Conclusion: What this “Echo” Tells Us

The formal resemblance between these two figures is not coincidental in any causal sense, but it is not meaningless either. It tells us something about the visual expectations we bring to female bodies in states of extremity. Horizontal, still, enveloped, partially obscured by textile or water or vegetation. This is a visual grammar we have learned, and it produces a specific affective register, one of contemplation rather than horror, of reverence rather than confrontation. Both Millais and the museum curators of the National Museum of Denmark worked within this grammar, whether consciously or not. The painting deploys it through artistic intention. The museum reproduces it through lighting, spatial arrangement, and the selective framing of what the viewer is invited to notice.

What interests me is the “seam” where the two operations meet. The Huldremose Woman is not a painting, she’s a person. Her stillness is not composed, it is the residue of chemical processes acting on organic matter over deep time. Yet the moment she enters the vitrine, the moment she is lit and captioned and encountered by a viewer who has paid admission, she begins to function within the same representational economy as Ophelia. She becomes, in Karin Sanders’ terms, a projective figure, a body that has “served as a screen upon which poets, visual artists, archeologists, museumgoers, and even Internet browsers have projected all sorts of imaginings.” (Sanders, Bodies in the Bog | Introduction | Remarkable Remains).

The difference, and it is a difference worth insisting on, is that the Huldremose Woman’s materiality resists total absorption into image. The patches on her lambskin cape, the evidence of long use and repair, the non-local provenance of her plant-fibre undergarment. These details insist on a life lived before the bog, before the museum, before our modern eyes. They are facts that exceed the frame. Ophelia has no such residue. She is image all the way down, representation layered on representation, Shakespeare’s text mediated through Millais’ brush, anchored to no body except the absent one of Elizabeth Siddal, (who nearly died of pneumonia in the bathtub) whose own artistic ambitions have been largely footnoted out of the story.

Both figures ask us to look at a woman held still by forces beyond her control. The question is whether we can learn to see not only the stillness, but what the stillness conceals.

This essay was prompted by reading [“Denmark’s ‘Best Dressed’ Bog Body: Preserving the Hidden History of Iron Age Clothing”] on ’s Substack (June 2025), which led me to think about the visual and material parallels between the Huldremose Woman and John Everett Millais’ Ophelia (1851–1852, Tate Britain).

Sources:

- [“Denmark’s ‘Best Dressed’ Bog Body: Preserving the Hidden History of Iron Age Clothing”], Textile Archaeology, Substack

- [The Woman from Huldremose (and her clothes)], National Museum of Denmark

- [Huldremose Woman], Wikipedia

- Frei, Skals et al., [“The Huldremose Iron Age Textiles: An Attempt to Define Their Provenance Applying the Strontium Isotope System”] (doi.org/10.1016/j.jas.2009.05.007), Journal of Archaeological Science (2009)

- Sir John Everett Millais, [Ophelia], Tate Britain

- [The Story of Ophelia], Tate

- [Sir John Everett Millais, Ophelia], Smarthistory

- Sanders, Karin. [Bodies in the Bog and the Archaeological Imagination]. University of Chicago Press, 2009.

The first one is called Cutting Pattern, from circa 1940. A woman (presumably a mother) sits cross-legged on the floor in a golden-yellow dress (her legs are asymmetrically folded to create a working surface for the cloth), scissors in hand, cutting the fabric spread across her lap. Beside her, a small girl leans against the woman’s slightly raised left leg, watching. There's an open door and a chair behind them, nothing remarkable about the room. The second painting is Young Woman Reading, also from circa 1940. The work is of a girl in a pink slip curled up in a plum-colored Victorian armchair, barefoot, totally absorbed in whatever she’s reading. Her lying body fills the chair in a way that suggests that she has been there a while and intends to stay.

Both paintings are oil on canvas. Both are part of the museum’s permanent collection, acquired through the 2020 Art for Greenville campaign. They are currently on view as part of the exhibition Anne Goldthwaite, Modern Woman.

Anne Goldthwaite 1869-1944 | Cutting the Pattern, c. 1940 | oil on canvas

Anne Goldthwaite 1869-1944 | Young Woman Reading, c. 1940 | oil on canvas

I want to write about what these paintings are doing because I think both capture something subtle, rare, and important.

First, let’s start with who Anne Goldthwaite was. Anne Goldthwaite was born in Montgomery, Alabama in 1869. She lost both parents young and was raised by family members who, thankfully, noticed she had a talent for drawing. One of her uncles funded her move to New York, where she studied at the National Academy of Design starting in 1898. In 1906 she went to Paris, lived at the American Girls’ Club, and fell in with the modernist circles forming around Gertrude Stein, HenriMatisse, and Pablo Picasso. She later said that fate had given her several years in Paris at the most exciting time, during the great reconstruction from academic art to modern art.

She came back to America just before World War I and showed two paintings at the 1913 Armory Show, one of only about a dozen women to do so. She taught at the Art Students League of New York for twenty-three years. She co-organized the 1915 Exhibition of Painting and Sculpture by Women Artists for the Benefit of the Woman Suffrage Campaign. She once unfurled a suffrage banner of her own design at a New York Giants baseball game in 1916. She was, by all accounts, a constant presence.

Her paintings and prints are held by the Met, the Whitney, MoMA, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Art Institute of Chicago, among others. However, despite all of this, she is not a household name. Art historians have noted that her work resists easy categorization. She absorbed the lessons of Post-Impressionism and Fauvism but never went fully abstract. Her brushwork loosened over time, growing more fluid and expressive, but she remained committed to the figure, to the real, to the seen. She is perhaps best known for her scenes of rural life in Alabama, which she painted with a directness and dignity that was unusual for a white Southern artist of her era, though that work rightly invites its own set of complicated questions.

What I Can’t Stop Thinking About :]

Cutting the Pattern and Young Woman Reading are later works, made around 1940, just a few years before Goldthwaite died in 1944. They are quiet domestic paintings. A woman sewing. A girl reading. Nothing is happening, exactly. That’s the whole point.

There’s a long history of women being painted at rest by men, and a long history of that rest meaning something different when a woman is the one holding the brush. When Renoir paints a woman reading or reclining, the viewer is often positioned as someone who has stumbled onto something private. There is a charge to it, a sense that the woman’s unawareness is part of the appeal. The art historian Griselda Pollock has written extensively about how male Impressionists constructed what she calls “spaces of masculinity” even when painting domestic interiors, because the viewer’s gaze itself carries the weight of access and power.

However, when Berthe Morisot paints her sister reading, or Mary Cassatt paints a mother sewing with a child nearby, something different happens. The viewer is not sneaking in. The viewer already belongs there. A 2021 article in the journal Dix-Neuf on Morisot’s work argues that her paintings of women produce a sense of intimacy that depends on identification rather than observation. Morisot painted these scenes because she lived inside them. The knowledge is not stolen. It’s shared.

Goldthwaite is working in that same tradition in these two paintings, and I think there are things she’s doing that haven’t been fully explored yet.

In Cutting the Pattern, the woman on the floor is not posing. She is working. The child leaning against her is not performing childhood for the viewer. She is just there because that’s where her mother is. The scene has the specific gravity of real domestic life, the way a child’s body will orbit a parent’s body without either of them deciding it should happen. Goldthwaite’s brushwork here is loose and warm. The golden tones of the woman’s dress almost bleed into the floorboards. The patterned fabric she’s cutting is the most detailed thing in the painting, as if Goldthwaite understood that the work itself deserved the most attention.

In Young Woman Reading, the figure is utterly unselfconscious. Her legs are drawn up, her body arranged for her own comfort and no one else’s. The pink of her slip and the plum of the chair create a kind of cocoon of color. There is no performance here. There is no awareness of being watched. This is what a girl looks like when she thinks she is alone.

My Questions:
These paintings were made near the end of Goldthwaite’s life, during a period when she was also completing WPA murals for post offices in Alabama. Scholars have paid more attention to her public commissions and her depictions of Black Southern life than to these intimate domestic works. I think that’s a gap worth filling.

Who are the figures in these paintings? Are they portraits of specific people or composites? The museum labels don’t say. Were they painted in New York or during one of Goldthwaite’s summers in Alabama? The chair in Young Woman Reading appears in other Goldthwaite paintings, so it may have been from a studio prop. Though the looseness of the work, the intimacy of the scenes, suggests something observed rather than arranged.

How do these late domestic paintings relate to her earlier work in Paris and her decades of teaching at the Art Students League? Did her students influence her return to these quiet subjects? What was happening in her life in 1940 that drew her to paint women and girls in states of rest and concentration?

And the bigger question, the one I keep coming back to. Why do we still not talk about Anne Goldthwaite very much? She was at the Armory Show. She knew Stein. She taught for decades. She made work that hangs in major museums. Nonetheless, she exists in a kind of art-historical middle distance, recognized but not celebrated, collected but not discussed.

I think part of the answer might be in these paintings themselves. The things Goldthwaite painted best, women sewing, women reading, women just being in their own bodies in their own rooms, are the things that art history has historically treated as minor. When a woman paints a woman cutting a pattern on her floor, it registers as a genre scene, something small. When a man paints a woman in a similar state of undress and absorption, it becomes a study, a meditation, something worthy of analysis.

I stood in front of these two paintings for a long time today. The museum was quiet. The light was good. I thought about how Anne Goldthwaite, at seventy-one years old, four years before she died, was still painting women the way women actually are when no one is looking. Not beautiful for anyone. Not available. Not symbolic. Just there, in a chair, in the light, cutting fabric, reading, breathing.

That felt like enough. That felt like everything.

…

One last thing. After I left the museum I went looking for more of Goldthwaite’s work online and found a piece in the Met’s collection called Annunciation, from a series titled “At Metropolitan.” It’s a drypoint with watercolor additions, made around 1925. The image shows Goldthwaite’s interpretation of the Annunciation scene, rendered in her loose, sketchy line, with faint color washed over the print. It is mysterious and beautiful and I have never seen anyone write about it. The Met’s own website won’t let you enlarge it, view it full screen, or download it. You can only see it as a small thumbnail on a catalog page. I don’t know what to make of that. Here is an artist whose prints sit in the collections of major American museums, and yet this particular image feels almost hidden, like something filed away and half-forgotten. I want to go see it in person someday. I want to sit with it the way I sat with these Greenville paintings. I would like to know what she was thinking when she made it, what version of the Annunciation she was responding to, and why she chose drypoint for a subject that most artists of her era would have rendered in oil. It feels like the kind of work that has a whole essay living inside it, waiting for someone to write it. Maybe one day that someone will be me.

The exhibition Anne Goldthwaite, Modern Woman is on view at the Greenville County Museum of Art. Both Cutting the Pattern (c. 1940) and Young Woman Reading (c. 1940) are part of the museum’s permanent collection.

Sources for further reading:

· Greenville County Museum of Art, Anne Goldthwaite: Modern Woman exhibition

· Encyclopedia of Alabama, “Goldthwaite, Anne”

· The Johnson Collection, “Anne Goldthwaite”

· American Women Artists, “Anne Wilson Goldthwaite (1869-1944): Worldly Artist”

· Columbia University Reid Hall, “Anne Wilson Goldthwaite, 1869-1944”

· Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Anne Goldthwaite Papers

· Hartigan, Lynda Roscoe. “Anne Goldthwaite.” In Sharing Traditions: Five Black Artists in Nineteenth-Century America. Smithsonian Institution Press.

· Laura Stapleton, “Minor Intimacies and the Art of Berthe Morisot: Impressionism, Female Friendship and Spectatorship,” Dix-Neuf 25, no. 2 (2021).

· Pollock, Griselda. Vision and Difference: Feminism, Femininity, and the Histories of Art. Routledge, 1988.

· Concordia University Open Textbook, “Berthe Morisot, Mary Cassatt & The Affluent Woman’s World”

I do not think that anymore.

What changed was not a class or a book, though those helped (especially Portrayed on the Heart, by Cynthia Hahn). What changed was that I started going to the Met without a plan, and I started noticing what stopped me. Not what I thought should stop me, not what was famous or important or on the cover of the brochure. What actually made my feet slow down.

Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione, (Il Grechetto)| Italian, Genoa 1609-1664 Mantua, Saint Francis in Ecstasy | ca. 1650, oil on canvas

One afternoon I wandered into a gallery of Baroque paintings I had walked past dozens of times. I was probably on my way somewhere else. But I stopped in front of a large canvas, dark background, dramatic lighting, a figure caught in the middle of something that felt private and urgent. I do not remember deciding to stop. I just did. And I stood there for a while, not analyzing, not reading the wall text, just looking. I was seeing something that someone had made four hundred years ago, and it was still doing its job. It was still making a stranger stand still.

That experience taught me something I now think about all the time as a graduate student in art history: the difference between looking at art and being looked at by it. There are objects that wait for you to arrive with your theories and your vocabulary and your training. And then there are objects that reach out and grab you before you have time to think about what you are seeing. The best ones do both.

…

I think about this a lot when I study medieval art. Medieval objects were not made to hang in museums. They were made to do things, to hold relics, to mark graves, to focus prayer, to remind a community who they were and what they believed. They were functional in a way that most modern viewers do not immediately see. When you look at a reliquary in a museum case, you are looking at something that has been pulled out of the world it was made for. It is no longer doing its original job. But if you stand in front of it long enough, and if you let yourself see it as an object that was made with intention, made to hold something precious, to be touched, to be carried in procession, it starts to do something again. Not the same thing. But something.

This is what I mean when I say that objects carry memory. My thesis research focused on Late Medieval funerary practice, tomb sculptures, devotional images, the physical things that communities made to keep a person’s identity from disappearing after death. These objects were designed to outlast the people they represented, and many of them have. They are still here, still holding the shape of someone’s face or the fold of their hands in prayer, still doing the work of remembering.

Retable Fragment with Six Apostles | Limestone with traces of paint | French, Burgundy, from the collegiate church of Saint-Jean-Baptiste, Vaudémont, c. 1325-50

I did not start graduate school knowing I would care about this. I started graduate school because I loved looking at things and wanted to understand why some things made me stop, and their stories. The answer, as it turns out, has a lot to do with materials, with stone and wood and gold and pigment, and with the choices that makers made about how to shape those materials into something that would last. Art history gave me a language for talking about that. But the looking came first.

…
I write this because I think there is a gap between the way art historians talk about art and the way most people experience it. Academic writing is rigorous and essential, but it is not always inviting. And the experience of standing in a museum, being stopped by something you did not expect to care about, is an experience that belongs to everyone, not just to people with graduate degrees.

These writings are my attempt to sit in that gap. I want to write about art the way I actually think about it: with care and seriousness, but also with the honesty that the best moments in a museum are not the ones you planned for. They are the ones that find you.

More soon,
-T