The Seam of Chastity
Lecture on Houdon’s Louvre Diane, where toe-balance and a crescent seam make chastity a crafted law. What runs on a single toe yet makes your own feet grow heavy; what bares a body yet tightens a law; what offers a…
Category History of Art
Cupid Sleeps While Fate Hunts
Room 044 in the Museo del Prado carried a disciplined brightness, the sort a ministry might approve, as the building’s stone drank the street and returned it as a pale, steady radiance. I stood where the wall surrendered to Titian’s…
Bow of Forgetting’s Gauge
A pale field, washed like chapel plaster after incense has settled, holds its own weather, and in that weather a severed head—half mask, half reliquary—floats as if a saint had been converted into an instrument, while the word Ariette (petite…
The Winged Bowyer of Parma
Bologna received him and gave him work. In that university city, where jurists and humanists argued late into the night under painted ceilings, he devised altarpieces whose saints seemed to hover between devotion and daydream, bodies elongated like instruments, fingers…