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Maybe the word most associated with Georgia O’Keeffe is “vagina,” but it could just as easily be “cash.” Sold in 2014 for $44.4 million, “Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1” holds the record for the highest price ever paid for a painting by a woman. A single white trumpet flower, cropped so close against an emerald tumult as to seem almost like a periscope peering out of a sea, it now hangs in the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, in Bentonville, Arkansas. A companion piece, less expensive, less vaginal, belongs to the Indianapolis Museum of Modern Art, about twenty minutes from where I grew up, in a suburb where fathers presented their daughters with promise rings.
Her attire, especially her bejewelled horned headdress, is lavish. Unconcerned with the decorum expected from elderly women in Renaissance Europe, she has chosen a tightly laced blue dress that emphasises her wrinkled cleavage. But, however fine her clothing, by the time this panel was painted her outfit would have seemed laughably outdated – the clothes were fashionable in her youth, but by 1510 her attire would have made the sitter a figure of ridicule rather than of high fashion.
The old woman is wearing this elaborate garment in the hope of attracting a suitor. This was once explicit. The painting has a pendant: a panel depicting An Old Man now in a private collection. Turned towards her companion, the old woman offers him a rosebud – a token of love, which he firmly refuses. Sixteenth-century viewers were invited to laugh at her self-delusion, but she seems blissfully unperturbed by this rebuttal. Today her defiance might inspire empathy or even admiration.
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Two striking
spalliere (paintings made to be shown at shoulder height) depict the pursuit of Daphne by Apollo. The first presents her asleep in a rural scene, dress falling open at the thigh where a zagging gold thread strains to keep the folds together. Apollo stands over her, leaning on a staff, head in profile, gaze intent on the recumbent figure. His impending act of predation we know, as fifteenth-century viewers would have known from their Ovid, that this balmy scene of visual consumption portends attempted rape is touched off by a moment of calm spectatorship. Apollo is all action in the next panel, chasing Daphne with arm outstretched as her limbs begin to transform into the woody roots of a tree, but the first painting strikes me as the more ominous of the pair. It implicitly enlists us as Apollo’s accomplices. Looking at a painting of a sleeping woman is uncomfortably analogized to sexual assault.
The long and messy history of vaccine cards
Even in our 21st-century pandemic, weâre clutching a familiar paper artifact.
By Hannah MarcusUpdated May 1, 2021, 3:00 a.m.
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A form that affirmed the health of travelers in 17th-century Italy.Wellcome Collection/CC by 4.0
My first vaccination at the Hynes Convention Center happened startlingly quickly, and I was grateful for 15 minutes in the recovery area to sit with my vaccine card and my thoughts. I am a historian, and I use documents like this to piece together the forgotten past and to tie individuals to the momentous events of history.