I went with a friend to the Renaissance portrait show at the Met the other day. Since we were there early in the morning, the crowds arrived only as we were leaving, so we were able to stroll through the whole thing, making shameless eye contact with the subjects and speculating whether each must have been pleased or not with their likenesses.

The show is enormous and contains a number of studies in chalk, terra cotta, and drypoint alongside the final paintings or marble busts. Unsurprisingly, the studies, even the prints, are all a lot more lively than the final works. The final works, for which the artists were presumably paid, contain a spectrum of corrective orthodontics (there were a lot of merciless underbites), softened double chins, gently backlit bugeyes and bulbous noses. They have a flatness and formality that is undoubtedly due to the nature of the commission (paint someone powerful so they’ll like it and not ruin your career), but was also endearingly familiar to me in a way that reminded me how I am often pleased with my own accidental sketches but loathe the things I try to make good enough to keep. (I was going to say that making something intended not to be seen is uncomplicated. But it’s just its own rare kind of complicated.)

There were clouds of flour, long-haired unicorns (horns both up and down), pollen and fertility symbols everywhere, half open doors, birds and hands that lapped their frames, distant mountain rages and seascapes in perfect focus behind eyebrowless beauties and stern merchants; one serene maiden wore her family’s crest, enormous stylized testicles, embroidered on her marble sleeves.

I thought about art and making things and getting paid or not to make things and how art once had a practical use in seizing and maintaining power and wealth, in stabilizing a society, and how an art market separate from commerce hasn’t necessarily been all good for art in general, but that the future of commercial art isn’t looking any better. I think we’ve all sensed this inevitable future in which making new things is almost valueless even while we maintained an unjustified faith that things would work out somehow because we simply couldn’t bear to picture this version of the future.

At the end of the show was a brown wall on which was aggressively printed the name of the company supplying the paint for the walls of the exhibition.

My review of the show is as follows: Lovely, lovely! and what an impressive lot of tall hats and turbans! (I am have been reading about orientalism in fashion and my simultaneous disapproval and painful covetousness of the droopily gilded Edwardian era clothing, leaves me turban-aware.) The Botticellis notwithstanding, the Memling portraits were my favorites, and we stopped for a moment on the way out to visit Tommaso Portinari and His Wife, who reside in eternal piety, his genuine, hers something less, outside the show in the main collection. (I like Mrs. Portinari. She looks like she’s trying not to giggle for fear of hurting her husband’s feelings.) For a good twenty minutes after we left, the features of everyone around me seemed luminous and sharp, and the jowels and baseball hats and whiskers and bald spots and double chins all seemed beautifully and intentionally made; and because this is New York in December and everyone is clad in voluminous dark puffer coats, the faces seemed to spring forward against the dense black of other centuries.

View from the FDR at night.

More Thomas Browne, this time “Of the right and left Hand.”

A beautiful journal by David Kilpatrick.

Two years of inhuman species.

It’s spring and it’s raining. Everything looks dirty.

I still have Jillian Tamaki’s long ago free wood panel image on my Mac’s (Culatello’s, that is) desktop. I go and look at her work when I am frightened by color… That, for obscure reasons, reminds me of Ruth Gwily too. More lovely work: Of Life and Death.

Mmm, scanwiches.

I’m quite happy with the iphone as camera these days. Since I often still carry or trail the baby and some baby-related equipment when I leave the house (Actually that’s pretty optimistic. In over a year I still haven’t figured out that I am supposed to bring little adorably shaped snack containers, spare diapers, squeaky toys, sundry bottles of water, changes of clothes, and a lot of other things I’m probably forgetting. I get all caught up congratulating myself for remembering my keys and phone, assuming I do.) I just can’t manage my serviceable Nikon any longer, so despite being so ripe they were falling off the picture trees, staining my clothing, and squishing underfoot; pictures were not being taken/picked, taken home and eaten, pickled, or baked into pies. And now they are. I wish they were larger and a fancier format, and hence more printable,⁰¹ but mostly I like the limitations. I like the highly specific little apps that generate such a capricious and chronologically identifiable species of image. I like that those apps are so short lived that the quality of the image will tell me as much about my life right now as will the subject.