Here's the image:
Tashjian proclaims that "a striking, fascinatingly out-of-character image in its storytelling." What's the usual "character"? More smiley? More of a sidekick? I really don't know. Do you? We're told "the religious undertones are startling": "Her pose and visage, not to mention the color of her dress, recall religious paintings of saints communing with their higher power."
IN THE COMMENTS: Rafe — short for Raphael? — says "Which paintings? What a lazy comparison, to paintings which only exist, apparently, in her mind."
I went looking for paintings of saints gazing upward. There's this, by Raphael:
Notice that Catherine's hands do not hang limply at her sides. They are expressive of ecstasy and placed in locations that would seem truly odd on a modern-day politico. Unlike Jill, she's got her weight shifted to one side, and also unlike Jill, she's leaning on what we know to be the device used to torture-murder-martyr her. Jill exists in an empty brown-gray void.
But it's the difference in the eyes that is most striking. Jill's eyes are rotated sideways, and only slightly upward, as if she is gazing fondly at her somewhat tall husband. They're not fixed on Heaven.
Can we find paintings of saints with eyes rotated sideways, which seems mildly coy? Consider the entirely un-Jill-like Saint Lucy:
पोस्ट्स
