Word: portraits
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...gangland slaying. The Rutherford Institute, which pays Jones' legal bills, once defended the right of football players at Jerry Falwell's Liberty University to pray in the end zone following touchdowns. Finally, and perhaps most damningly, the institute's director, John Whitehead, displays in his office a portrait of Bob Dylan. That's right, Bob Dylan, author of this lyric (from It's Alright Ma, I'm Only Bleeding): "But even the President of the United States/Sometimes must have to stand naked...
Your ghost inseparable from my shadow As long as your daughter's words can stir a candle. She could hardly tell us apart in the end. Your portrait, here, could be my son's portrait...
...recondite allegories, complicated quirks, unexpected twists of meaning. Despite its often ravishing formal beauty, it is full of unease. Apart from Durer's famous etching Melancholia, Renaissance art can show no more poignant portrayal of the way depression freezes both action and curiosity in its sufferers than Lotto's Portrait of a Young Man, circa 1530. It depicts its subject with sallow face, deep dark eyes and Hamlet-black clothes, idly toying with the pages of an unread book; drying rose petals are scattered on the table next to a watching lizard, emblem of cold-bloodedness...
...think of Renaissance portraiture as straightforward: here's Duke X, the man to the life, speaking through his realistic effigy; that's the armor he wore when he did the Turk in--and so forth. Lotto's portraits tend to be more complicated than that. Take, for instance, his magnificently assured portrait of Andrea Odoni, 1527. Odoni, a rich Venetian, collected Greco-Roman antiquities, and the clue to this painting is the statuette he shows in his hand--an image of Artemis, goddess of the Ephesians, denounced by St. Paul. But his other hand clasps a crucifix to his breast...
Lotto's taste for allegory and emblems is catnip to art historians who go for obscurities in the text, but coming as messages across a cultural gap of nearly half a millennium, they can be maddeningly difficult to read. Portrait of a Married Couple, 1523-24, looks like an ordinary marriage portrait, painted with exquisite fluency and respect: an upper-class man with a squarish, brown-bearded face (he looks oddly like the late Gianni Versace) sitting at a table with an equally patrician woman, Venetian evidently, from the white lapdog she is holding. Her right hand rests devotedly...