When You Fall In Love... With A Painting

When You Fall In Love... With A Painting

She's lovely of course, Parmigianino's "Antea." Standing alone in the centre of the Oval Room at the Frick, surrounded by portraits that somehow pale in comparison. She has turned to regard you, almost at eye level, still and composed. She is, as the show is appropriately called, "A Beautiful Artifice": a tiny youthful head, a sharply defined face, eyes so wide the whites show below. The yellow of her dress seems to slip down over her impossibly wide, stooped shoulders. Her hands, one covered and the other strikingly, almost erotically, bare, do not fit her body or each other at all. Although improbable in many ways, she commands the room with a physical presence and the illusion of a discerning mind.

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