Judas Iscariot

Roberto Ferri - Anima Mundi.

Roberto Ferri - L'Angelo della Morte (L'Ange de la mort/The Angel of Death).

Tracey Emin, Nothing Touches (2009); Louise Gluck, “A Myth of Devotion”; Jenny Diski, Skating to Antarctica; Louise Gluck, “Lamium”; Bat for Lashes, “Glass”; The Snow Queen (1957); A. S. Byatt, “Ice, Snow, Glass”.

But it is not that unbecoming insanity that beckons to her now, it is the sharp geometry of bare conifers against white snow, the painful resolution of individual grass blades in a wide summer field, a forest of glass threads drained clean of desire, mute waves crashing without sound upon swollen sand. —Sunetra Gupta, Memories of Rain

What happened if you melted a person layer by layer? What if there was nothing between the layers and nothing at the center, only quiet? —Madeleine Thien, Do Not Say We Have Nothing

Without feelings perhaps you can feel like a god. —Adrienne Rich, “Transit”

And my greatest desire is to lose not only all will but all personal being. —Simone Weil, Waiting for God

Catherine of Genoa developed the theory that one should destroy the ego so completely that the first-person-singular pronoun would disappear altogether from one’s speech. —Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Fast and Holy Feast

Eliminating herself was a sort of aesthetic project. —Elena Ferrante, The Story of the Lost Child

There is too much of everything. I keep silent. I hold my breath. I curl up in a ball, I give up my boundaries, I retreat towards an imaginary center… I have my head shaved, my teeth pulled and my breasts cut off — everything that bothers my gaze or slows it down — the stomach, the ovaries, the conscious and cysted brain. When I have nothing more than a heartbeat to note, to perfection, I will have won. —Claude Cahun, Aveux non avenus

You and I compare hurt. I only feel dirty every day and some nights. I wash my face three or four times, and, when I told you I wanted to be pore-less, you told me people should have pores. —Terese Marie Mailhot, Heart Berries: A Memoir

So too, perhaps, with our bodies: if they are small enough, or fraught enough to see or feel in their entirety, we can be sure that they exist and we can be certain of their borders—and by extension, we can know the selves that they carry with certainty. We’re no longer porous, no longer soluble, no longer contaminable; instead, we are safe, at last. —Fiona Wright, Small Acts of Disappearance:

Your needs are overwhelming? You can’t depend on yourself or others to meet them? You don’t even know what they are? Then need nothing. —Caroline Knapp, Appetites: Why Women Want

To feel anything deranges you. To be seen feeling anything strips you naked. In the grip of it pleasure or pain doesn’t matter. You think what will they do what new power will they acquire if they see me naked like this. If they see you feeling. You have no idea what. It’s not about them. To be seen is the penalty. —Anne Carson, Red Doc>

I don’t want him to see my hunger. If you have a need and they find it out, they will use it against you. The best way is to stop from wanting anything. —Margaret Atwood, Alias Grace

Watching my mama I learned some lessons too well. Never show that you care, Mama taught me, and never want something you cannot have. Never give anyone the satisfaction of denying you something you need, and for that, what you have to do is learn to need nothing. Starve the wanting part of you. In time I understood my mama to be a kind of Zen Baptist- rooting desire out of her own heart as ruthlessly as any mountaintop ascetic. The lessons Mama taught me and the lessons of Buddha were not a matter of degree, but of despair. My mama’s philosophy was bitter and thin. She didn’t give a damn if she was ever born again, she just didn’t want to be born again poor and wanting. I am my mama’s daughter, her shadow on the earth, the blood thinned down a little so that I am not as powerful as she, as immune to want and desire. I am not a mountain or a cave, a force of nature or a power on the earth, but I have her talent for not seeing what I cannot stand to face. I make sure that I do not want what I do not think I can have, and I keep clearly in mind what it is I cannot have. I roll in the night all the stories I never told her, cannot tell her still- her voice in my brain echoing love and despair and grief and rage. When, in the night, she hears me call her name, it is not really me she hears, it is the me I constructed for her- the one who does not need her too much, the one whose heart is not too tender, whose insides are iron and silver, whose dreams are cold ice and slate- who needs nothing, nothing. —Dorothy Allison, “Mama”

I feel like a dead blue sea – can’t feel any more. —Virginia Woolf

I am empty of everything. I am empty of everything but the thin, frail trunks of the trees and the thin, frail ghosts in my room. —Jean Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight

Osamu Ishii

Jenna Marbles

A Pennsylvania museum has solved the mystery of a Renaissance portrait in an investigation that spans hundreds of years, layers of paint and the murdered daughter of an Italian duke.

Among the works featured in the Carnegie Museum’s exhibit Faked, Forgotten, Found is a portrait of Isabella de'Medici, the spirited favorite daughter of Cosimo de'Medici, the first Grand Duke of Florence, whose face hadn’t seen the light of day in almost 200 years.

Isabella Medici’s strong nose, steely stare and high forehead plucked of hair, as was the fashion in 1570, was hidden beneath layers of paint applied by a Victorian artist to render the work more saleable to a 19th century buyer.

The result was a pretty, bland face with rosy cheeks and gently smiling lips that Louise Lippincott, curator of fine arts at the museum, thought was a possible fake.

Before deciding to deaccession the work, Lippincott brought the painting, which was purportedly of Eleanor of Toledo, a famed beauty and the mother of Isabella de'Medici, to the Pittsburgh museum’s conservator Ellen Baxter to confirm her suspicions.

Baxter was immediately intrigued. The woman’s clothing was spot-on, with its high lace collar and richly patterned bodice, but her face was all wrong, ‘like a Victorian cookie tin box lid,’ Baxter told Carnegie Magazine.

After finding the stamp of Francis Needham on the back of the work, Baxter did some research and found that Needham worked in National Portrait Gallery in London in the mid-1800s transferring paintings from wood panels to canvas mounts.

Paintings on canvas usually have large cracks, but the ones on the Eleanor of Toledo portrait were much smaller than would be expected.

Baxter devised a theory that the work had been transferred from a wood panel onto canvas and then repainted so that the woman’s face was more pleasing to the Victorian art-buyer, some 300 years after it had been painted.

In the case of Isabella, in order to secure an alliance with the Orsini family of Rome, she was married to Paolo Giordano I Orsini when she was 16. Contrary to popular belief, people in Renaissance Europe weren’t all that into child brides, this was just about the politics, so she stayed at her father’s household in Florence until she was of appropriate age. And then she just sort of… never left. Her new husband had zero concept of money, and her dad actually kinda hated him even though he was the one who arranged the marriage in the first place. So Isabella and her 50,000 scudi dowry (at a time when the average Italian earned somewhere between 10 and 40 scudi a year) stayed in Florence. Because she never went to Rome to live with her husband, she enjoyed enormous freedom and power back in Florence. After her mother died, she basically stepped into the role of First Lady of Florence, and was considered one of the keenest political minds in Europe. She ruled what she wanted, bought what she wanted, and fucked who she wanted, with no one really able to tell her no.

She was eventually assassinated by her husband while she was on holiday at one of her family’s country villas, probably because she was fucking her husband’s cousin, Troilo Orsini. Well, she had an “accident” while bathing, and Paolo Orsini said she must have drowned, but the coroner said she was strangled, and several servants swore they saw him do it. He might also have done it on the orders of Isabella’s brother, Francesco Medici, since he was trying to consolidate his power as the next Grand Duke, and by all accounts she was definitely in his way because of her political savvy.