The smile of five centuries and eyes that pursue: don’t miss Leonardo da Vinci’s historic supermodel of the Florentine Renaissance. He hired clowns and jugglers to keep the lady in her trademark smirk, sly and haunting across the ages. She does seem to play it close to the vest, arms folded, as though her heart retains secrets that even her artist could only guess at.

As though hovering above you on the great staircase, battling against the winds, the figure brings news of a battle won, hence her name: a Victory, or – in Greek- a Nike. Her heroic forms cry out the news she delivers as messenger -- which, in Greek again, is angelos--  glad tidings of joy. Did you ever wonder where angels got their wings? Well, now you know

Unearthed from a small Greek island near the sea, the goddess of love and beauty might have risen, as the legends tell, from those waves, with a drapery to dry her, wrapped round her hips. This interpretation of Venus/Aphrodite, in the superb simplicity of the classical ideal, originally graced a gymnasium, as though to inspire one to thrive for a perfect form. 

Nestled in a stole that seems to both cuddle and protect, Miss Caroline Rivière is here thirteen years old, wandering in an open countryside as though in the freedom of childhood’s end. Dead a year later, 

Ingres’ portrait has preserved  her in a kind of amber, a girl eternally on the precipice of becoming an adult, yet never to arrive. With the Mona Lisa’s same strangeness and mystery, Mlle. Rivière, however, seems to whisper less about womanhood’s secrets than about those of the chrysalis that brings forth the butterfly who flies off as soon as it emerges.

Struggling against their stone prison, it beggars belief that such striking images of servitude were unfinished pieces. Yet the pope demanded Michelangelo stop work on them and instead paint the Sistine Chapel, very much against the artist’s will. When he finished the ceiling, he signed the painted masterpiece “Michelangelo, sculptor.” When we look at these astounding figures, we get why.

Vermeer shows us a woman absorbed in the painstaking task of tatting, gathering threads to make the lace that his native Low Countries were famous for. Yet we can barely make out her face, hazy and bent over the pillow, the support of her creation, so that she is mostly obscured. The one precise element in an almost blurred image is the thread the lace maker pulls. The only thing in focus is what she is focused on. Vermeer has given us a portrait of the mind and its thoughts without even a likeness of the person doing the thinking.