He foresaw his pale body
Richard Hamilton British
Not on view
In this homage to James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), Hamilton visualizes Leopold Bloom’s body from above, placing the viewer in a position to identify with Bloom’s perspective. In an interior monologue from the book, Bloom anticipates his bath: “He foresaw his pale body reclining in it at full, naked, in a womb of warmth, oiled by scented melting soap, softly laved.” Hamilton based the print on a 1948 watercolor in which he had inverted the severely foreshortened view of Andrea Mantegna’s Dead Christ (ca. 1490; Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan), a masterpiece of the Italian Renaissance.
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