Pictures at an Examination
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courtesy of yale center for british art, paul mellon collection
GEORGE, 3RD EARL COWPER, WITH THE FAMILY OF CHARLES GORE (1775)
Johann Zoffany (German, 1733–1810)
Imagine a patient with nausea, abdominal pain and vomiting. Compared with those urgent symptoms, the minor detail that she is hiccuping might seem inconsequential. Yet it could be the key to her diagnosis: Hiccups can be a subtle sign of gastric volvulus, in which the stomach twists in on itself. Yale’s Braverman asks students to treat paintings such as this one, from the Georgian era, as “foreign objects” whose every detail demands equal attention. They first take in the foreground, noticing, says Braverman, that “everyone is happy and jovial, and there’s a celebration”—of a prominent marriage between Hannah Anne Gore and George, the third Earl of Cowper (both standing). Then the students observe, over the shoulders of the seated women, a painting of the Tuscan hills outside Florence, where Lord Cowper was an expatriate patron of the arts. But in the second picture within a picture, before which the 16-year-old Gore stands, Zoffany hints at discord: In a mythological wedding scene, Hercules ousts Calumny, a reference to the slander Lord Cowper endured after enjoying several affairs in Italy.
