Jesse Locker

@jessemlocker.bsky.social

Professor of art history at Portland State University. Author of Artemisia Gentileschi: The Language of Painting (Yale University Press) and some other stuff. 2 parts Weltschmerz, 1 part vermouth

José de Alcibar (born Texcoco; fl. 1751–1803), Portrait of the 16-year-old María Anna Josefa de San Ignacio, painted upon entering the convent, 1793, Oil on canvas, 103.5 x 83.5 cm (Szépmûvészeti Múzeum, Budapest)

A girl dressed in a nun's habit, an elaborate flowered crown, badges with religious scenes, and a doll of Christ as pilgrim

Aurelio Lomi, Portrait of the Dog Roldano, 1597-1604, oil on canvas (Villa del Principe, Genoa). Roldano was a present from Philip II to Genoese Prince Giovanni Andrea Doria. (And the painter, Aurelio Lomi, was Artemisia Gentileschi's uncle)

A handsome white hound on an elegant balcony being groomed by a page

"Chi Asino va a Roma, Asino se ne toma." "If an Asse at Rome doe sojourne, An Asse he shall from thence returne" —Fynes Moryson, An itinerary: Containing His Ten Yeeres Travell Through the Twelwe Dominions (1617) [In other words, "Go to Rome an ass, come back an ass.]

From the Museum Chartaceum ("Paper Museum") commissioned by 17th-century scholar and patron Cassiano dal Pozzo: a selection of Corals, Patterned Stones, Asbestos, Fossils, Ivory, Ammonite and Hard Stone, 1620s (Windsor Castle, Royal Library)

A sheet of drawings of Corals, Patterned Stones, Asbestos, Fossils, Ivory, Ammonite and Hard Stone,

Feast of the Wine (The Procession of the Ram), Oil on canvas, 44 × 65 inches (111.8 × 165.1 cm), Philadelphia Museum of Art. Wonderfully strange painting by the 17th-century French artist known only as the Master of the Processions (Maître des Cortèges).

A procession of slightly scruffy men and boys wearing hats and ivy crowns, holding glasses of wine and leading a ram https://www.philamuseum.org/objects/103000

All else aside there is nothing I want or need genAI to do for me. I like reading. I like doing research. I like playing around in spreadsheets. I like interviewing people. I like writing. I like doing these things for myself because I take pleasure in the doing and they make me a better thinker.