Primer

Workplace is pleased to launch the latest episode of Primer, where a new work by an artist is presented online as a means to explore their wider practice.

Presented here is a new work by Meredith Sellers. In The Watchful Eye (After Raphael), Sellers isolates the enigmatic gaze from Raphael’s Young Woman with a Unicorn and sets it above a tightly cropped expanse of dark blue sea. Through a closer look at Seller’s new work, this presentation highlights themes central to Sellers’ wider practice; fragmented art-historical references, shifting symbols of power, and the crossover between past and present anxieties.

The Watchful Eye (After Raphael) borrows from Raphael’s 1506-6 painting, Young Woman with a Unicorn. Over a lilac background, a tightly cropped view of the woman’s cool gaze stares out. Her deep blue eyes meet the viewer’s, but what exactly they convey remains mysterious. They appear piercing, watchful—but of what? Raphael’s full composition, with the sitter seen in three-quarters view in front of a misty landscape, borrows heavily from Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, though he has replaced her serene warmth with a chilly glare.

For many years it was thought to be a painting of St. Catherine by Raphael’s mentor, Perugino, but conservation in 1934 revealed that the work had been overpainted by a later artist, adding a cloak and placing a wheel, St. Catherine’s attribute, in her hands. The unicorn was only revealed after this overpainting was removed, when the work was verified as being Raphael’s.

Beneath this excerpt from Raphael sits a rectangle of dark sea, mimicking the colour of the woman’s eyes. The water churns in small waves, a symbol of the passage of time, transformation, and the unknowable. An image of serenity or a threat of imminent danger.

At the height of the High Renaissance, Savonarola, the “mad monk of Florence,” prophesized the apocalypse would come in the year 1500. This prediction, and the fear it wrought, allowed the mad monk to accumulate great political power. As noted by Machiavelli, he drew a large populist audience and gained favor with artists, writers, and cultural producers. His rise allowed him to consolidate power and lead a coup against the Medici in 1494, resulting in his control of the state, with an ultimate goal of putting Florence under a strict theocratic rule. Instead, he was executed by the state for heresy in 1498.

The year 1500 came and went without apocalyptic event, but Savonarola’s ideas cast a long shadow. Raphael created Young Woman with a Unicorn just a few years after his execution. The sitter is thought by many to be Guila Farnese, mistress of Pope Alexander VI, as the Farnese symbol was the unicorn. The corruption of the Vatican and the wider church under Alexander was a persistent theme for Savonarola, and the Pope excommunicated him in 1497, paving the way for his consequent torture and death.

In the book of Revelation, a harbinger of the apocalypse is the sea turning red and all the creatures in it dying. In contemporary evangelical Christianity, climate change—and the humans and creatures it will affect—is seen as an irrelevant concern, a product of the will of God, unimportant to the true believers who will be raptured to Heaven. The woman’s eyes watch, but what future awaits?