Tears and Paintings: Giotto and Agnes Martin

Molesworth explains why Giotto's altarpiece known as the Stefaneschi triptych and Agnes Martin's painting in the Fogg Museum at Harvard made him cry. The contrasts between the two works are almost easy to formulate: sacred and secular, representational and abstract, medieval and modern. Analyzing his reaction to the paintings again, he notes that the radical difference of the two works may have stood as a clue to how he had come to look at paintings.