​The Foot at the Art Institute of Chicago, by Polly Hansen

Armida Abandoned by Rinaldo, by Giambattista Tiepolo (Italy) 1742

​The Foot at the Art Institute of Chicago
 
When I was a little girl I used to get stomach aches at the dinner table. Mom would say, “Go lie down on your tummy on the sofa.”

Bored as I was lying there waiting for the cramps to go away, I’d pull out the art history books stacked on the bookshelf an arm’s reach away. My favourite book was the big, black one that started with paintings from the Medieval period and went all the way through to the Modern Era with painters like Picasso, who was Mom’s favourite. 

I had my own. One was a gruesome painting of Jesus on a cross close to the ground cluttered with skulls, a grimace on his face, blood coming out of the wounds in grisly detail from his feet, hands, ribs, a thorny crown gouging his forehead. 

We weren’t religious, didn’t go to church, so I didn’t know the meaning of the scene, but was impressed by how miserable he looked, how much agony he was in, and how hopeless the woman in her blue shroud appeared, and how there was one man holding a staff looking at the viewer and pointing to Jesus as if to say, “Here is suffering. Don’t you forget it.”

I also loved the Romantic Era pages of naked, round ladies lying on folds of lovely silk, their stomachs and thighs larger than their small, almost child-like breasts. Further on in the book there was one painting of a woman reclining on a boulder talking to a young man standing at a distance dressed in a tunic and leather shields looking coyly off to the side. Two old soldiers look to be pleading with him. It was the woman’s sandaled foot that drew my attention. Her sole looks barefoot as it curves against the roundness of the boulder so perfectly I could feel the cool rock under my own skin, the firmness of that contact. I wanted to touch that foot, kiss that foot, smell it, lick it like ice cream, to bite it even, it looked so delicious. I wanted to hold the coolness of it against my cheek. The woman holds one hand out in a gesture of invitation. The young man also wears sandals with thongs that wrap his muscular calves, but they were nowhere nearly as seductive. 

Imagine my shock and delight, then, when my family moved from Maryland to Illinois when I was twelve and I visited the Art Institute of Chicago. There, in the Classical Era gallery, was an enormous wall-sized painting of that scene and there was that glorious foot in real life! It felt like home to me, gave me sense of ownership. I’d had no idea the painting was so large. I drew closer, as close as I could without setting off the alarm. It was as scrumptious as it was in the book. I glanced around to see if other people were admiring that foot, but no, I was the only one. I could still feel the cool rock against my sole even though I wore shoes and socks. This rock and her foot anchored this woman in place, gave her strength, made her laughter bold and her cavalier attitude dangerous. Even now as a grown woman I love thinking about that foot knowing it is still there in that gallery, and that I can look it up on the Internet any time I want to see it. 

I’ll do that now.

And there it is! Took me ten minutes because I forgot the painter’s name, Giambattista Tiepolo, “Armida Abandoned by Rinaldo,” only, how odd! I saw the whole thing backwards in my mind, as if I was seeing the mirror image. It’s her right foot, not her left that seals itself so closely to that rock.

But now that I have studied it so closely, I will never forget her right sole as a strong foothold on her own strength and sense of reality. I would do well to anchor myself with such certainty in my world, come what may, to know my anchored place in the world and to feel so certain despite the disdain or disaffection that may surround me. Because of that foot rooted to that rock forever and always, I feel I may always be certain of my identity, even if others are not.

Polly Hansen

Polly Hansen’s unpublished memoir, A Minor, Unaccompanied: Memoir of a Teen Musician’s Odyssey, won  i’s 2022 coming-of-age Memoir Prize for Books. Her work is published in Newsweek, The Sun and numerous other journals. She was a finalist in the 2023 Doris Betts Fiction Prize and lives in Asheville, NC with her husband and two black dogs often mistaken for small black bears on leashes. You can find her at pollyhansen.com and @9ofPentacles.