The Veridencies: A Poetic Performance on the History of Green Bodies in Art

ABSTRACT: I will be presenting sections of my long-poem-art-history-essay, The Veridencies.  This essay-in-verse reflects on the religious, erotic, and ecological significance of green flesh in religious paintings from Duccio di Buoninsegna through to the present. I am interested in the ways that a certain green color on a painted body has become the standard for indicating asceticism or other removal of the self from worldly matters in religious paintings. Yet in many of these images the overwhelming impression is that greened flesh marks much more than a transcendence of the horror of putrefaction. . . . even if sometimes it is evidence of the literal decay of the painting itself.  The Veridencies raises in poetry the same question p(r)osed by Didi-Huberman in his work on Fra Angelico:“How to envision this wind of strangeness that passes through the painted bodies of Christianity in the West . . . the mystery in bodies beyond bodies”

Joe Milutis <www.joemilutis.com> is a writer, artist and Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Arts and the MFA in Creative Writing and Poetics at the University of Washington-Bothell.  He is the author of various books, parabooks, expanded essays, and translations including Ether: The Nothing That Connects Everything (2006), Failure, A Writer's Life (2013), and most recently a translation and commentary of Roland Barthes' largely forgotten, posthumous art book all except you (punctum, 2023).