And yet here it is in this room, most immanently real and beautiful, and washed, already, in the blood of a sacrifice. It is nonsense given form and weight to work upon the world. The image of Isis is curved back against the dome, so that only from the stair does it look appropriately benign. I hadn’t considered the difficulty of that portrait when I described it. The face is huge and far too close, and the shape of it shifts as you move so that Isis appears to stand outside the world and be peering in, as if we are the ones who are trapped on a flat surface and she is trying to comprehend our smallness. Isis, or Mother Mary, or something else that is so much less kind: her eyes are stars, and perhaps she in turn is just a mask they wear so that we do not have the sense to hide.