Two hands grip a sphere of glass or bone — held at eye level, pressed against a head whose features have not resolved. The skull reads as mineral: pale, dense, worked from the outside. Behind it, a deep cobalt ground carries the marks of its own making — scraped, layered, gold flecking the upper corners where paint has lifted. The hands are the most legible thing in the image, and that legibility is the problem. They grip with precision. What they hold does not correspond to that precision — the object is transparent, circular, possibly hollow. The head above neither looks nor turns. The image holds the gesture of examination without its object, the posture of study without a subject that submits to it.
