Squint your eyes and you could be looking at a fragment of a medieval altarpiece. Except here, the gold leaf background is a field of dry grass, and the central sacrificial figure is not the god-man in agony, but an innocent calf. We feel the reflexive, sweet “aww” of seeing any young creature, but the calf side-eyes us warily in the way that animals sometimes do, foreshadowing what's coming down the line. That commonplace barnyard tragedy has been sublimated, however—by beauty, by the canna flower on the left that echoes the carvings on the frame—elevated into timeless mythology.

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