“Have they hoisted the acrid sponge on the tip of the lance; Against her beauteous mouth elated with the sacrament: The cross without Christ, who suffers above her breast; Is nought but the double wound born in silence.” That is the Italian poet Gabriele d'Annunzio’s description of this brooding portrait by Romaine Brooks, a caption displayed alongside the work during its first display in a Paris gallery. The painting transfigures Ida Rubinstein, the Russian ballet dancer and Brooks’ lover at the time, into a personification of France, behind her burns the Belgian city of Ypres, the site of a brutal battle during World War I.
