Plate 11: a cartouche with fruits, flowers, and leaves at top, a mask of a faun in profile to either side with a festoon of fruits and flowers in each of their mouths, from 'Twelve cartouches' (Recueil de douze cartouches) 1640 - 1645

Curator: This piece, dating from between 1640 and 1645, is titled "Plate 11: a cartouche with fruits, flowers, and leaves..." It's part of a series called 'Twelve cartouches' by François Collignon, now residing at the Metropolitan Museum. The media? Think etching, engraving, ink – the whole gamut. Editor: Wow, okay, my first thought? Drama! I mean, it's bursting with a kind of theatrical intensity, like a stage set waiting for a scene from a really over-the-top opera. All those flourishes – almost like edible explosions. Curator: Absolutely! The Baroque was nothing if not performative. Think about the period's power dynamics; cartouches like this weren't just decorative. They were framing devices—literally bordering the pronouncements and power of institutions and nobility. The festoons are also no mere decoration. Editor: Sure, you've got the obvious symbols of wealth and plenty in the fruit, but the faun masks, I am thinking the natural world but a little mischievous? Is this wealth earned or grabbed. Curator: Precisely! You are onto a crucial intersectional theme here. The faun, of course, also relates back to classical antiquity and its own ideas regarding labor, the body, and hedonistic, even immoral pleasures. It definitely makes the piece more charged. What message do you think this sends? Editor: The ambiguity is the message maybe? Are we meant to feel desire, guilt, both? Look closer, the empty cartouche in the middle - for me it could almost represent our anxieties around class today; that the frame, the *idea* of success is all the truly matters. Curator: The intersectional threads are complex and definitely resonate today. Thinking of how we are trapped by expectations of race, gender and wealth? I am convinced that in analyzing pieces such as this one, it provides a crucial point of context in examining our current cultural moment. Editor: Agreed. Who knew one fancy frame could hold so much? Makes you wonder what narratives are still lurking, un-etched, in our own picture frames.