can’t help but read the white-robed woman in the painting as the harbinger of the cultural and ecological destruction. While the tiny beings below her run for their lives, she wears a strange and benevolent expression aimed not at them but at something else in the distance—the imagined target of progress. It’s only with her gaze fixed on this target that she can trample on hundreds of species and thousands of years’ worth of knowledge without ever breaking her pallid smile.
