II. Petrarch's skull: Francesco Petrarca (1304–1374), Italian Renaissance poet whose Il Canzoniere explores themes of unrequited love, loss, absence, and spiritual striving. In 2004, analysis revealed that the skull in his tomb was not his.
3. Rubens' blush: Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640), Flemish Baroque painter whose vivid palette—particularly in the rendering of flesh—marks a major development in figure painting. The eponymous term “Rubenesque” commonly denotes voluptuous feminine beauty—a theme in his oeuvre. || Three Graces: Oil painting by Rubens (1635) depicting the Charites (Graces), daughters of Zeus and Eurynome, personifying joy, splendour, and abundance.
IV. Tesseract: A four-dimensional hypercube that has extension beyond ordinary perception. || Tetragram: The Tetragrammaton is the four-letter Hebrew name of God (transliterated as YHWH in English). It is regarded as sacred and traditionally not spoken aloud. || nuclear mysteries: Nuclear Mysticism is a term coined by Salvador Dalí to describe his belief that modern physics reveal a deep spiritual structure. This is most vividly explored in his painting Crucifixion (Corpus Hypercubicus) (1954).
VI. a rose is a rose: Gertrude Stein (1874–1946), American modernist novelist, poet, and playwright, invoked the resonant power of insisting with difference, exemplified in the poem Sacred Emily (1913) in which the line “Rose is a rose is a rose” appears. Here as elsewhere, Stein’s poetics is a treatment of language as object, where words can be encountered in their immediacy rather than as vehicles for association. || a horse: Mister Ed (1961–1966), American sitcom featuring a talking horse, whose theme song begins with the tautological, near-Steinian line “A horse is a horse, of course, of course.”
VII. seven ... plague and salvation: Seven recurs throughout the Book of Revelation, enumerating symbols of divine judgment and redemption—among them seven angels, seven trumpets, seven plagues, and seven bowls. || woe: In the Book of Revelation, the three woes are escalating judgments that mark intensified suffering and the nearing of the apocalypse.
VIII. apocalypse: See VII. || ouroboros: Ancient symbol of a serpent or dragon devouring its own tail signifying infinity and the unity of beginning and end. || ampersand: A typographic ligature (&) derived from the Latin et meaning “and”.
X. syzygitic: Syzygy, an astronomical term for the alignment of three celestial bodies—typically the sun, earth, and moon—causing eclipse and intensifying tides. || Tetractys: A triangular figure of ten points arranged in four rows (1–2–3–4), venerated by the Pythagoreans as a symbol of cosmic order, divine mystery, and the ineffable source of all things. || laminar: Laminarity is a state of fluid flow in smooth, parallel layers with minimal disruption, such that a liquid may appear still despite continuous movement.