Here are a few items that jump out from the Boston image:
John Palencar, in a recent interview with George Ward, said that the woman in the image is a Salem witch. Why include a character from just outside of Boston? Why not paint someone from Boston proper?
Why are there light beams emanating from the box?
The strange square symbols, per John Palencar in the same interview, represent alphanumeric naval signal flags. What do they spell, if anything?
The gem is a peridot, the birthstone for August, which can be cut to many different shapes—but square is unusual. Why this shape?
Why is there a leg stepping onto home plate depicted on her sleeve?
The flower is a gladiolus, the birth flower for August, which contains dozens of petals, but here only four are in focus. Why?
What is the meaning of the number 112 just to the upper right of the flower.
In the upper right of the ring surrounding the witch’s head, there appears to be a number four. What does it mean?
The poem begins:
If Thucydides is
North of Xenophon
As mentioned earlier, these two names, Thucydides and Xenophon (Ancient Greek historians), appear in a 1774 letter from Horace Walpole, a member of British Parliament, to his friend, Horace Mann, regarding the brewing American rebellion in which he says, “the next Augustan age will dawn on the other side of the Atlantic. There will, perhaps, be a Thucydides at Boston, a Xenophon at New York, and, in time, a Virgil at Mexico, and an Isaac Newton at Peru.”
Not only does this confirm that we’re in the right city, but because the names of these two men appear on the front of the Boston Public Library, this gives us a logical starting point—or does it? Though the presence of these names is likely a clue, it could be that the library holds some other meaning having little to do with its location.
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