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Join Us DIJON, France — “In a fabric, the intersection of thread during its weaving establishes an unbreakable pact between the two opposed and distinct entities, the warp and the weft, and this pact is reaffirmed at every crossing thousands of times over.” So begins Isabella Ducrot’s The Checkered Cloth ( La stoffa a quadri ), a slim volume that the artist published with the Italian art-book publisher Quodlibet in 2019. In her book, the Naples-born, Rome-based artist describes an epiphany she’d had years before, when she viewed “The Annunciation with St.
Margaret and St. Ansanus” (1333) by Italian Gothic painter Simone Martini, with Lippo Memmi, in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. The depicted scene is familiar biblical lore — the Angel Gabriel informing the Virgin Mary of her destiny as mother of Jesus — but Ducrot noticed, with surprise, that the fold of the angel’s cape, visible just under his wings, reveals a checkered pla.