Giotto Redux at Galerie Kreo

Pure caprice, I know, but when I saw this underexposed image of hanging lamps by the Bouroullec brothers, on display in Paris at Galerie Kreo, I thought of Giotto's great Lamentation, spangled with floating golden lamps of quite another order--halos, actually. A common feature in Gothic and early Renaissance paintings, they are often gilded (with a thin layer of pure gold) rather than painted, and gilded not by the painter (though sometimes they are), but by an artisan brought in for that purpose alone. As such, they do glow in a way that the opaque surface of the rest of the painting does not.