tedorè 

Madonna arrived at the 2026 Met Gala wearing a custom Saint Laurent creation by Anthony Vaccarello — and it was not just fashion. It was a direct, deliberate homage to one of the most extraordinary and underrated paintings of the 20th century: “The Temptations of Saint Anthony” (1945) by Leonora Carrington. Leonora Carrington (1917–2011) was a British-Mexican surrealist painter, novelist and mystic — one of the last surviving members of the original Surrealist movement of the 1930s. Her work fused Celtic mythology, medieval alchemy, Kabbalah, Jungian psychology and feminist mysticism into a completely unique visual language. She was, in many ways, the ultimate outsider: a woman who refused to be anyone’s muse, who escaped Nazis, survived a psychiatric asylum, and reinvented herself in Mexico, where she painted her most powerful work. Carrington painted The Temptations of Saint Anthony shortly after arriving in Mexico, inspired by Hieronymus Bosch’s version at the Museo del Prado in Madrid — which she had seen in 1940 while fleeing the Nazi invasion of France. The painting was created for a competition for the film Bel-Ami (1947), where she competed against Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, Dorothea Tanning and Paul Delvaux. What makes Carrington’s version extraordinary is precisely what made it lose the competition: while the other artists painted tormented demons and horror, Carrington painted serenity. As the caption reads, she depicts “a serene anchorite, master of a hybrid community: demons transformed into angelic beings, a witch with a red cauldron, a goat pouring vital water, and the spiraling Queen of Sheba.” The alchemical fire and the faithful pig symbolise victory over temptation, merging Christianity, Celtic witchcraft and alchemy into a reflection of “resilience and cosmic harmony.” Of all the figures in this painting, Madonna chose to be the Queen of Sheba: the spiraling, dark-haired figure at the centre of that enormous flowing veil, the one whose presence is the true engine of the entire scene. In the Kabbalistic tradition — which Madonna has studied deeply since the 1990s — the Queen of Sheba is not simply a historical monarch. In the Zohar, the core text of Kabbalah, the Queen of Sheba is identified as Lilith herself — Adam’s first wife, created from the same earth as Adam, not from his rib. She refused to be submissive, spoke the divine name, grew wings and flew out of Eden. She was cast out, demonised, erased from the official story — and she became the most powerful feminine archetype in the entire Western mystical tradition. Lilith is the original woman who would not submit. The first feminist. The one who chose freedom over paradise. And here is where the circle closes completely. Twenty-eight years ago, Madonna filmed the video for Frozen in the Mojave Desert and she appeared dressed in black, long dark hair, hovering above the ground, surrounded by crows and a black dog. She transformed, levitated, dissolved into liquid and was reabsorbed by the earth. Every symbol in that video — the dark birds, the black dog, the three versions of herself, the desert — points to the same archetype: Hecate, Lilith, the primordial dark feminine that stands at the threshold between life and death, that cannot be possessed, that transforms everything it touches. Madonna herself said she was depicting “the embodiment of female angst” — a mystical creature, neither alive nor dead, neither human nor divine. Saint Anthony withstood demons and monsters. But what truly threatened him was not horror. It was the spiraling Queen of Sheba — serene, magnetic, cosmic.

She is home 😍🪩