‘It’s a queered up history of art’: the provocateur turning Gaga and Kardashian into weeping saints

Why are there almost no tears in great works of art? Italian artist Francesco Vezzoli is rectifying this – by embroidering balloon-shaped drops on to modern mashups of Giotto and Botticelli

Since tears express intense emotion, you’d think great painters would have fallen over themselves to depict people crying. Wrong, says Francesco Vezzoli. “Just Google books about tears in art,” says the Italian artist via video call. “There aren’t any. There are some tears in Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights, but that’s an extreme painting. You should find tears on the face of Christ, but that happens only once.” This is in Antonello da Messina’s Ecce Homo, from 1475. “Go to the Kunsthistorischen Museum in Vienna: no tears. In European religious paintings, there should be tears on the faces of every saint because they all died for martyrdom. But tears are very rare.”

To correct this remarkable oversight, over the past 15 years Vezzoli has embroidered tears on to reproductions of paintings by great Renaissance artists from Giotto to Botticelli and Lotto. Sewing has been long part of Vezzoli’s practice: he used to frequent a needlepoint shop called Creativity while at Central St Martin’s in London in the early 1990s (when he wasn’t clubbing, that is, or writing his dissertation on homoeroticism in Brazilian soap operas).