Goats and Sheep. A Portrait Farm

kevin horan

What would happen if we treated goats and sheep as customers of the local photo studio? Personalities emerge. You look at the pictures and you see nonhuman persons. You wonder, what’s going on inside that head? How is the world we think we know perceived by a different set of senses and needs? And as that mystery simmers, you realize these creatures are returning our gaze.

Kevin Horan

a p o r t r a i t fa r m

essay by elena passarello

g o at s a n d s h e e p | a p o rt r a i t f a r m

$ 35.00 | Can $ 47.50 € 30.00 | £ 27.00

goats and sheep

Imagine traveling back in time — way, way, way back, to shortly after the worst day in Earth’s history — just to take a long look at what you once were. Sixty-six million years ago, an eight-mile-wide asteroid hit what is now the Gulf of Mexico and wiped out three-quarters of the life that inhabited our planet. Quadrupedal beasts weighing more than a golden retriever? Gone. The ammonites of the oceans and the dinosaurs of the land? All but neutralized in this, Earth’s fifth mass extinction. It was the last major die-off before the one in which we currently live, and a version of you survived it.

In truth, nobody is certain what you looked like so far back into “deep time,” but we’ve made a rough sketch.

New studies in the fossil record are filling in the gaps of our evolutionary tree’s mammalian branches. As I type this, they’re reaching backward to the single common ancestor shared by all of Earth’s “placental mammals” — the six thousand different kinds of creatures that nurture their unborn with protein-rich uterine snack packs.

Go ahead and take a long look at yourself sixty-six thousand millennia in the past. Watch your former body creep along a lofted Paleocene tree limb, flitting your tail from side to side and licking your many-toothed chops.

You weigh about as much as a deck of cards, but your forearms are, relatively speaking, jacked. Whiskered and snouty, with padded hands and feet, you expertly climb toward your next meal — an insect of some earlier order. Behind your beady eyes is perhaps the most complex brain of the epoch, with keen sensory receptors, strong reproductive urges, and a neurological highway that allows its disparate hemispheres to high-five.

Your former self hears a rustling nearby: something that sounds lightweight enough for you to challenge it. In the soupy haze, you finally make out the shape of the critter, and it’s merely another one of your own — the same gray fur and pointed nose and roving eyes. You decide it’s safe enough to stare at your own kin, so there you linger, tightening your gaze.

Just look at the two of you: a matched set of ancient mammals, staring one another down in an early Cenozoic arbor. In some ways, our world has never been more than this — two creatures locking eyes to seek connection or size each other up (or both). And at this particular moment, your matching twin bodies absolutely buzz with potential. Inside your featherweight frames lie the building blocks of any number of creatures: a bat or a wolf or an aardvark, an ape or a goat or a sheep.

But you’ve both got millions of years of work ahead if you want to become anything, so don’t linger here too long. When the moment fades, turn away from one another. Face opposite branches and scurry away without so much as a wink goodbye.

This particular slice of prehistory — the hundred thousand years post-dinosaur, post-asteroid — is sometimes called the Great Mammal Explosion. With the terrible lizards decimated and the weather mellowing, it’s high time for tiny, warm-blooded bodies like yours to divide and conquer. And divide you will, updating yourself exponentially and yielding different results, cell by cell.

As both you and your doppelganger riff and code away from your shared ancestor, the oceans rise and then recede. What is now Europe dislodges from what is now North America. Earth’s poles ice, the trees revise themselves, the land around you thaws and freezes a few times over. But you must only mark these incomprehensible swaths of time in miniscule increments — each meal that keeps you hale, every shrewd leap further up a tree to safety, and the countless new editions of yourself that you bring into the world, one by one. Trust that these small moments will add up and, eventually, force gargantuan changes.

6 | 7

elena passarello

Imagine traveling back in time — way, way, way back, to shortly after the worst day in Earth’s history — just to take a long look at what you once were. Sixty-six million years ago, an eight-mile-wide asteroid hit what is now the Gulf of Mexico and wiped out three-quarters of the life that inhabited our planet. Quadrupedal beasts weighing more than a golden retriever? Gone. The ammonites of the oceans and the dinosaurs of the land? All but neutralized in this, Earth’s fifth mass extinction. It was the last major die-off before the one in which we currently live, and a version of you survived it.

In truth, nobody is certain what you looked like so far back into “deep time,” but we’ve made a rough sketch.

New studies in the fossil record are filling in the gaps of our evolutionary tree’s mammalian branches. As I type this, they’re reaching backward to the single common ancestor shared by all of Earth’s “placental mammals” — the six thousand different kinds of creatures that nurture their unborn with protein-rich uterine snack packs.

Go ahead and take a long look at yourself sixty-six thousand millennia in the past. Watch your former body creep along a lofted Paleocene tree limb, flitting your tail from side to side and licking your many-toothed chops.

You weigh about as much as a deck of cards, but your forearms are, relatively speaking, jacked. Whiskered and snouty, with padded hands and feet, you expertly climb toward your next meal — an insect of some earlier order. Behind your beady eyes is perhaps the most complex brain of the epoch, with keen sensory receptors, strong reproductive urges, and a neurological highway that allows its disparate hemispheres to high-five.

Your former self hears a rustling nearby: something that sounds lightweight enough for you to challenge it. In the soupy haze, you finally make out the shape of the critter, and it’s merely another one of your own — the same gray fur and pointed nose and roving eyes. You decide it’s safe enough to stare at your own kin, so there you linger, tightening your gaze.

Just look at the two of you: a matched set of ancient mammals, staring one another down in an early Cenozoic arbor. In some ways, our world has never been more than this — two creatures locking eyes to seek connection or size each other up (or both). And at this particular moment, your matching twin bodies absolutely buzz with potential. Inside your featherweight frames lie the building blocks of any number of creatures: a bat or a wolf or an aardvark, an ape or a goat or a sheep.

But you’ve both got millions of years of work ahead if you want to become anything, so don’t linger here too long. When the moment fades, turn away from one another. Face opposite branches and scurry away without so much as a wink goodbye.

This particular slice of prehistory — the hundred thousand years post-dinosaur, post-asteroid — is sometimes called the Great Mammal Explosion. With the terrible lizards decimated and the weather mellowing, it’s high time for tiny, warm-blooded bodies like yours to divide and conquer. And divide you will, updating yourself exponentially and yielding different results, cell by cell.

As both you and your doppelganger riff and code away from your shared ancestor, the oceans rise and then recede. What is now Europe dislodges from what is now North America. Earth’s poles ice, the trees revise themselves, the land around you thaws and freezes a few times over. But you must only mark these incomprehensible swaths of time in miniscule increments — each meal that keeps you hale, every shrewd leap further up a tree to safety, and the countless new editions of yourself that you bring into the world, one by one. Trust that these small moments will add up and, eventually, force gargantuan changes.

6 | 7

elena passarello

often running through your dreams. Before you know it, you’re burying your dead in decorated plots and adorning the graves with flowers, singing while you do.

After a long day of hunting, you watch the hominin faces near you, studying the changing physical language of your people. You find yourself looking for something — a map, a secret portal — that points as far backward as the beastly gazes of the prey that you track out in the field. Your predator’s eyes sit, focused and forward, on your face; few mammals see colors the way primates like you do. The new types of cones in your retinas, red and green and blue, revise your sense of how colors mark the seasons. And it is perhaps these two elements — your keen eyes and the warm, time-slowing fire — that serve as catalysts for what comes next.

As Homo erectus, you find yourself etching patterns into the surface of shells. In later centuries, you ground iron-rich rocks into red powder pigments, first to mark your territory, then to retrace the shapes you see in the world. Once, in a forty-thousand-year-old version of Spain, a creature that moves just as you do lugs a torch into a limestone cave. That version of you fills the cave’s walls with ochre handprints, tessellations, and the sharp-lined images of creatures.

One favorite subject is a four-legged thing with a stubborn, jutting chin, rendered in profile again and again. You paint scads of them — paint their horns and their hooves, red and wandering. In far away places that will one day become Mongolia, Algeria, or Indonesia, other early humans do the same, but these red cave beasts are rarely, if ever, rendered with eyes. Their flat ochre figures will never return your sharpening gaze, and so you must move forward.

Soon enough, these creatures infiltrate domestic spaces: their images carved or whittled, worn around necks or lovingly placed into tombs. Seventeen thousand years ago, with the Earth still lodged in its ice age, a version of you molds a hooved thing out of clay; this happens full centuries before the invention of any practical ceramic tools. And later, in not-yet-France, you take a mammoth tusk and carve away the ivory. Instead of fashioning a spearhead or a spade, you carve from the tusk an image: a pair of swimming ungulates. The arresting animal image precedes the practical. The art seems to always come first.

We’re not certain how any of the living, breathing inspirations of your trinkets finally make their way back into the fold. You might coax a herd down from the mountains after a lean hunting season. Some think you find tiny, orphaned specimens in the grass — their large, wondering eyes locking with yours — and bring them home to tame them. No matter how it happens, for the first time since that Paleogene tree, you find yourselves together and cohabitating. Sheep and goats are perhaps the first species that you willfully domesticate, as the omnipresent wolf-cum-dogs just started crashing your parties thousands of years beforehand. But from the moment you reconnect onward, in the eleven thousand years that roll toward our present day, you and sheep and goats remain utterly inseparable.

You corral them into the center of your earliest towns to keep (other) predators away from them, and haul their dung to the outskirts to bury it, burn it, or shape it into bricks. Note how even their shit sustains you, as well as their bodies long after death. It’s difficult to think of a human object that wasn’t once made from goats or sheep. Musical instruments first spring from bone, gut, and horn; cosmetics from lanolin; their bladders are receptacles for wine and beer. Sometimes “goatskins” even hold the milk from their own bodies, stowed away in

9

8

Versions of you grow skinnier, longer legged, or lower to the ground. One breed of your mammalian kind grows so fat it must lose its legs and take to the water. Another finds itself on an island and, before it can say tickety-boo, its eyes weigh as much as its brain and its head rotates in an almost-full circle. Thousands of other versions of you make choices that force their entire lines into evolutionary corners, where they disappear forever.

But both you and your weaselly twin from that long-ago staring contest aren’t going out like that.

As the inland waterways dry and grasslands arise, your old friend leaps from the trees where you met.

Over a few million years, it quintuples in size and then keeps growing, never quitting its quadruped stance.

One version of it slowly develops a huge hump for storing fat in times of paucity. Another specimen loses its fur and grows a hyper-sensitive, putty-soft snout for rooting out food. Yet another offspring of the twin you once ogled leaves both these new creatures behind to make a special honeycomb stomach, and then it adds three more to its belly. A gastric network like this slows digestion and makes acres of any tough green roughage that the shifting planet might throw its way edible. No matter the grass type, it can be chewed, stored, then chewed again, and thus absolutely squeezed of all its nutrients. This ruminative advantage is such a fine idea that it will never evolve away.

The creature’s mouth loses its upper incisors in favor of champing molars and a more prominent jaw. Horns erupt. Teeth buck. And at a crucial moment in a surprisingly late hour, this adaptable ungulate splinters once again. One version of itself grows nimble and longhaired in the mountains; the other roams the grassland in thickly woolen packs. Both specimens regard the Earth with eyes much changed from when you three were identical. Their new eyes are strategically placed at the sides of the head, each pupil a wide, searching rectangle.

Wary and knowing, they can see in a near panorama, scanning the horizon — perhaps for you.

But you’re off on your own trip, first remaining in the post-asteroid trees for several millennia, even as your weight increases and your tail disintegrates. At some point after reaching the ground, you shed your fur, either to more easily forage in waterways or to keep cool as the savannahs grow hotter (maybe both). Eventually, the tree-climbing muscles in your feet shorten and slacken as the small bones of your pelvis grow wider. You find yourself spending more hours balancing upright than galloping on all fours. Then a bone slips to a lower rung of your throat, which broadens the ways you make sound in this world, so you begin to sing to it.

Your soft hide makes you vulnerable, forcing you to spend your nights hunkered down or hiding in shelters.

In daylight packs, you hunt the latest versions of the creatures from which you split so long ago — harvesting their meat, sharpening their bones, and draping their dried skins over your gooseflesh. Think of that for a moment: every beast you ever hunted, you once were. Even in this present hour, the animals of your newfangled consciousness are the images you’ve hunted for eons, and at one point each beast was — once upon a time — also yourself. But birds and bony fish are far more distant relatives than these horned-and-hooved ruminants that the Pleistocene-you chases over the veld. When you scan the panorama to find this particular prey, the gaze that links you is much more recent; you can see it in how they raise their horned heads toward you — a knowing nod.

Fire-making is a part of your life by the time you split from the Neanderthals. The hot diet morphs your teeth and guts and changes your brand of predation. The fire also serves as a bright thing around which to gather your kin and wait out the dark. That practice stokes your senses, sparking new impressions while it warms your vulnerable flesh. The fire, the animals, and the changing seasons thrive on either side of your consciousness,

often running through your dreams. Before you know it, you’re burying your dead in decorated plots and adorning the graves with flowers, singing while you do.

After a long day of hunting, you watch the hominin faces near you, studying the changing physical language of your people. You find yourself looking for something — a map, a secret portal — that points as far backward as the beastly gazes of the prey that you track out in the field. Your predator’s eyes sit, focused and forward, on your face; few mammals see colors the way primates like you do. The new types of cones in your retinas, red and green and blue, revise your sense of how colors mark the seasons. And it is perhaps these two elements — your keen eyes and the warm, time-slowing fire — that serve as catalysts for what comes next.

As Homo erectus, you find yourself etching patterns into the surface of shells. In later centuries, you ground iron-rich rocks into red powder pigments, first to mark your territory, then to retrace the shapes you see in the world. Once, in a forty-thousand-year-old version of Spain, a creature that moves just as you do lugs a torch into a limestone cave. That version of you fills the cave’s walls with ochre handprints, tessellations, and the sharp-lined images of creatures.

One favorite subject is a four-legged thing with a stubborn, jutting chin, rendered in profile again and again. You paint scads of them — paint their horns and their hooves, red and wandering. In far away places that will one day become Mongolia, Algeria, or Indonesia, other early humans do the same, but these red cave beasts are rarely, if ever, rendered with eyes. Their flat ochre figures will never return your sharpening gaze, and so you must move forward.

Soon enough, these creatures infiltrate domestic spaces: their images carved or whittled, worn around necks or lovingly placed into tombs. Seventeen thousand years ago, with the Earth still lodged in its ice age, a version of you molds a hooved thing out of clay; this happens full centuries before the invention of any practical ceramic tools. And later, in not-yet-France, you take a mammoth tusk and carve away the ivory. Instead of fashioning a spearhead or a spade, you carve from the tusk an image: a pair of swimming ungulates. The arresting animal image precedes the practical. The art seems to always come first.

We’re not certain how any of the living, breathing inspirations of your trinkets finally make their way back into the fold. You might coax a herd down from the mountains after a lean hunting season. Some think you find tiny, orphaned specimens in the grass — their large, wondering eyes locking with yours — and bring them home to tame them. No matter how it happens, for the first time since that Paleogene tree, you find yourselves together and cohabitating. Sheep and goats are perhaps the first species that you willfully domesticate, as the omnipresent wolf-cum-dogs just started crashing your parties thousands of years beforehand. But from the moment you reconnect onward, in the eleven thousand years that roll toward our present day, you and sheep and goats remain utterly inseparable.

You corral them into the center of your earliest towns to keep (other) predators away from them, and haul their dung to the outskirts to bury it, burn it, or shape it into bricks. Note how even their shit sustains you, as well as their bodies long after death. It’s difficult to think of a human object that wasn’t once made from goats or sheep. Musical instruments first spring from bone, gut, and horn; cosmetics from lanolin; their bladders are receptacles for wine and beer. Sometimes “goatskins” even hold the milk from their own bodies, stowed away in

9

8

Versions of you grow skinnier, longer legged, or lower to the ground. One breed of your mammalian kind grows so fat it must lose its legs and take to the water. Another finds itself on an island and, before it can say tickety-boo, its eyes weigh as much as its brain and its head rotates in an almost-full circle. Thousands of other versions of you make choices that force their entire lines into evolutionary corners, where they disappear forever.

But both you and your weaselly twin from that long-ago staring contest aren’t going out like that.

As the inland waterways dry and grasslands arise, your old friend leaps from the trees where you met.

Over a few million years, it quintuples in size and then keeps growing, never quitting its quadruped stance.

One version of it slowly develops a huge hump for storing fat in times of paucity. Another specimen loses its fur and grows a hyper-sensitive, putty-soft snout for rooting out food. Yet another offspring of the twin you once ogled leaves both these new creatures behind to make a special honeycomb stomach, and then it adds three more to its belly. A gastric network like this slows digestion and makes acres of any tough green roughage that the shifting planet might throw its way edible. No matter the grass type, it can be chewed, stored, then chewed again, and thus absolutely squeezed of all its nutrients. This ruminative advantage is such a fine idea that it will never evolve away.

The creature’s mouth loses its upper incisors in favor of champing molars and a more prominent jaw. Horns erupt. Teeth buck. And at a crucial moment in a surprisingly late hour, this adaptable ungulate splinters once again. One version of itself grows nimble and longhaired in the mountains; the other roams the grassland in thickly woolen packs. Both specimens regard the Earth with eyes much changed from when you three were identical. Their new eyes are strategically placed at the sides of the head, each pupil a wide, searching rectangle.

Wary and knowing, they can see in a near panorama, scanning the horizon — perhaps for you.

But you’re off on your own trip, first remaining in the post-asteroid trees for several millennia, even as your weight increases and your tail disintegrates. At some point after reaching the ground, you shed your fur, either to more easily forage in waterways or to keep cool as the savannahs grow hotter (maybe both). Eventually, the tree-climbing muscles in your feet shorten and slacken as the small bones of your pelvis grow wider. You find yourself spending more hours balancing upright than galloping on all fours. Then a bone slips to a lower rung of your throat, which broadens the ways you make sound in this world, so you begin to sing to it.

Your soft hide makes you vulnerable, forcing you to spend your nights hunkered down or hiding in shelters.

In daylight packs, you hunt the latest versions of the creatures from which you split so long ago — harvesting their meat, sharpening their bones, and draping their dried skins over your gooseflesh. Think of that for a moment: every beast you ever hunted, you once were. Even in this present hour, the animals of your newfangled consciousness are the images you’ve hunted for eons, and at one point each beast was — once upon a time — also yourself. But birds and bony fish are far more distant relatives than these horned-and-hooved ruminants that the Pleistocene-you chases over the veld. When you scan the panorama to find this particular prey, the gaze that links you is much more recent; you can see it in how they raise their horned heads toward you — a knowing nod.

Fire-making is a part of your life by the time you split from the Neanderthals. The hot diet morphs your teeth and guts and changes your brand of predation. The fire also serves as a bright thing around which to gather your kin and wait out the dark. That practice stokes your senses, sparking new impressions while it warms your vulnerable flesh. The fire, the animals, and the changing seasons thrive on either side of your consciousness,

aesthetics, or humor — they’re portals into everything we are, as well as how far we’ve traveled to be here.

So when you look through the pages of this book, locking eyes with its ovine and caprine subjects, you probably know what to do.

Imagine one of the earliest versions of yourself traveling forward in time — way, way, way forward — to reenact that crucial, ancient moment with its long-time compatriot. Let the way-back-then-you leap forward toward this particular book, where the goats and sheep will already be waiting to meet your gaze. On many of these pages, you’ll almost feel them acknowledging you as old friends, colleagues in this eternal drag across the planet. It’s almost as if they’re saying, with a wide-pupil wink, “Hello, human. What took you so long?”

11

10

a pack for a shepherd to drink while she wanders. The products harvested from these bodies keep you warm, healthy, and productive, so it’s no stretch to say that they help bring your own body into focus. And of course, culture makes a human just as much as biology does, and you’d be hard-pressed to find any aspect of your art, faith, sport, or craftsmanship that is unmarked by an even-toed ungulate.

As your cities encase themselves in Earth’s first human architecture, these animals find their way into the blueprints. Both goats and sheep thrive within the settlements at Jeitun and Jericho. In Mesopotamia’s most buzzing metropolis, you use all the precious metals you can find to hammer together an image of a dazzle-eyed, pointy-chinned goat rearing up on its hind legs. In that same place and time, a ritually sacrificed human is buried with a wooden box: the famous Standard of Ur. On the box are images of sheep parading before a king. Imagine their pearlescent eyes looking out past the frame and toward you.

A millennium later, in what is now China, you cast a square bronze chalice with four curly-horned rams on each side of the cup, staring down the drinker. For a 2,700-year-old Athenian oil lamp shaped like a ram, you paint the eye so it nearly covers the figure’s entire head. A searching eye etched into the back of a Mycenaean amethyst. A pupil-less, perfectly round eye on a Scythian saddlecloth. On the walls of the Palace of Persepolis, a whole flock of sheep, giving you the side-eye. A relief rendering of Olympian god Hermes with a ewe on his shoulders — the eyes of both man and beast in profile, identically rendered.

In Ancient Greece, your days-long rites of Dionysus require at least one goat sacrifice before the chorus can chant and the revelers can drink, dance, and sing their old and passionate music. Hence the name for these theatrics — “goat song,” or tragōdia. Hence the Greeks’ “tragedy” mask, with its bleating mouth and narrowed eye.

Hence the tragic ending of Ajax, staged by Sophocles 2,400 years ago. After his suicide, the title character is wheeled into the amphitheater on the ekkyklêma with a fold of sheep, all of them still-eyed and dead.

The sheep you draw in medieval bestiaries are nearly unrecognizable: a gray, catlike thing gritting its teeth and looking glum while a wolf swallows it whole. The bestiary goats are more wild-eyed and thus truer to form. In the illuminated manuscripts they wrestle Amos near the caption: “Because of its lust, a goat’s eyes are slanted.”

As time passes, the sheep- and goat-song continues: a flirty-eyed, four-horned, piebald goat in a Mughal tapestry. A docile-eyed lamb in a golden crown at the center of the Ghent altarpiece. Goya’s goats, leering, with witches perched atop their backs. Chagall’s goats, with their cave-painted mien, making eyes at longhaired damsels. A velvet-eyed lamb dozing in the arms of a velvet-eyed Jesus, framed over a country pulpit. Dolly the cloned sheep, staring mysteriously at humanity on the cover of Time.

All of this, dear reader, hopefully proves why, when we encounter an animal portrait, we see more than the surface image. After sixty-five million years of looking at ruminants, three million years hunting goats, and eleven thousand years of shepherding, not only are these swaths of deep time present in every exchange we share with wooly beasts; said beasts also live inside every cell that makes us human.

Perhaps this explains why, in a black-and-white headshot of a sheep with a hard-set mouth and a frank gaze, you might see yourself — who you were and what you slowly elected to become. In a portrait of a wizened goat, you see hundreds of millennia of choices, lifetimes of growth, and the kind of extended collaboration that can’t help but linger in a body’s DNA. For images like these aren’t just vessels for emotion,

aesthetics, or humor — they’re portals into everything we are, as well as how far we’ve traveled to be here.

So when you look through the pages of this book, locking eyes with its ovine and caprine subjects, you probably know what to do.

Imagine one of the earliest versions of yourself traveling forward in time — way, way, way forward — to reenact that crucial, ancient moment with its long-time compatriot. Let the way-back-then-you leap forward toward this particular book, where the goats and sheep will already be waiting to meet your gaze. On many of these pages, you’ll almost feel them acknowledging you as old friends, colleagues in this eternal drag across the planet. It’s almost as if they’re saying, with a wide-pupil wink, “Hello, human. What took you so long?”

11

10

a pack for a shepherd to drink while she wanders. The products harvested from these bodies keep you warm, healthy, and productive, so it’s no stretch to say that they help bring your own body into focus. And of course, culture makes a human just as much as biology does, and you’d be hard-pressed to find any aspect of your art, faith, sport, or craftsmanship that is unmarked by an even-toed ungulate.

As your cities encase themselves in Earth’s first human architecture, these animals find their way into the blueprints. Both goats and sheep thrive within the settlements at Jeitun and Jericho. In Mesopotamia’s most buzzing metropolis, you use all the precious metals you can find to hammer together an image of a dazzle-eyed, pointy-chinned goat rearing up on its hind legs. In that same place and time, a ritually sacrificed human is buried with a wooden box: the famous Standard of Ur. On the box are images of sheep parading before a king. Imagine their pearlescent eyes looking out past the frame and toward you.

A millennium later, in what is now China, you cast a square bronze chalice with four curly-horned rams on each side of the cup, staring down the drinker. For a 2,700-year-old Athenian oil lamp shaped like a ram, you paint the eye so it nearly covers the figure’s entire head. A searching eye etched into the back of a Mycenaean amethyst. A pupil-less, perfectly round eye on a Scythian saddlecloth. On the walls of the Palace of Persepolis, a whole flock of sheep, giving you the side-eye. A relief rendering of Olympian god Hermes with a ewe on his shoulders — the eyes of both man and beast in profile, identically rendered.

In Ancient Greece, your days-long rites of Dionysus require at least one goat sacrifice before the chorus can chant and the revelers can drink, dance, and sing their old and passionate music. Hence the name for these theatrics — “goat song,” or tragōdia. Hence the Greeks’ “tragedy” mask, with its bleating mouth and narrowed eye.

Hence the tragic ending of Ajax, staged by Sophocles 2,400 years ago. After his suicide, the title character is wheeled into the amphitheater on the ekkyklêma with a fold of sheep, all of them still-eyed and dead.

The sheep you draw in medieval bestiaries are nearly unrecognizable: a gray, catlike thing gritting its teeth and looking glum while a wolf swallows it whole. The bestiary goats are more wild-eyed and thus truer to form. In the illuminated manuscripts they wrestle Amos near the caption: “Because of its lust, a goat’s eyes are slanted.”

As time passes, the sheep- and goat-song continues: a flirty-eyed, four-horned, piebald goat in a Mughal tapestry. A docile-eyed lamb in a golden crown at the center of the Ghent altarpiece. Goya’s goats, leering, with witches perched atop their backs. Chagall’s goats, with their cave-painted mien, making eyes at longhaired damsels. A velvet-eyed lamb dozing in the arms of a velvet-eyed Jesus, framed over a country pulpit. Dolly the cloned sheep, staring mysteriously at humanity on the cover of Time.

All of this, dear reader, hopefully proves why, when we encounter an animal portrait, we see more than the surface image. After sixty-five million years of looking at ruminants, three million years hunting goats, and eleven thousand years of shepherding, not only are these swaths of deep time present in every exchange we share with wooly beasts; said beasts also live inside every cell that makes us human.

Perhaps this explains why, in a black-and-white headshot of a sheep with a hard-set mouth and a frank gaze, you might see yourself — who you were and what you slowly elected to become. In a portrait of a wizened goat, you see hundreds of millennia of choices, lifetimes of growth, and the kind of extended collaboration that can’t help but linger in a body’s DNA. For images like these aren’t just vessels for emotion,

13 | 13

12 | 13

sophie

13 | 13

12 | 13

sophie

71 | 71

70 | 71

opie

71 | 71

70 | 71

opie

77 | 77

76 | 77

ella

77 | 77

76 | 77

ella

79 | 79

78 | 79

sydney

79 | 79

78 | 79

sydney

Editorial coordination

Cover

laura maggioni

bella

Editing

Page 6

charles gute

moolahlah

Art direction annarita de sanctis

Cover daria donchenko

Layout carlotta turba

Color separation maurizio brivio, milan

All rights reserved © Kevin Horan Essay © Elena Passarello For the present edition © Copyright 2018, 5 Continents Editions srl No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

5 Continents Editions Piazza Caiazzo, 1 20124 Milan, Italy www.fivecontinentseditions.com

ISBN: 978-88-7439-840-9

Distributed by ACC Art Books throughout the world, excluding Italy Distributed in Italy by Messaggerie Libri S.p.A.

Printed in Italy in October 2018 by Tecnostampa – Pigini Group Printing Division Loreto – Trevi, Italy for 5 Continents Editions, Milan