An $8m painting, and one weird old tip

While browsing my RSS feeds today, I came across a post on Art Market Monitor about a painting by “racy” Dutch painter Hendrick Goltzius (the post was highlighting content from within a larger article at the New York Times). I have pasted a screengrab from my RSS reader below, because if you simply click on the link I provide to the article you won’t get the same wry grin. I looked at the painting, and read the short blurb that accompanied it in my RSS reader. I then noticed that the belly of the crude cartoon in the ubiquitous spam trap, erm, I mean, Google ad about losing belly fat with “one weird old tip” was a pretty reasonable facsimile of the belly on the model for the Dutch painting from 1612 that’s set to go for a cool 8 million bucks at auction.

Just saying.