first works, the influence of the traditional iconography for such paintings clearly makes itself felt: the arms are shown forming a T or Y; the figure is light-colored; background tends to be dark; and the palette reveals some hint of realism (some trace of red, a mixture of black and ochre for the hair, with the occasional presence of gold). By the mid-1960s, the realism in the depiction of the whole human figure was beginning to disappear, with the torso or arms just hinted at; this effect of zooming in on the head created a structural parallel with the form of a landscape (the two arms of Christ marking a sort of horizon). The journeys to India of 1973 and 1975 brought about another change, with Congdon drawing inspiration from the rag-clad wretches abandoned in the streets of Calcutta, stunted human larvae without arms or legs. The last traces of physiognomy, still recognizable in Crucifix 64, disappeared altogether by 1974. New Season of Travel Travel was a way of extending his visual experience, of nourishing his art. With the exception of some important European trips (the Aeolian islands, Spain, Greece), most of Congdon’s travelling during the 1970s took him far afield (air travel had replaced the liners of his youth). He visited North West Africa, Ethiopia, the Near and Middle East (from Turkey to the Yemen) and South America. There was also a change in his eye: if before he was looking for the monumental sites or the extremes of nature, he now looked at the world with the eye of an unassuming chronicler, someone moved by pity for what he saw, and depicted petrol tankers, the House of Slaves (Gorée) near Dakar, the trains in Tunisia, the houses in Sana’a. This different approach to the sites of the world is most fully revealed by the two trips to India in 1973 and 1975. Late Period: Lombardy In the fall of 1979 Congdon moved his studio to an apartment adjacent to the Benedictine monastery Comunità Ss. Pietro e Paolo (Community of the Saints Peter and Paul) in Cascinazza, in the Milanese countryside of Gudo Gambaredo (Italy), where he would live for the rest of his life. He was aware that this was the last decisive move of his career; there would be no more traveling to far-flung places. At first, he was more than diffident towards his own “promised land”,