You have to zoom in on her face because these may be the most beautiful eyes ever put on canvas, and once you understand what she is looking at, they become almost unbearable... The painting is Joan of Arc, made by the French artist Jules Bastien-Lepage in 1879, and it hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. It is enormous, more than eight feet tall, and it shows Joan not as a warrior in armor, but as what she actually was before any of it: a peasant girl of thirteen, standing in her parents' garden in the French countryside. The Met describes her eyes as wide open and clear blue, her cheeks feverishly flushed, her gaze turned upward and away, and they are right, this is the face of someone who is no longer fully in the garden... She has just heard the voices and behind her, among the trees, Saints Michael, Margaret, and Catherine have appeared, and they are telling this teenage girl the impossible thing she was born to do: leave home, take up a sword, and drive an army of invaders out of France. Her eyes are fixed on something the rest of us cannot see, but her bare feet are digging into the earth, and one hand grips a branch beside her. She is being called toward something vast and terrifying, and every muscle in her is trying to stay rooted to the ground she knows. The artist caught the precise moment a girl is torn between the life she has and the fate she cannot refuse. And everyone knows how the story ends: she would follow those voices, she would lead armies, crown a king, and be captured, and at nineteen she would be burned alive as a heretic, still insisting the voices were real. Everything that was coming for her is already there, waiting, behind those wide blue eyes in this peaceful garden...