“Bruegel suggests a chart of emotions as intricate as the map-making of Ortelius. The sloped back of the kneeling Christ echoes the shape of a cliff or mountain range. The texture of the robes of the Pharisees, all fissures and geological creases, runs straight into this panel’s immediate neighbour: a Bruegel exterior, Landscape with the Flight into Egypt. At the feet of the stooped Pharisee is a pebble the size of an egg. And then another, even smaller. The tools of execution are countered by the words Christ traces with his finger in the dust: “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.” So this act of writing, making the ground into a page, overwhelms the rhetorical snares of speech, the ugly cut and thrust of political interrogation. The enchanted mob, literally petrified, will move again. The stick divided by the Pharisee’s gesturing hands becomes a wand. And the stage, as we remember from John, empties. The stone-throwers walk away, one by one, according to age. Until the kneeling Christ and the standing woman remain, in an awkward reversal of their established sexual status. He tells her to go, to sin no more, to pass from this narrative, and out of our knowledge. A mystery encrypted in one small panel of painted wood now hanging in a London gallery.“ — Iain Sinclair