THE INSATIABLE DESIRE FOR DIVINE LOVE A short film by Mont Carver

Original artwork: https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/360403

I spent hours moving through The Met’s Open Access collection before encountering Antonius Wierix II’s engraving The insatiable desire for divine love (Divini amoris intensio), created between 1570 and 1604. Among more than half a million works, this was the image that stopped me.

The engraving depicts a robed figure holding two hearts connected by fine lines to a crowned heart suspended above him. I was drawn to the way it gives longing a physical structure. It immediately connected with questions that already run through my work: queer love, faith, yearning and the unseen forces that bind people together.

The Insatiable Desire for Divine Love reimagines the engraving as a short magical realist film set in present-day Mexico City. A young Mexican woman prays before the image in her bedroom. The engraving awakens and becomes a prophecy. Later, she glimpses a luminous, long-haired figure. The apparition eventually returns in an ordinary human form as the girl living next door, whom she encounters on the rooftop while hanging laundry.

The divine revelation is not fulfilled through a distant celestial being, but through another young woman who has been living beside her all along. The film asks whether the love we address through prayer might already exist within the ordinary world, waiting to be recognized.

I developed the film through a branching process on the FLORA canvas rather than through a single generation. I began with visual research into Mexican domestic devotional spaces, bedrooms, neighborhoods, rooftops and clotheslines. From there, I developed the two characters and repeatedly refined their appearance, environments, visual continuity and relationship to the original artwork. I explored several interpretations of the apparition, rejecting images that felt overly polished or like generic digital fantasy in favor of something more intimate and slightly uncanny.

I also experimented with expanding and animating the original engraving while preserving its recognizable composition. Its engraved clouds begin to drift, the landscape responds to the wind, the hearts pulse and the delicate black lines tremble as though the antique image were awakening inside the paper. Across the film, those connecting lines are translated into the electrical wires and clotheslines of Mexico City. The pastoral landscape becomes a dense urban rooftop, while clouds reappear through white sheets moving in the wind.

The final visual language combines the tenderness of a magical-girl story with the texture of 35mm photography, domestic realism, devotional imagery and restrained analog dream effects. The dusty pink bedroom, faded turquoise textiles, warm daylight, black ink and pearlescent light were refined across connected iterations. Sound, music and an ornamental title sequence were developed as part of the same visual world.

The project also begins from the idea that some artworks have lives beyond museum walls. Devotional images can travel through reproductions, bedrooms and domestic altars, where they are framed, touched, prayed to and woven into everyday life. I wanted Wierix’s engraving to leave the digital archive and enter a young woman’s bedroom, not as a distant historical object, but as an intimate image she lives with and speaks to.

The film therefore traces a circular journey: from devotional print to museum collection, from the archive back into a home, and finally toward the museum again as a contemporary moving image. Rather than simply illustrating the original engraving, the work proposes a new afterlife for it, one in which sacred longing becomes domestic, Mexican and queer. IG post: https://www.instagram.com/reels/Dc-6_KgRaEV/

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