Doctor Strange Stands Before a Glowing Sanctum Window — Print & Oil Painting

The light arrives before the man does. A colossal wheel of gold white fire fills the middle of this wide banner, built from three or four concentric rings and perhaps forty radiating spokes, and it is bright enough to bleach its own edges, which is why the brightness reading here is the highest of the six and the contrast among the highest as well.

He stands dead centre inside it, cut off at the knees, both arms held slightly away from the body and the hands open and empty. Red cloak, dark blue layered tunic, a broad belt with a heavy oval buckle, and at the sternum a round amulet with a green stone burning in it. He is entirely in front of the light and takes almost no illumination from it, so the figure reads as a dark shape with a lit rim.

Outside the wheel the architecture has stopped behaving. Blocks of city fold up and over on both sides, cornices and roof gardens turning through ninety degrees, one facade running into another at an angle no street would allow, and the whole arrangement is mirrored left to right so that the picture is symmetrical about him.

The window that gives the picture its name is a real fixture with a real function. The house at 177A Bleecker Street has carried a circular window since the 1960s, a seal that keeps certain things out of the building, and its designer is said to have lifted the shape from a window in a newspaper strip he admired. Worth noting honestly: the printed design is a circle crossed by four sweeping curves, and what is burning behind this figure is a wheel of many spokes instead. Part of our Marvel collection, next to the same amulet worn by a figure with six arms and a long horizontal river of fire drawn through both hands.