When I saw Bartolommeo Bulgarini’s The Crucifixion in the Smart Museum, one big question stuck out to me. Why does it look like that? The heads of the characters seem slightly out of proportion, lodged at awkward and unnatural angles; their hands are rendered in awkward and contrived poses; and Jesus’s torso and legs seemed oddly elongated and alien. These kinds of representational inconsistencies were present in the illustrations we…