Urban Light has become an iconic setting in the city of angels: It's the scene of countless wedding photos and postcards, appears in Tori Amos's "Maybe California" music video and is the backdrop of Natalie Portman and Ashton Kutcher's fight scene in the film No Strings Attached.
The presence of light-struck wash drawings of cloud-borne figures and angels by Giambattista Tiepolo proposes a reading of Degas's aerialist as a modern-day, secular version of such imagery, clearly suspended from her clenched jaw, not divinely supported.