Melani Veveçka, University of Toronto
There are paintings that invite admiration, and there are paintings that demand confrontation. Motra Toneoccupies a quiet room in the National Gallery of Tirana, surrounded by centuries of Albanian history rendered in oil and canvas (Figure 1). Most visitors pass her without pause. A few linger momentarily. Fewer still grasp what she represents. She does not speak, but neither does she remain silent. Her power lies in what she withholds, in her refusal to explain herself.
I first encountered Motra Tone (Our Sister/Sister Tone) as a child, long before I had the language to articulate what I saw. Even then, her presence was deliberate. She did not appear passive. She appeared composed. In a nation that self-identifies as the fatherland, Motra Tone complicates the gendered iconography of national identity. Her body is not a neutral object; it is a repository of historical memory, layered with intention and resistance.
Kolë Idromeno painted his own sister, Tone, in Motra Tone in 1883, at a moment when Albanian identity was being shaped under the weight of Ottoman rule. On the surface, the portrait is straightforward: a young woman in traditional Albanian clothing, her hand resting thoughtfully across her mouth. Yet beneath this apparent stillness lies a calculated political statement. Idromeno encodes dissent through visual restraint, crafting an image that challenges colonial power without appearing to do so.
Even the painting’s title, Our Sister, introduces a quiet rupture. Albanian national discourse has long been shaped by the metaphor of the fatherland (atdheu), a masculinized ideal associated with strength, sacrifice, and defense. Idromeno’s portrait disrupts this idea by placing a woman, neither militant nor maternal, at the center of national imaginary. By titling the portrait Motra Tone, Idromeno spins a quiet wordplay: “Tone” identifies his sister by name, yet in the Gheg dialect it also means “ours,” so the phrase doubles as Sister Tone and Our Sister, turning a private likeness into a shared national kinship. The result is a portrait of femininity that neither conforms to traditional gender roles nor rejects them outright. Instead, it reframes the politics of identity through a feminine figure whose stillness conceals a deeper politicized will.
Motra Tone should be read not as a passive reflection of cultural tension, but as an active site through which questions of gender, nationhood, and colonial resistance are visually expressed. The analysis is organized around four thematic lenses: first, the role of traditional dress as a medium of strategic concealment; second, the use of religious iconography as political assertion; third, gesture and gaze as visual cues of autonomy and control; and finally, the deployment of mimicry as a means of disrupting colonial aesthetic norms. Taken together, these elements reveal Motra Tone as a complex visual archive of resistance, shaped as much by what it conceals as by what it reveals.
Veils of Power, Threads of Memory: Dressing the Albanian Body Under Empire
To understand Motra Tone as a site of political meaning, one must begin with the clothing she models. In Albanian visual culture, garments are never merely decorative. They are saturated with historical significance, regional belonging, and embodied resistance. Central among these is the qeleshe, the traditional white felt cap worn throughout Albania, but with particular resonance in the north. More than an item of dress, the qeleshe functions as a visual declaration of Albanian ethnic continuity, communal memory, and cultural resilience.[1] Its whiteness is not neutral; it signals both purity and defiance. Its form, solid and unyielding, speaks to a history of endurance in the face of external domination. Under Ottoman rule, this cultural expression was repeatedly threatened. Imperial power sought to erode regional identities through imposing dress codes that projected the illusion of uniformity while erasing the complexities of local culture.[2] Clothing became one of the few remaining avenues through which identity could be negotiated and preserved. In this context, the qeleshe transformed from a cultural object into a political statement.
Kolë Idromeno captures this transformation with extraordinary subtlety. In Motra Tone, he positions the qeleshebeneath the yashmak, a sheer veil emblematic of Ottoman elite femininity and the aesthetic norms of imperial propriety.[3] The yashmak initially dominates the visual field. It is translucent, delicately folded, and seemingly weightless, offering the illusion of elegance and refinement. Yet its beauty is not innocent. It represents the surface architecture of the empire, a visual apparatus designed to naturalize submission, particularly through the disciplining of gendered bodies.
Beneath this veil, however, the qeleshe remains visible; firm, opaque, and conspicuously at odds with the softness above it. This layering is not incidental. It is a precise visual strategy. Idromeno stages a material confrontation between two aesthetic systems. The yashmak embodies imperial surface, fragile and imposed. The qeleshe signifies indigenous substance, enduring and rooted. By placing one atop the other, Idromeno does not create harmony; he creates friction.
The contrast in texture and opacity further deepens the visual argument. The yashmak’s gauzy transparency invites the gaze yet conceals depth, suggesting that Ottoman-imposed identity is performative and ultimately insubstantial. In contrast, the qeleshe offers no such invitation. It is unapologetically present, its visual density resisting both erasure and interpretation. Where the yashmak performs femininity in line with the empire’s expectations, the qeleshe interrupts, destabilizes, and reclaims the space of the Albanian body.
This layered symbolism reflects the theoretical framework of strategic essentialism—as introduced by Gayatri Spivak, the term refers to the deliberate, tactical emphasis on cultural identifiers in the face of systemic erasure.[4] It is not a retreat into fixed identity, but a calculated assertion of difference. In Motra Tone, the qeleshe becomes such a gesture. It is not concealed out of shame, but out of necessity. It remains legible, but only to those attuned to its meaning. Its presence beneath the yashmak signals an act of survival that is at once visual, cultural, and political.
Idromeno constructs a portrait that resists simplistic narratives of hybridity. This is not a figure suspended between two cultures, but one who performs submission while preserving autonomy. Her clothing does not merely reflect an identity under pressure, but it also embodies the techniques through which that identity is defended. Through this deliberate layering of garments, Idromeno offers a powerful meditation on colonial aesthetics, regional resistance, and the politics of concealment.
The Empire Can Look, But It Cannot Touch: The Politics of the Visible Cross
There are symbols that decorate, and there are symbols that declare. The cross in Motra Tone does the latter. It does not whisper; it does not retreat into ornament. It rests boldly on her chest, directly over her heart, not merely as an accessory but as an act of visual insistence. It speaks before she does. Its placement, scale, and gleam demand to be seen, defying the aesthetic norms of the empire that sought to discipline both bodies and beliefs. In a composition otherwise marked by restraint, the cross becomes the axis around which meaning circulates. It interrupts the softness of submission with the solidity of conviction. It is not subtle. It is sovereign.
To understand the full weight of this symbol, one must look closely at where Motra Tone comes from. Shkodra, her city of origin in Northern Albania, was historically a bastion of Catholicism.[5] During Ottoman rule, however, systemic pressure led many in the region to convert to Islam, reshaping the city’s religious landscape over time.[6] Yet despite this imposed transformation, a significant Catholic minority refused to abandon their faith. Their refusal was political as well as spiritual Catholicism in Shkodra became a line drawn, an assertion of identity, continuity, and resistance in the face of assimilation. Churches were not simply places of worship, but spaces of autonomy and communal preservation, housing not only the sacred but the cultural, the historical, and the political. Through ritual, public celebration, and the enduring authority of the clergy, this community sustained a counter-narrative—one that rejected imperial uniformity in favor of rooted cultural sovereignty.
Idromeno, intimately familiar with this world, emphasizes these dynamics in Motra Tone. The cross she wears is neither incidental nor decorative. It is oversized, centrally placed, and gleams against her muted clothing with deliberate force. Its visibility is a calculated act of disruption, positioned to rupture the Ottoman visual order that prescribed femininity as modest, subdued, and politically neutral. By placing the cross in the center of the chest, Idromeno collapses the boundary between interior and exterior. He visualizes religious identity not as private conviction but as public position. The heart, in this image, is not a metaphor for feeling alone. It becomes a political site—intimate, yes, but exposed, deliberate, and unflinching.
The visual tension between the cross and the surrounding veil intensifies this confrontation. The sheer yashmak, associated with Ottoman elite femininity is meant to signify propriety and deference. Yet it fails to obscure the cross. On the contrary, its transparency serves to highlight what it attempts to conceal. The contrast in texture—gold against gauze, density against delicacy—speaks to a broader dialectic between imposition and persistence. Where the empire crafts an aesthetic of surface, Idromeno roots identity in depth, in weight, in history.
This act of visual layering is ideological as well as stylistic. It mirrors the strategic compromises undertaken by Shkodra’s Catholic community, who learned to inhabit the empire’s imposed laws while refusing to surrender the core of their cultural and religious identity. The cross becomes a symbol of what Homi Bhabha might call “interstitial agency,” an assertion of autonomy from within the very structures designed to suppress it.[7] Yet even more closely aligned is Gayatri Spivak’s concept of strategic essentialism.[8] The Catholic minority in Shkodra, facing both political marginalization and cultural erasure, emphasized their distinctiveness not out of essentialist nostalgia but as a tactical assertion of survival. The cross in Motra Tone functions in exactly this way. It does not erase complexity, but momentarily consolidates identity for the sake of visibility and resistance. Furthermore, the act of making the cross so publicly visible disrupts the Ottoman logic of modesty and religious containment. It reframes what was meant to be hidden as something that must be acknowledged. Motra Tone does not wear her faith quietly. She wears it defiantly. Her cross is not declarative as well as devotional. It transforms the personal into the political and turns belief into spectacle.
Benedict Anderson’s theory of imagined communities deepens this reading. Anderson writes that nations are not born of geography alone but of shared rituals, symbols, and stories.[9] In this context, Catholicism in Shkodra functioned as one such imagined community, a collective narrative of belonging that could be maintained even in the face of political marginalization. By placing the cross at the visual and symbolic center of Motra Tone, Idromeno embeds this communal narrative into the image itself. The portrait is a cultural archive, a national gesture disguised as a personal one.
Idromeno refuses the empire’s attempts to privatize faith. He reclaims religion as public, disruptive, and entirely political. The cross is a visual thesis, a claim to autonomy, a rejection of erasure, and a reminder that belief, when embodied with intention, can unsettle even the most rigid structures of power. Through Motra Tone, Idromeno constructs not just a portrait, but a testament. The cross simultaneously performs and symbolizes resistance.
Nothing to Perform: Stillness as a Refusal of the Colonial Spectacle
Resistance in Motra Tone is not confined to symbols worn or statements declared. It moves beneath the surface, expressed through a language of gesture, posture, and gaze. These embodied choices speak with a precision more deliberate than words, revealing a politics of refusal embedded in stillness and silence. What first appears subdued becomes strikingly legible when read not as submission but as strategy. This is not a portrait of a woman being seen, but one of a woman choosing how to be seen.
Consider first the placement of her hand, gently covering her mouth. To a casual viewer, this may seem an echo of traditional feminine modesty, a familiar gesture within both patriarchal and colonial aesthetics. It suggests a woman silent, contained, deferential. But Idromeno’s composition resists such easy interpretation. This is not a hand suppressing speech. It is a hand protecting voice. In this moment, silence is not imposed from without but chosen from within. The gesture becomes an assertion of control over language itself.
bell hooks notes that silence, when wielded deliberately, becomes a tactic of survival and resistance.[10] Within structures that demand constant self-disclosure from the oppressed, withholding speech is a radical act. In Motra Tone, this act plays out visually. Her silence is not born of absence or obedience. It is a form of presence, denying the viewer the comfort of total access and disrupting the imperial logic that renders colonized women fully knowable and consumable.
The stillness of her posture also deserves critical attention. Judith Butler’s theory of performativity emphasizes that identity is produced through repetition, through gestures and behaviors that conform to cultural norms.[11] Yet Butler recognizes the subversive potential of such performances. When repetition becomes hyper-visible or strategically altered, it can expose the very structures it upholds. In Motra Tone, stillness becomes one such subversion. Her body is poised, controlled, deliberately unmoving, withholding rather than seducing, entertaining, or yielding. This stillness is precision. Motra Tone denies the viewer the spectacle they might expect. She refrains from expressive gesture or dynamic posture, refusing to perform for either the imperial eye or the patriarchal imagination. Her presence resists legibility. It exists on its own terms, and within that restraint lies immense power.
Idromeno constructs a portrait that refuses to resolve easily into tropes of victimhood or resistance. It sits in tension, inviting the viewer to reconsider the meaning of silence, the function of gaze, and the politics of stillness. Motra Tone does not speak, but she does not remain silent. Her refusal to be fully seen, fully interpreted, or fully possessed becomes the very mode through which she asserts autonomy. This is not submission disguised as strength, but strength disguised as submission.
The Mirror and the Crack: Mimicry and the Albanian Gaze
If Motra Tone’s gaze and silence are vehicles of quiet resistance, then the surface of the canvas itself becomes the battleground for a more direct confrontation. What at first appears to be a faithful exercise in European realism is, in truth, a sophisticated act of visual subversion. Idromeno paints with precision as he composes political provocation, one rendered in the visual language of the colonial rule but aimed squarely against it. His artistic choices expose and unsettle the very aesthetic values they seem to uphold.
Trained in Venice, Idromeno became well-versed in the formal techniques of Western academic art. Realism, chiaroscuro, and the disciplined interplay of light and shadow were not simply artistic conventions. They were visual technologies developed to serve ideals such as rationality, balance, and objectivity. In colonial contexts, these techniques often worked to reinforce hierarchies, positioning the European subject as stable and knowable, while casting the colonized as exotic, ornamental, and peripheral.[12] Idromeno, however, did not adopt these conventions uncritically. He repurposed them. In Motra Tone, he appropriates the refined tools of European realism and directs them toward a critique of colonial visual authority. At first glance, the portrait appears to comply with the aesthetic ideals imposed by Ottoman and Western influence. The textures are rendered with exquisite detail. The composition is harmonious. The garments gleam with delicately layered light. Yet the very perfection of the image resists easy interpretation. The refinement is pushed too far. The portrait is not just realistic—it is hyperreal. Every element is so meticulously crafted that it becomes unnerving.
Here, Idromeno’s technique begins to embody the logic of mimicry as theorized by Homi Bhabha. In Of Mimicry and Man, Bhabha argues that colonial mimicry occurs when the colonized replicate the forms, customs, and representations of the colonizer in ways that are almost, but not quite, the same.[13] This resemblance creates profound instability. It unsettles colonial power because it reveals that the authority of the colonizer is dependent on repetition, not origin. Rather than affirming empire, mimicry disturbs it.
In Motra Tone, Idromeno mimics the visual codes of Ottoman femininity with excessive precision. The portrait replicates the aesthetics of refinement to such an extent that the illusion of imperial naturalness begins to fracture. What once appeared elegant becomes overdetermined, and the viewer is confronted not with a celebration of empire but with its uncomfortable reflection. The polish becomes unnatural, the poise deliberate, and the beauty imposed. Through mimicry, Idromeno forces the viewer to confront the performative nature of imperial aesthetics. The ideals that once seemed objective or universal now appear artificial and contingent. The empire’s self-image becomes uncanny, disrupted by its own visual logic pushed beyond comfort.
Idromeno deepens this effect through his use of visual contrast. The carefully lit textures of the yashmak, the intricate folds of the fabric, and the stark clarity of the cross against Motra Tone’s chest all work together to destabilize the composition’s harmony. Light and shadow generate tension and add dimension, contrasts as diagnostic as they are decorative. They draw attention to the friction between the appearance of conformity and the reality of resistance.
Through this visual strategy, Idromeno constructs a uniquely subversive form of cultural assertion. He reclaims the language of the colonizer and rewrites it in the image of the colonized. Every brushstroke in Motra Tone becomes a kind of refusal, encoded within a masterful reproduction. This is not realism in service of compliance. It is realism turned against its own ideological foundation. The portrait insists on being read not as a beautiful replication of empire but as a precise and quiet dismantling from within.
Ultimately, Motra Tone is not simply a work of visual beauty. She is a layered, intentional act of cultural preservation, an image that holds within it the quiet strength of a people who refused to disappear. Kolë Idromeno does not offer his viewer a portrait of submission. He constructs a complex and deliberate vision of Albanian identity, shaped not through loud declarations but through restraint, control, and symbolic defiance. Each element of the painting—the concealed qeleshe, the gleaming cross, the stillness of the body, the unflinching gaze—speaks to the enduring power of those who chose to preserve, rather than perform, their survival. To witness Motra Tone is to encounter the emotional and political weight of survival. The painting becomes more than a portrait. It becomes a vessel for memory, for resistance, for all the quiet strategies through which people endure when history tries to forget them. Idromeno does not make her heroic by spectacle. He makes her powerful by truth. To see her is to understand what survived. To return to her is to remember who kept it alive.
Endnotes
[1] Bukurie Mustafa, “Transformation of the Ethnical and Religious Function of the Traditional Costume of Albanians in Macedonia during Socialism.” EthnoAnthropoZoom / ЕтноАнтропоЗум, vol. 20, no. 20, 2020, pp. 211–241, www.ceeol.com/search/article-detail?id=1128089.
[2] Mehmet Ada Özdil, “Dressing the Empire: Clothing, Identity, and Social Control in the Ottoman Millet System.” Lectio Socialis, vol. 8, no. 2, 30 July 2024, https://doi.org/10.47478/lectio.1489487.
[3] Anastasia Falierou, “FROM THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE.” From Traditional Attire to Modern Dress: Modes of Identification, Modes of Recognition in the Balkans (XVIth-XXth Centuries) (2011): 175.
[4] Elisabeth Eide, “Strategic Essentialism.” The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Gender and Sexuality Studies, 21 Apr. 2016, pp. 1–2, https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118663219.wbegss554.
[5] Ermal Baze and Andi Pinari, “Catholicism and Religious Symbiosis on the Facade of the Southeast Adriatic: The Case of Shkodra during the Kingdom of the Nemanjić Dynasty.” Turkish Online Journal of Qualitative Inquiry (TOJQI), vol. 13, no. 1, Jan. 2022, pp. 289–297.
[6] Ana Sekulic, “Conversion of the Landscape: Environment and Religious Politics in an Early Modern Ottoman Town” (PhD Dissertation, Princeton University, 2020).
[7] Nagendra Bahadur,Bhandari, “Homi K. Bhabha’s Third Space Theory and Cultural Identity Today: A Critical Review.” Prithvi Academic Journal, vol. 5, no. 1, 12 May 2022, https://doi.org/10.3126/paj.v5i1.45049.
[8] Eide, “Strategic Essentialism,” 171–172.
[9] Shahid H. Raja, “Two-Nation Theory & Benedict Anderson’s Theory of Imagined Communities.” Medium, 7 Sept. 2023, shahidhraja.medium.com/two-nation-theory-benedict-andersons-theory-of-imagined-communities-cb8c2fc1c212.
[10] bell hooks, “Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness.” The Journal of Cinema and Media, vol. 36, no. 36, 1989. 15–23.
[11] Judith Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory.” Theatre Journal, vol. 40, no. 4, Dec. 1988, pp. 519–531. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3207893, https://doi.org/10.2307/3207893.
[12] “The Role of Art in European Colonial Expansion and Imperialism | Art and Colonialism Class Notes | Fiveable.” Fiveable.me, 2024, fiveable.me/art-and-colonialism/unit-2/role-art-european-colonial-expansion-imperialism/study-guide/2a8ONuUS5RsAAD7A.
[13] Homi K, Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man.” John Wiley & Sons, Ltd EBooks, 15 Apr. 2016, pp. 53–59, https://doi.org/10.1002/9781119118589.ch3.
About the Author
Melani Veveçka is entering her fourth year at the University of Toronto, where she studies Political Science and Evolutionary Anthropology. Her love for art traces back to her parents, who made a ritual of taking her to museums and taught her that curiosity is its own form of intelligence. Outside academics, Melani feels most at peace on long walks that stretch into golden hour, in a restaurant with a perfect dish in front of her, solving a late-night sudoku grid, or spinning music as an amateur DJ.