Francis Picabia’s abstract composition combines hard-edged mechanical shapes that might belong to a dough-making machine. The title Reverence is inscribed near the top of the circle and “object that does not praise the past” is written in French at the bottom. Metallic paints in gold and silver mimic industrial surfaces, but also bring gilded religious icons to mind. Using the combination of ideal geometric shapes (a circle within a square), Picabia may have meant to parody Leonardo da Vinci’s celebrated Vitruvian Man. Here, however, the artist inserts a machine as the central subject. Picabia painted Reverence in New York during World War I, where, together with his friend Marcel Duchamp, he became a leader of the local Dada art movement.