For much of history, queer works of art—that is, art that explores same-sex relationships, romances, and sexual encounters—have been scorned, altered, or simply hidden away. In recent years, there have been efforts to reclaim these works and to champion art whose queerness was once dismissed or disregarded.

It’s harder to know how to reclaim something as queer when its original creator—and the audience to whom it was first shown—not only lacked the terminology to discuss sexualities that deviated from the norm but intended for the work to mean something entirely different. It’s particularly difficult when those meanings become lost on modern viewers. Can we truly call something queer when it was never intended to be? Where is the line between fetishism and representation?

In the anonymous French painting Gabrielle d’Estrées and One of Her Sisters (ca. 1594), two women—one presumed to be Gabrielle d’Estrées, mistress of King Henry IV of France, and the other her sister, the Duchess de Villars—turn half towards the viewer as they sit in a bathtub lined with silk. The women have faces the shape of upturned petals; thin, arched eyebrows; skin the same color as the pearls they both wear in their ears. They are naked from the waist up, and both women’s small, dark eyes are locked on the viewer, mouths tight and ambiguous.

But what everybody sees first—what viewers can’t help but fix their gazes on—is the hand of the woman on the left as it pinches the nipple of the woman on the right, her index finger and thumb forming a perfect “C.” Above them, ruched silk curtains, heavy as thunderclouds, are parted as though the audience is at a stage’s edge. The viewer’s voyeuristic position sets the scene as a performance.

There’s an obvious eroticism to the image: the fearlessness of their gazes, the soft curves of flesh, the erect nipples. The pinch itself constitutes the only moment in the painting where skin meets skin, where contact is between the subjects rather than with the audience. As scholar Chris Roulston notes, the composition employs the traditional artistic language of coupledom—one figure is light haired while the other is brunette figure dark—lending an added intimacy that makes the painting undeniably sapphic.