Kahlo’s paintings, like those of the previous artists, show an awareness of art history and reflect linkages with predecessors she admired, often those from the Spanish tradition or from distinguished Italian portrait artists. For example,Thomas Cole paintings in her Self-Portrait with a Velvet Dress (1926), she alludes through both the red dress and the slender elegant fingers both to Botticelli and Bronzino. Many of Kahlo’s works feature the wounded self/damaged body,Fernando Botero paintings which is specifically a female body. She is shown dealing with the pain and loss of miscarriage and infertility in Henry Ford Hospital, and with pain stemming from both physical and emotional wounds in paintings such as Broken Column,Caravaggio paintings and Wounded Deer. Despite the female identification Kahlo can also play upon and invoke identification with male saints: with St Sebastian (in Wounded Deer), and with Christ (in Broken Column). Kahlo’s repeated experiments in the self-portraits with clothing and accessories such as jewelry, native plants, and animals, shows a preoccupation with defining and embracing her ethnic heritage (European German-Jewish, Mexican, Indian). Writing about Kahlo’s works, Sharyn R. Udall remarks, ‘She is trying on identities, both personal and artistic: from the melancholy aristocrat of her first self-portrait, she seems to be testing an image that speaks of her mixed Euro-American and Indian heritage. She is also concerned with political and national issues about the distinctive identity of Mexico as it emerges from colonialism into independence, and in particular with its identity vis-à-vis its northern neighbor,William Blake paintings the United States. She resists comparisons that rank the two countries by showing th progressive, industrial, wealthy northern country as superior to its poor and ‘primitive’ southern neighbor. Her own allegiance is clear.