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| Alessandro Allori Birth of the Virgin 1602 oil on panel Cappella della Natività, Basilica di Santo Spirito, Florence |
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| Caravaggio Supper at Emmaus 1605-1606 oil on canvas Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan |
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| Filippo Tarchiani St Dominic in Penitence ca. 1607 oil on canvas Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
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| Ludovico Carracci St Anthony Abbot preaching to the Hermits 1615 oil on canvas Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan |
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| Pier Francesco Mazzucchelli Forge of Vulcan ca. 1600-1626 oil on canvas Museo d'Arte Antica del Castello Sforzesco, Milan |
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| Giovanni Baglione Polyhymnia, Muse of Sacred Poetry 1620 oil on canvas Musée des Beaux-Arts d'Arras |
"Arguments about beauty since Plato are stocked with questions about the proper relation to the beautiful (the irresistibly, enthrallingly beautiful), which is thought to flow from the nature of beauty itself. The perennial tendency to make of beauty itself a binary concept, to split it up into "inner" and "outer," "higher" and "lower" beauty, is the usual way that judgments of the beautiful are colonized by moral judgments. From a Nietzschean (or Wildean) point of view, this may be improper, but it seems to me unavoidable. And the wisdom that becomes available over a deep, lifelong engagement with the aesthetic cannot, I venture to say, be duplicated by any other kind of seriousness. Indeed, the various definitions of beauty come at least as close to a plausible characterization of virtue, and of a fuller humanity, as the attempts to define goodness as such. Beauty is part of the history of idealizing, which is itself part of the history of consolation. But beauty may not always console. The beauty of face and figure torments, subjugates; that beauty is imperious. The beauty that is human, and the beauty that is made (art) – both raise the fantasy of possession. Our model of the disinterested comes from the beauty of nature – a nature that is distant, overarching, unpossessable."
– Susan Sontag, from An Argument About Beauty (2002)
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| Giovanni Baglione Clio, Muse of History 1620 oil on canvas Musée des Beaux-Arts d'Arras |
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| Giovanni Baglione Erato, Muse of Love Poetry 1620 oil on canvas Musée des Beaux-Arts d'Arras |
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| Giovanni Baglione Thalia, Muse of Comedy 1620 oil on canvas Musée des Beaux-Arts d'Arras |
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| Francesco Furini St Catherine of Alexandria ca. 1625-30 oil on canvas Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence |
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| Pietro da Cortona Portrait of Cardinal Giulio Sacchetti ca. 1626-27 oil on canvas Galleria Borghese, Rome |
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| Bernardo Strozzi Portrait of a Knight of Malta ca. 1629 oil on canvas Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan |
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| Felice Ficherelli Tarquin and Lucretia ca. 1635-40 oil on copper Wallace Collection, London |
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| Paolo Domenico Finoglia Triumph of Bacchus ca. 1635-45 oil on canvas Museo del Prado, Madrid |