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| Benjamin Robert Haydon Personification of the River Ilissos, or Figure of Theseus (one of the Elgin Marbles from the Parthenon, newly arrived in England) 1808 drawing British Museum |
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| Benjamin Robert Haydon Personification of the River Ilissos, or Figure of Theseus (one of the Elgin Marbles from the Parthenon, newly arrived in England) 1808 drawing British Museum |
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| Benjamin Robert Haydon Personification of the River Ilissos, or Figure of Theseus (one of the Elgin Marbles from the Parthenon, newly arrived in England) 1808 drawing British Museum |
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| Benjamin Robert Haydon Personification of the River Ilissos, or Figure of Theseus (one of the Elgin Marbles from the Parthenon, newly arrived in England) 1808 drawing British Museum |
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| Giovanni Antonio da Brescia after Amico Aspertini Hercules carrying the Cretan Bull (after antique relief) ca. 1500-1520 engraving British Museum |
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| attributed to Michel Corneille the Younger Pegasus with Nymphs before 1708 drawing Harvard Art Museums |
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| Michel Dorigny Study for a Satyr before 1665 drawing private collection |
from Sunday Morning
Jove in the clouds had his inhuman birth.
No mother suckled him, no sweet land gave
Large-mannered motions to his mythy mind.
He moved among us, as a muttering king,
Magnificent, would move among his hinds,
Until our blood, commingling, virginal,
With heaven, brought such requital to desire
The very hinds discerned it, in a star.
Shall our blood fail? Or shall it come to be
The blood of paradise? And shall the earth
Seem all of paradise that we shall know?
The sky will be much friendlier then than now,
A part of labor and a part of pain,
And next in glory to enduring love,
Not this dividing and indifferent blue.
* * *
Is there no change of death in paradise?
Does ripe fruit never fall? Or do the boughs
Hang always heavy in that perfect sky,
Unchanging, yet so like our perishing earth,
With rivers like our own that seek for seas
They never find, the same receding shores
That never touch with inarticulate pang?
Why set the pear upon those river banks
Or spice the shores with odors of the plum?
Alas, that they should wear our colors there,
The silken weavings of our afternoons,
And pick the strings of our insipid lutes!
Death is the mother of beauty, mystical,
Within whose burning bosom we devise
Our earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly.
– Wallace Stevens (1915)
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| Annibale Carracci Sacrifice of King Pelias (study for fresco) ca. 1584 drawing Musée du Louvre |
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| Pietro Antonio Novelli Diana visiting the sleeping Endymion before 1804 drawing Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
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| Charles Joseph Natoire Head of a Sea God ca. 1730-40 pastel Art Institute of Chicago |
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| Antonio Tempesta Perseus killing Medusa before 1620 etching Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (Achenbach Foundation) |
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| Jacopo Caraglio after Perino del Vaga Vulcan and Ceres before 1565 engraving Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam |
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| follower of Nicolas Poussin Theseus abandoning Ariadne 17th century drawing British Museum |
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| Jan Saenredam after Hendrik Goltzius Perseus and Andromeda 1601 engraving Royal Collection, Great Britain |