Tuesday, February 11, 2020

Human and/or Divine Figures in Paint (1610-1620)

Domenichino
Venus
ca. 1610-20
oil on canvas
York City Art Gallery

Giovanni Biliverti
St Zenobius revives a Dead Boy
ca. 1610-20
oil on canvas
National Gallery, London

Giovanni Battista Crespi
The Flight into Egypt
ca. 1610-20
oil on canvas
Bristol Museum and Art Gallery

attributed to Leandro Bassano
Portrait of a Young Nobleman
ca. 1610-20
oil on canvas
National Trust, Plas Newydd, Wales

attributed to Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger
Anne of Denmark, consort of King James I
ca. 1612
oil on panel
National Portrait Gallery, London

Of God

Men which seek God by reason, and natural strength (though we do not deny common notions and general impressions of a sovereign power) are like Mariners which voyaged before the invention of the Compass, which were but Costers, and unwillingly left the sight of the land. Such are they which would arrive at God by this world, and contemplate him only in his Creatures, and seeming Demonstration.  Certainly, every Creature shews God, as a glass, but glimmeringly and transitorily, by the frailty both of the receiver and beholder:  Our selves have his Image, as Medals, permanently, and preciously delivered.  But by these meditations we get no further than to know what he doth, not what he is.  But as by the use of the Compass, men safely dispatch Ulysses' dangerous ten years' travel in so many days, and have found out a new world richer than the old, so doth Faith, as soon as our hearts are touched with it, direct and inform us in that great search of the discovery of God's Essence, and the new Jerusalem, which Reason durst not attempt.

– John Donne, from Essays in Divinity (ca. 1611)

Daniel Fröschl
Two Satyrs and a Nymph with Putto
ca. 1613
watercolor on vellum
Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh

William Larkin
Richard Sackville, 3rd Earl of Dorset
1613
oil on panel
Kenwood House, London

William Larkin
Elizabeth Cary née Tanfield
ca. 1614-18
oil on panel
Kenwood House, London

Adriaen van Nieulandt
Diana and her Nymphs
1615
oil on canvas
National Trust, Ham House, London

Peter Paul Rubens
Christ's Charge to Peter
ca. 1616
oil on panel
Wallace Collection, London

Jacob Jordaens
The Temptation of the Magdalen
ca. 1616-17
oil on panel
Art Institute of Chicago

Cornelius Johnson
Martha Temple, Lady Penyston
1619
oil on panel
Yale Center for British Art

Anthony van Dyck
The Deposition
ca. 1619
oil on canvas
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

Diego Velázquez
Two Young Men eating at a Humble Table
ca. 1618-20
oil on canvas
Wellington Collection, Apsley House, London

Guercino
Head of an Old Man
ca. 1619-20
oil on canvas
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford