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| Pomponio Amalteo The Judgment of Solomon ca. 1534-35 drawing (study for fresco) Musée du Louvre |
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| Cavaliere d'Arpino (Giuseppe Cesari) David and Goliath ca. 1591-93 drawing Musée du Louvre |
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| Cavaliere d'Arpino (Giuseppe Cesari) David Victorious ca. 1602 drawing (study for fresco) Musée du Louvre |
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| Daniele da Volterra Elijah in the Desert ca. 1545 oil on canvas private collection |
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| Correggio (Antonio Allegri) Eve offering the Apple ca. 1526-28 drawing (study for cupola fresco, Parma Cathedral) Musée du Louvre |
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| Girolamo Macchietti Adam and Eve before 1592 drawing Musée du Louvre |
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| Michelangelo Buonarroti after Masaccio Expulsion of Adam and Eve before 1564 drawing Musée du Louvre |
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| workshop of Andrea Mantegna The Judgment of Solomon ca. 1500 drawing Musée du Louvre |
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| Girolamo Mazzola Bedoli Kneeling Prophet ca. 1535 drawing (study for fresco) Musée du Louvre |
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| Donatello David ca. 1435-40 bronze Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Florence |
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| Jan Massys Susanna and the Elders 1567 oil on panel Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts, Brussels |
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| Cesare Nebbia Gideon holding the Fleece soaked with Dew ca. 1575 drawing Musée du Louvre |
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| attributed to Bartolomeo Passarotti after Michelangelo Buonarroti Head of Moses before 1592 drawing Musée du Louvre |
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| Polidoro da Caravaggio The Deluge ca. 1524-26 drawing Musée du Louvre |
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| Peter Paul Rubens after Michelangelo Buonarroti Figure of Haman from the Sistine Ceiling ca. 1601-1608 drawing Musée du Louvre |
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| Gregorio Preti Sacrifice of Isaac before 1672 oil on canvas Musée Fesch, Ajaccio, Corsica |
From the Righteous Man Even the Wild Beasts Run Away
O take me to the sullen flats
Where I may linger through the day
Appeased, though riven by each sense,
And gather to a certitude.
There I belong. Only today
A much-feared wolf retreated at
My scholar's eye: the temperate man
Admits no hunger not his own.
(Send him the hard beatitude
Of one sun in the place-locked sky.)
Ample journey if the soul
Flung what it took and could not help
– That going, brimming, everywhere –
To lighten in a sudden small
And lucid elementary globe,
Improbable, unstemmed, at rest,
And white on who receives its gaze.
(In that new land where the old trees
Are shattered to an unmeant shade,
I'd be imposed upon by things.)
Until each falling look obeyed
Line that wore to an edge. How close
These solemn feintings into sight,
How proper to the exile of
Large simulacra: so the reign
Of objects sorted one by one,
The mountain at horizon-lip,
Aspens divulging endlessly.
(Discreet yet lively in all touch
Who shall dare to settle here?)
I'd lean to rubbled things that make
Below the harvest they survive
A clarifying signature,
Rapt and unwelcome. Quartz maybe;
Obsidian that burned to live
Unsorrowing, conditional;
Or else some stone just isolate.
(The steady hills call out a name.
Over and over they must speak
The water's cadences alone.)
– David Bromwich (1976)