Monday, May 13, 2024

Selected Sinuosities - I

Nicolai Abildgaard
Adrastos slays himself at the Tomb of Atys
(from the story of King Croesus, as told by Herodotus)
ca. 1774-75
drawing
(study for painting)
Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen

Nicolai Abildgaard after Michelangelo
Figure from Sistine Chapel Last Judgment
1774
oil on canvas
Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen

Jean-Robert Ango
Ascending Figure
ca. 1759-70
drawing
Cooper-Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Anonymous Dutch Artist after Jean Lepautre
Laocoön Group
ca. 1688-98
color etching, printed à la poupée
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Jean Arp
Doll without Head
1964
color woodblock print
Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio

Jacques Coelemans after Valentin de Boulogne
St Sebastian bound to a Tree
before 1735
engraving
Gemäldegalerie, Dresden

Richard Cosway
Venus and Mars
ca. 1790
drawing
Yale Center for British Art

Giovanni Battista Crespi (il Cerano)
Baptism of Christ
1601
oil on canvas
Städel Museum, Frankfurt

Arthur Crowquill
Cover Design for Pictures of Life
at Home and Abroad
by Albert Smith

ca. 1850-60
drawing, with watercolor
Morgan Library, New York

Jacques-Louis David
Distraught Woman
ca. 1775-80
drawing
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

Robert Delaunay
Political Drama
1914
oil paint and collage on cardboard
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

Phyllis Dolton
Design for Ballet Costume
ca. 1935
drawing, with watercolor
Victoria & Albert Museum, London

Henry Fuseli
River God Skamandros
shielding Trojan Warriors from Achilles

(illustration to The Iliad)
c1790-
drawing-
Morgan Library, New York

Giambologna
River God
ca. 1580
terracotta modello
Victoria & Albert Museum, London

Corrado Giaquinto
Triumph of Galatea
1733
oil on canvas
Milwaukee Art Museum

Luca Giordano
Bacchus and Ariadne
(Ariadne's pose derived from Michelangelo's tomb figures, Night and Day)
ca. 1685-86
oil on canvas
Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia

Adam

Adam, on such a morning, named the beasts:
     It was before the sin. It is again.
An openwork world of lights and ledges
     Stretches to the eyes' lip its cup:
Flower-maned beasts, beasts of the cloud,
     Beasts of the unseen, green beasts
Crowd forward to be named. Beasts of the qualities
     Claim them: sinuous, pungent, swift:
We tell them over, surround them
     In a world of sounds, and they are heard
Not drowned in them; we lay a hand
     Along the snakeshead, take up
The nameless muzzle, to assign its vocable
     And meaning. Are we the lords or limits
Of this teeming horde? We bring
     To a kind of birth all we can name
And, named, it echoes in us our being.
     Adam, on such a morning, knew
The perpetuity of Eden, drew from the words
     Of that long naming, his sense of its continuance
And of its source – beyond the curse of the bitten apple – 
     Murmuring in wordless words: 'When you deny
The virtue of this place, then you
     Will blame the wind or the wide air,
Whatever cannot be mastered with a name,
     Mouther and unmaker, madman, Adam.'

– Charles Tomlinson (1968)