Tuesday, June 11, 2024

Encounters Depicted

Anonymous Italian Artist
Portrait of a Couple
ca. 1580-90
oil on canvas
Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio

Cornelis van Haarlem
Amorous Couple and Woman with Songbook
ca. 1594
oil on canvas
Princeton University Art Museum

Master of the Half-Lengths
Rest on the Flight into Egypt
ca. 1540
oil on panel
National Gallery, London

Master of the Saint Bartholomew Altar
Baptism of Christ
ca. 1485-1500
oil on panel
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

Hans Horions
Salome dancing for Herod
ca. 1665
oil on canvas
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Johann Liss
Temptation of Mary Magdalen
ca. 1626
oil on canvas
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Johann Liss
The Cursing of Cain
ca. 1626-27
oil on canvas
Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia

Abraham Bosse
Youth
(from the series Four Ages of Man)
1636
etching
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Cornelis Schut
Head of the Virgin with Dead Christ
ca. 1640
etching
Philadelphia Museum of Art

Raphael Lamar West
Orlando rescuing Oliver from the Lion
ca. 1785
drawing
(study for a painting illustrating Shakespeare's As You Like It)
Morgan Library, New York

Anthony van Dyck
The Mocking of Christ
ca. 1628-30
oil on canvas
Princeton University Art Museum

Cornelis van Poelenburgh
Christ carrying the Cross
ca. 1620-25
oil on copper
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

Jacob Jordaens
Groom bringing a Horse to its Master
(illustration of a proverb)
ca. 1645
gouache on paper
(modello for tapestry)
Musée du Louvre

Peter Paul Rubens
The Meeting of Abraham and Melchizedek
ca. 1626
oil on canvas
(modello for tapestry)
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

Pensionante del Saraceni
Fruit Vendor
ca. 1615-20
oil on canvas
Detroit Institute of Arts

Aelbert Cuyp
Lady and Gentleman on Horseback
ca. 1655
oil on canvas
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

from Collected Poems

Word by word and war by war –
What makes one possible sustains the other too:
The urge to change, the power to deceive,
To fabricate a version of the world
Not as it is, but as someone imagines it to be.
The aim is not to say what happened
But to forge a monument by force, deploying
All the subtlety and weapons of the will
And leaving something broken in its wake: the simple truth
As it appeared in school each day . . . 

                *              *             *

I used to think there was a different way,
A less insistent one, accepting what it finds
Without revising it, without the specious clarity
And authority of art, and its pervasive
Atmosphere of will. But that turned out to be a style too,
A sweeter one perhaps, yet just as artificial in the end.
The point is general, not confined to art: to make
Is to destroy; to act is to replace what would have been
With something signed, that bears a name. When I was a boy
I thought a life just happened, or was there to find.
Wars were aberrations. Poems were another generation's. 
I didn't realize you made it up, you made them up,
And that the self was not an object but an act,
A sequence of decisions bound together by a noun . . .

– John Koethe (2006)