Ancient Egypt Head of the God Amun 1336-1327 BC granodiorite Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
Ancient Greece Head of Athena 200 BC marble Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
Roman Empire Head of a Young Woman AD 120-130 marble Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna |
Michelangelo Buonarroti The Pitti Tondo (detail) 1504-05 marble Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Florence |
attributed to Baccio Bandinelli Colossal Head before 1560 marble Los Angeles County Museum of Art |
Ippolito Buzzi Luisa Deti, mother of Pope Clement VIII ca. 1605 marble Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
Alessandro Algardi Portrait of a Lady ca. 1630-40 terracotta Hermitage, Saint Petersburg |
Michele Fabris Saturn before 1684 marble private collection |
Franz Xaver Messerschmidt Portrait Bust of Gerard van Swieten ca. 1770-72 marble Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna |
Antonio Canova Genius of Death 1789 marble Hermitage, Saint Petersburg |
Johann Heinrich von Dannecker Head with Diadem ca. 1801-1805 terracotta (bozzetto for tomb figure) Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart |
Edward Hodges Baily Bust of George Gordon, Lord Byron ca. 1810-30 marble Government Art Collection, London |
Bertel Thorvaldsen Portrait Bust of Lady Georgiana Bingham ca. 1821-24 marble National Gallery of Art, Washington DC |
Hiram Powers A Country Woman 1838 marble National Gallery of Art, Washington DC |
Gaston Lachaise Portrait of Georgia O'Keeffe 1925-27 alabaster Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
Jacques Lipchitz Portrait of Gertrude Stein 1920 bronze Yale University Art Gallery |
from Eggheads
In the fifties people who were smart
And looked smart were called eggheads.
Adlai Stevenson, who was bald and went to Princeton,
Was the quintessential egghead, and so he lost
To Dwight Eisenhower, the president of Columbia.
Dave Brubeck was an egghead, with his horn-rimmed
Glasses and all those albums of jazz at colleges,
Though on NPR last week he claimed he wasn't smart.
I took piano lessons from his brother Howard
In the Thearle Music Building in San Diego in the fifties,
Which probably would have made me an egghead by contagion
If it hadn't been for Sputnik, which made being smart
Fashionable for a while (as long as you didn't look smart).
* * *
What sent me on this memory trip was the realization
That stupidity was in style again, in style with a vengeance –
Not that it was ever out of style, or confined to politics
("We need more show and less tell," wrote an editor of Poetry
About a poem of mine that he considered too abstract).
– John Koethe (2012)