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| Gabriel Max Springtime Reverie 1872 oil on canvas Belvedere Museum, Vienna |
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| Koloman Moser Spring ca. 1913 oil on canvas Leopold Museum, Vienna |
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| Ignaz Stern Allegory of Spring ca. 1723 oil on canvas Museumslandschaft Hessen Kassel |
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| Jacob de Wit Allegory of Spring 1751 oil on canvas (grisaille) Museumslandschaft Hessen Kassel |
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| Zacharias Blyhooft Allegory of Summer 1677 drawing Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen z -Berlin |
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| Francesco Fontebasso Allegory of Summer ca. 1740 drawing Belvedere Museum, Vienna |
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| Édouard Manet Automne (Méry Laurent) 1882 oil on canvas Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nancy |
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| Jakob Gabriel Mollinarolo Allegory of Winter ca. 1755-60 bronze Belvedere Museum, Vienna |
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| Pietro da Cortona (Pietro Berrettini) Four Ages of Man The Golden Age 1637 fresco Palazzo Pitti, Florence |
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| Pietro da Cortona (Pietro Berrettini) Four Ages of Man The Silver Age 1637 fresco Palazzo Pitti, Florence |
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| Pietro da Cortona (Pietro Berrettini) Four Ages of Man The Bronze Age 1641 fresco Palazzo Pitti, Florence |
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| Pietro da Cortona (Pietro Berrettini) Four Ages of Man The Iron Age 1641 fresco Palazzo Pitti, Florence |
-Ages-of-Man-Infancy-1743-oil-on-canvas-Mus%C3%A9e-Granet-Aix-en-Provence.jpg) |
| Michel-François Dandré-Bardon Ages of Man - Infancy 1743 oil on canvas Musée Granet, Aix-en-Provence |
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| Michel-François Dandré-Bardon Ages of Man - Youth 1744 oil on canvas Musée Granet, Aix-en-Provence |
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| Michel-François Dandré-Bardon Ages of Man - Old Age 1744 oil on canvas Musée Granet, Aix-en-Provence |
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| Luc-Olivier Merson Allegory of Time 1896 oil on canvas Musée Carnavalet, Paris |
Agamemnon is about to descend from his carriage and enter the palace when Clytemnestra appears in the doorway: behind her, two women attendants hold between them a folded textile.
Clytemnestra: Men of the city, you assembled Argive elders, I will not be ashamed to speak to you of my feelings of love for my husband: with the passing of time, fear dies away in the human mind. What I will say is not second-hand knowledge, but my own wretched life through all the time that this man was away at Ilium. In the first place, it is a terrible trial for a wife to be sitting alone at home without her man, hearing many dire reports, with first one man coming and then another after him capping his bad news with an even worse disaster to proclaim to the house. And if this man met with as many wounds as was said in the reports that were channelled into our house, he's got more holes in him to count than a net has; while if he'd been killed as often as the stories claimed, he'd have had to have three bodies – a second Geryon – and could boast that he had donned a threefold cloak of earth, having died once in each of his persons. Because of dire reports like these, many a noose hung from above was untied from my neck by others after I had been seized and held by force. That, you will understand, is why our son is not standing here by my side, the holder of our mutual pledges, as he ought to be – Orestes. Don't be surprised by this. He is being brought up by a friend bound to us by hospitality and alliance, Strophius the Phocian, who plainly pointed out to me two potential disasters – the danger you were in at Troy, and the possibility that the clamorous populace, in the absence of a ruler, might hatch a wicked plot – and said it was part of human nature to kick a man a bit more when he was down. In an explanation such as this there can be no deception. Well, in my eyes the gushing fountains of tears have dried up, and there is not a drop left; and I have damaged those eyes by lying late awake, weeping for the beacon-sites set up to signal your return which always remained idle.
– Aeschylus, from Agamemnon (458 BC), translated by Alan H. Sommerstein (2008)