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| Louis Chéron Classical Warriors under Shields before 1725 drawing British Museum |
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| Gaspare Diziani Roman Cavalry Battle before 1767 drawing British Museum |
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| Johann Rudolf Holzhalb Lucretia ca. 1780 etching and engraving Graphische Sammlung, ETH Zürich |
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| Simon Fokke Classical Soldiers burning their Camp before 1784 etching Philadelphia Museum of Art |
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| Giovanni Battista Cipriani Youth at Altar with Libation before 1785 drawing British Museum |
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| Pietro Fancelli Birth of Asclepius ca. 1795 drawing Rhode Island School of Design, Providence |
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| Johann Heinrich Lips Woman with Lyre ca. 1797 drawing British Museum |
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| Jean-Jacques François Lebarbier Hippolytus departing from Troizen 1798 drawing Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna |
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| Joseph Anton Koch Les Argonautes 1799 engraving (portfolio of illustrations) British Museum |
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| Étienne-Barthélemy Garnier The Minyades with the dead Hippasus ca. 1800 drawing private collection (sold by Nicolas Schwed, Paris, 2022) |
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| Carl Wilhelm Kolbe the Elder Mounted Antique Couple ca. 1800-1810 etching British Museum |
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| Louis Lafitte Hercules crowned with Victory over Antaeus ca. 1810-1812 drawing (design for medallion) British Museum |
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| Sigmund Ferdinand von Perger Bellerophon and Pegasus slaying a Lion 1809 drawing Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna |
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| Alfred Edward Chalon Thyrsis in Landscape 1809 drawing (illustration to Milton's Comus) British Museum |
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| Samuel De Wilde Daniel Egerton as Clytus in The Rival Queens by Nathaniel Lee 1816 watercolor on paper British Museum |
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| Bartolomeo Pinelli Mercury protecting Paris in Battle 1827 drawing British Museum |
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| Edmond Aimé Florentin Geffroy Electra in Oreste ca. 1840 hand-colored engraving Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum |
from A Letter to a Friend upon the Occasion of the Death of his Intimate Friend
His willingness to leave this World about that Age when most Men think they may best enjoy it, tho paradoxical unto worldly Ears, was not strange unto mine, who have so often observed, that many, the old, oft stick fast unto the World, and seem to be drawn like Cacus's Oxen, backward with great struggling and reluctancy unto the Grave. The long habit of Living makes meer Men more hardly to part with Life, and all to be nothing, but what is to come. To live at the rate of the old World, when some could scarce remember themselves young, may afford no better digested Death than a more moderate period. Many would have thought it an Happiness to have had their lot of Life in some notable Conjunctures of Ages past; but the uncertainty of future Times hath tempted few to make a part in Ages to come. And surely he that hath taken the true Altitude of Things, and rightly calculated the degenerate state of this Age, is not like to envy those that shall live in the next, much less three or four hundred Years hence, when no Man can comfortably imagine what Face this World will carry: and therefore since every Age makes a step unto the end of all things, and the Scripture affords so hard a Character of the Last Times; quiet Minds will be content with their Generations, and rather bless Ages past than be ambitious of those to come.
– Sir Thomas Browne (1656)
Browne, writing in the middle of the seventeenth century, continued to believe what nearly all educated Europeans of the past thousand years had believed – that the world they lived in had been in continuous and ongoing decline since Classical and Biblical times. The future would necessarily be worse than the present, and was only to be dreaded. This view would soon itself go extinct – once the novelty of Capitalism had generated an equally novel faith in Progress.