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| Giovanni Bellini Portrait of a Young Man ca. 1470-80 oil on panel Bode Museum, Berlin |
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| Raphael Portrait of Cardinal Alessandro Farnese (later Pope Paul III) ca. 1512 oil on panel Museo di Capodimonte, Naples |
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| Andrea Solario Christ carrying the Cross 1513 oil on paper, mounted on panel Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nantes |
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| Titian Portrait of Cardinal Alessandro Farnese (grandson of Pope Paul III) ca. 1545-46 oil on canvas Museo di Capodimonte, Naples |
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| Paris Bordone Portrait of a Lady with a Squirrel ca. 1550 oil on canvas Deutsche Barockgalerie, Augsburg |
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| Domenico Tintoretto Portrait of a Procurator of San Marco ca. 1600 oil on canvas Staatsgalerie Stuttgart |
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| Peter Paul Rubens Christ Triumphant over Sin and Death ca. 1615-22 oil on canvas Liechtenstein Museum, Vienna |
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| Marcantonio Franceschini Death of Adonis ca. 1692-98 oil on canvas Liechtenstein Museum, Vienna |
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| Jean-Étienne Liotard Portrait of Pierre Favre at age 85 (depicted by 77-year-old Liotard) 1780 pastel on paper Cabinet d'Arts Graphiques des Musées d'Art et d'Histoire, Genève |
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| Thomas Gainsborough Portrait of Thomas Hibbert 1785 oil on canvas Neue Pinakothek, Munich |
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| Wilhelm Schadow Portrait of Maria Potocka in Renaissance Dress ca. 1820-30 oil on panel National Museum, Warsaw |
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| Karl Christian Aubel Portrait of Franziska Schier ca. 1835 oil on canvas Museumslandschaft Hessen Kassel |
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| Achille Devéria Man in Masquerade Costume ca. 1840 oil on canvas Musée des Beaux-Arts de Béziers |
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| Theodor Schindler Peasant in a Red Vest ca. 1900 oil and resin on canvas Von der Heydt Museum, Wuppertal |
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| Kasimir Malevich Portrait of a Woman ca. 1932-33 oil on canvas State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow |
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| Maurice Marinot Florence at the Piano 1936 oil on cardboard Musée des Beaux-Arts de Pau |
For this was a kind of sickness which far surmounted all expression of words and both exceeded human nature in the cruelty wherewith it handled each one and appeared also otherwise to be none of those diseases that are bred amongst us, and that especially by this. For all, both birds and beasts, that use to feed on human flesh, though many men lay abroad unburied, either came not at them or tasting perished. An argument whereof as touching the birds is the manifest defect of such fowl, which were not then seen, neither about the carcases or anywhere else. But by the dogs, because they are familiar with men, this effect was seen much clearer.
So that this disease (to pass over many strange particulars of the accidents that some had differently from others) was in general such as I have shown, and for other usual sicknesses at that time no man was troubled with any. Now they died some for want of attendance and some again with all the care and physic that could be used. Nor was there any to say certain medicine that applied must have helped them; for if it did good to one, it did harm to another. Nor any difference of body, for strength or weakness, that was able to resist it; but it carried all away, what physic soever was administered. But the greatest misery of all was the dejection of mind in such as found themselves beginning to be sick (for they grew presently desperate and gave themselves over without making any resistance), as also their dying thus like sheep, infected by mutual visitation, for the greatest mortality proceeded that way. For if men forebore to visit them for fear, then they died forlorn; whereby many families became empty for want of such as could take care of them. If they forebore not, then they died themselves, and principally the honestest men. For out of shame they would not spare themselves but went in unto their friends, especially after it was come to this pass that even their domestics, wearied with the lamentations of them that died and overcome with the greatness of the calamity, were no longer moved therewith. But those that were recovered had much compassion both on them that died and on them that lay sick, as having both known the misery themselves and now no more subject to the danger. For this disease never took any man the second time so as to be mortal. And these men were both by others counted happy, and they also themselves, through excess of present joy, conceived a kind of light hope never to die of any other sickness hereafter.
– from The Peloponnesian War as written by Thucydides (5th century BC) and translated by Thomas Hobbes (1628) and edited by David Grene (1959)