Value

Karl Isakson
Studio Interior
ca. 1918-20
oil on canvas
Moderna Museet, Stockholm

Isaac Israëls
Basket of Flowers
ca. 1925
oil on canvas
Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, Netherlands

Bernardino India
Seated Woman
ca. 1584
drawing
British Museum

Heinrich Max Imhof
Portrait of Marchesa Marianna Florenzi
1833
marble
Neue Pinakothek, Munich

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres
Legs of Angel
(study for painting, Voeu de Louis XIII)
1821
drawing
Cabinet d'Arts Graphiques
des Musées d'Art et d'Histoire, Genève

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres
Figure Studies
(study for painting, Romulus victorious over Acron)
ca. 1812
drawing
Musée Bonnat-Helleu, Bayonne

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres
Figure of the Virgin
(study for painting, Voeu de Louis XIII)
1821
drawing
Cabinet d'Arts Graphiques
des Musées d'Art et d'Histoire, Genève

Jean-Antoine Marie Idrac
Cupid stung by a Bee
1876
bronze
Palais des Beaux-Arts de Lille

Georgios Iakovidis
Académie
ca. 1880
drawing
National Gallery, Athens

Sanja Iveković
From the Work of Lady Rosa of Luxembourg
2001
photomontage
Institut Valencià d'Art Modern

Innocenzo da Imola
Portrait of a Woman
ca. 1520-30
oil on panel
Galleria Borghese, Rome

Augustus John
Study of Lady Ottoline Morrell
1909
watercolor on paper
Manchester Art Gallery

Augustus John
Study of artist Gwen John
ca. 1900
drawing, with added watercolor
Manchester Art Gallery

Augustus John
Portrait of artist Gwen John
1900
drawing
Manchester Art Gallery

Gwen John
The Convalescent
ca. 1923-24
oil on canvas
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

Gwen John
The Letter
1924
oil on canvas
Manchester Art Gallery

It may be taken for granted that art history deserves to be counted among the humanities.  But what is the use of the humanities as such?  Admittedly they are not practical, and admittedly they concern themselves with the past.  Why, it may be asked, should we engage in impractical investigations, and why should we be interested in the past?  The answer to this question is: because we are interested in reality.  . . .  There is nothing less real than the present.  To grasp reality we have to detach ourselves from the present.  Philosophy and mathematics do this by building systems in a medium which is by definition not subject to time.  Natural science and the humanities do it by creating those spatio-temporal structures which I have called the "cosmos of nature" and the "cosmos of culture."  And here we touch upon what is perhaps the most fundamental difference between the humanities and the natural sciences.  Natural science observes the time-bound processes of nature and tries to apprehend the timeless laws according to which they unfold.  Physical observation is only possible where something "happens," that is, where a change occurs or is made to occur by way of experiment.  And it is these changes which are finally symbolized by mathematical formulae.  The humanities, on the other hand, are not faced by the task of arresting what otherwise would slip away, but of enlivening what otherwise would remain dead.  Instead of dealing with temporal phenomena, and causing time to stop, they penetrate into a region where time has stopped of its own accord, and try to reactivate it.  Gazing as they do at those frozen, stationary records of which I have said that they "emerge from the stream of time," the humanities endeavor to capture the processes in the course of which those records were produced and became what they are. 

– Erwin Panofsky, from The History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline (1940)

Rendered

Carlo Innocenzo Carlone
Portrait of the artist's brother Diego Francesco Carlone
ca. 1710
oil on canvas
Gallerie degli Uffizi, Florence

Bernard Picart
Académie
1732
drawing
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

Gaetano Gandolfi
Académie
ca. 1752-55
drawing
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

Hugues Taraval
Académie
before 1785
drawing
Victoria & Albert Museum, London

Alexis Louis Charles Arthur Gouin
Model in Costume
ca. 1855
hand-colored daguerreotype (stereograph)
Princeton University Art Museum

Frederick Sandys
Study of Fanny Eaton
(professional model popular among London artists)
ca. 1860
drawing
British Museum

Edward Poynter
Study for The Painter's Inspiration
1863
drawing (print study)
British Museum

Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot
Woman reading in the Studio
1868
oil on board, mounted on panel
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

Julio González
Woman Dressing
ca. 1905
drawing
Tate Modern, London

Heinrich Kühn
Model Study
ca. 1905
gum bichromate print
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Harold Gilman
Portrait of the artist's Mother writing in bed
ca. 1910
drawing
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

Gwen John
Girl with Bare Shoulders
ca. 1910
oil on canvas
Museum of Modern Art, New York

Milton Bellin
Académie
1933
drawing
Loeb Art Center, Vassar College,
Poughkeepsie, New York

George Hoyningen Huene
Model wearing Golden Gown
ca. 1945
chromogenic transparency
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Jess (Jess Collins)
Model in Studio 15 #2
1950
oil on canvas
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Elizabeth Peyton
Nick (Chateau Marmont, Los Angeles)
2002
oil on canvas
Museum of Modern Art, New York

Kyle Dunn
Studio Still Life
2024
acrylic on panel
Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut

from Fragment on Evil

"I know it is the common opinion that evil prevails very much above good, even amongst mankind, who are the most favoured by nature of all sensible creatures; but still some think they have reason to dispute this popular opinion.  What one may safely pronounce on this head is that if we compare pains and pleasures in their degrees, the former are infinitely superior; there being many pains, and even durable ones, extremely acute; and no pleasure that is at the same time very intense and very durable.  Love betwixt the sexes is, I believe, the only one that has any pretensions to the character of an exquisite and intense pleasure, whether we consider the bodily enjoyment which it affords, or the tenderness and elegance of that friendship which it inspires.  Perhaps men of strong genius may find as high pleasure in study and contemplation.  But what is all this in comparison of those many cruel distempers and violent sorrows to which human life is subject?"

– David Hume (ca. 1740)

Unseeing

Jusepe de Ribera
Youth with Hat-Flaps over Eyes
ca. 1630-40
drawing
Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Markus Raetz
Sleeper
1958
color woodblock print
Cabinet d'Arts Graphiques des Musées d'Art et d'Histoire, Genève

Filippo Parodi
Lucretia
ca. 1685-90
marble
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

Domenico Maggiotto (Domenico Fedeli)
Sleeping Youth
ca. 1760
drawing
Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna

Wilhelm Leibl
Head of Blind Man
ca. 1866-67
oil on canvas
Lenbachhaus, Munich

Anton Kolig
Dream of Happiness (Rudolf Baurecht)
1944
drawing
Leopold Museum, Vienna

Caspar David Friedrich
Youth sleeping on Grave Mound
ca. 1803
woodcut
Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel

Anselm Feuerbach
Resting Nymph
1870
oil on canvas
Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg

François Duchatel
Soeur Juliana van Thulden on her Deathbed
1654
oil on canvas
Musées d'Art et d'Histoire, Genève

Louis Fabritius Dubourg
Académie
ca. 1724
drawing
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Jean-Baptiste Henri Deshays
Sleeping Woman
ca. 1757-58
oil on canvas
Kunsthalle Bremen

Edgar Degas
Scene from the Steeplechase - The Fallen Jockey
1866
drawing
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

Bartolomeo Coriolano after Guido Reni
Sleeping Cupid
ca. 1630
chiaroscuro woodcut
Graphische Sammlung, ETH Zürich

Charles Chaplin
Le Rêve
1857
oil on canvas
Musée des Beaux-Arts de Marseille

Edward Burne-Jones
Sleeping Beauty
1871
watercolor and gouache on vellum
Manchester Art Gallery

Anonymous German Artist
Recumbent Youth
16th century
drawing
Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden

It was a much-debated question at the time of Plato whether the language of words, the names of things, exists by convention or by nature.  Whether there is some real bond between the word "horse" and a horse, or whether it might also be called by any other name.  The question, put in that form, looks to us a little childish.  Most of us are convinced that with the exception of onomatopoeic words as "moo-cow," the names of things are more or less fortuitous labels, noises we have learned to make in order to indicate certain classes of things.  It has been traditional in this context to bring out the arbitrary and conventional nature of language by contrasting the accidental name "horse" or "cheval" with the artist's visual image of a horse.  This, it was thought, is not conventional but a real likeness, a natural sign, or what is also called an "icon."

In Plato's Cratylus, which is devoted to this problem, Socrates constantly makes use of this contrast.  "Could a painting, to revert to our previous comparison, be made like any real thing, if there were not pigments out of which the painting is composed, which were by nature like the objects which the painter's art imitates?  Is that not impossible?"

"Impossible," echoes his victim.  It is one of the moments in Plato's dialogues when one would have liked to have been present to thrust the speaker aside. "O Socrates," I would have said, "were you not trained as a sculptor?"  "I was," he would have admitted.  "And did you find that the stone you used was like the objects you imitated?"  "Not very much, by the dog."  "Or what about the cups from which you drank at the symposium?  Have you not noticed that the old-fashioned ones have black figures on the red burnt clay, while most of your recent pottery uses black for the ground and leaves the natural red of the cup free for the figures?  Are objects then both black and red according to the painter's whim?  But even if you thought of the colored paintings by Polygnotus or Zeuxis, we now know, O Socrates, that they could never hope to match their pigments against the reality of a sunlit landscape.  Yet sunlit landscapes have been painted, and what you considered impossible has happened."     

– E.H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: a Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (Princeton University Press, 1960)

Poses

Gregorio Pagani
St Helena
(study of saint's pose repeated 14 times)
ca. 1592
drawing
British Museum

Bernard Picart
Académie
1721
drawing
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

Hugues Taraval
Life Study
(model posed for foreshortened Crucifixion)
before 1785
drawing
Victoria & Albert Museum, London

Salvino Salvini
Model Study by a Sculptor
ca. 1850
oil on canvas
Museo Nazionale di Palazzo Reale, Pisa

Auguste Belloc
Reclining Model
ca. 1858
albumen silver print
Museum of Modern Art, New York

Paul Cézanne
Académie
ca. 1867
drawing
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

Hermann Heid
Model Study
ca. 1875
albumen silver print
Museum of Modern Art, New York

Anonymous English Photographer
Artist and Model in the Studio
ca. 1890
albumen silver print
Museum of Modern Art, New York

Alphonse Mucha
Model Study
ca. 1899
gelatin silver print
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Charles Despiau
Seated Model
ca. 1900
drawing
Museum of Modern Art, New York

Henri Matisse
Model Study
ca. 1908-1909
drawing
Museum of Modern Art, New York

Constant Puyo
Three Photographers in a Meadow with a Model
1909
platinum print
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

George Bellows
Standing Model
before 1925
drawing
Buffalo AKG Art Museum, New York

George Grosz
Self Portrait with Model
1928
oil on canvas
Museum of Modern Art, New York

PaJaMa (Paul Cadmus, Jared French, Margaret French)
Francis Burton Harrison III, Saint Luke's Place, New York
1945
gelatin silver print
Museum of Modern Art, New York

Anonymous American Photographer
Woman posing in Bathing Suit
1959
gelatin silver print
Loeb Art Center, Vassar College,
Poughkeepsie, New York

Philip Pearlstein
Male Model, Minstrel Marionettes and Unfinished Painting
1994
oil on canvas
Museum of Modern Art, New York

    To crown all, he has scattered through these few pages a multitude of proper names, most of them gorgeous in sound, and each of them carrying its own strange freight of reminiscences and allusions from the unknown depths of the past.  As one reads, an extraordinary procession of persons seems to pass before one's eyes – Moses, Archimedes, Achilles, Job, Hector and Charles the Fifth, Cardan and Alaric, Gordianus, and Pilate, and Homer, and Cambyses, and the Canaanitish woman.  Among them, one visionary figure flits with a mysterious pre-eminence, flickering over every page, like a familiar and ghostly flame.  It is Methuselah; and in Browne's scheme, the remote, almost infinite, and almost ridiculous patriarch is – who can doubt it? – the only possible centre and symbol of all the rest.

– Lytton Strachey on Sir Thomas Browne (1906)