Carven

Anonymous Christian-Roman Sculptor
Christ healing the Paralytic
AD 400-415
ivory relief (fragment of altarpiece)
Musée du Louvre

Anonymous Norwegian Sculptor
Chess Piece (King)
ca. 1200
walrus ivory
Musée du Louvre

Anonymous French Sculptor
Mourning Virgin from Crucifixion scene
ca. 1225-1250
ivory (originally painted)
Musée du Louvre

Anonymous French Sculptor
Descent from the Cross
ca. 1270-80
ivory (originally painted)
Musée du Louvre

Anonymous German Sculptor
St Sebastian
ca. 1600-1650
ivory (Rothschild bequest)
Musée du Louvre

Jacobus Agnesius
St Sebastian
ca. 1610
ivory
Musée du Louvre

attributed to Francesco Terilli
Christ aux outrages
ca. 1615
ivory
Musée du Louvre

attributed to Jürgen Kriebel
St John the Evangelist from Crucifixion scene
ca. 1620
ivory
Musée du Louvre

Anonymous French Sculptor
Portrait of Cardinal de Retz 
borne by Allegorical Figures
ca. 1654
ivory relief
Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts

Pierre Jaillot
St Sebastian
1662
ivory
Musée du Louvre

Gérard van Opstal
Triton and Nereid
before 1668
ivory relief
Musée du Louvre

Anonymous Chinese Sculptor
Head of a Woman
17th century
ivory relief (partly painted)
Musée du Louvre

Anonymous European Sculptor
The Unrepentant Thief
17th century
ivory (fragment of Crucifixion scene)
Buffalo AKG Art Museum, New York

Anonymous French Sculptor
The Judgment of Paris
17th century
pierced ivory relief
Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts

Anonymous German Sculptor after Gianlorenzo Bernini
Bowl with Marine Deities
(imitation of Triton Fountain)
18th century
ivory
Musée du Louvre

Claude-Antoine Rosset
Portrait of Voltaire
after 1760
ivory bust
Musée du Louvre

Jean-Auguste Barre
Mademoiselle Rachel of the Comédie française
1848
ivory
Musée du Louvre

from Lines

(written at Geneva)

                        Although no flowers or grass

Grow from the corpse of a deceased sound,

Somewhat, methinks, should mark the air around

Its dying place and tomb,

A gentle music, or a pale perfume:

For hath it not a body and a spirit,

A noise and meaning? and, when one doth hear it

Twice born, twice dying, doubly found and lost,

That second self, that echo, is its ghost.

But even the dead are all asleep this time,

And not a grave shakes with the dreams of crime –

The earth is full of chambers for the dead,

And every soul is quiet in his bed;

Some who have seen their bodies moulder away,

Antediluvian minds, most happy they,

Who have no body but the beauteous air,

No body but their minds.

– Thomas Lovell Beddoes (1824)

Swords

Anonymous German Artist
Our Lady of Sorrows
15th century
hand-colored woodcut
Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna

Albrecht Altdorfer
Expulsion from Paradise
ca. 1508
woodcut
Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna

Michael Wolgemut and Wilhelm Pleydenwurff
Nero
1493
hand-colored woodcut
(illustration to the Nuremberg Chronicle) 
Herzog August Bibliothek, Wulfenbüttel

Jacob Matham after Hendrik Goltzius
Personification of Wrath
ca. 1600
engraving
Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel

Ubaldo Gandolfi
Warrior
before 1781
drawing
Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna

Agnolo Gaddi
St Julian
ca. 1393-96
tempera and gold on panel
Alte Pinakothek, Munich

Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Joan of Arc kissing the Sword of Deliverance
1863
oil on canvas
Musée d'Art Moderne et Contemporain de Strasbourg

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres
Sword of Henri IV
1813
drawing
Museum de Fundatie, Zwolle, Netherlands

Anonymous Netherlandish Artist
Judith with the Head of Holofernes
ca. 1540-50
oil on panel
Alte Pinakothek, Munich

René-Marie Castaing
St Martin
ca. 1935
gouache on paper
(study for altarpiece)
Musée des Beaux-Arts de Pau

Juan de Flandes
Beheading of St John the Baptist
ca. 1496-99
oil on panel
Musée d'Art et d'Histoire, Genève

Anonymous Flemish Artist
Beheading of St John the Baptist
ca. 1520-30
oil on panel
(altarpiece fragment)
Musées d'Art et d'Histoire, Genève

Crispijn de Passe the Elder
Lucretia
ca. 1620
engraving
Herzog August Bibliothek, Wulfenbüttel

Anselm Feuerbach
Illustration Design for the Nibelungenlied
1844
drawing
Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Anton Koberger (printer)
Death of King Saul
ca. 1479-83
hand-colored woodcut
(Bible illustration)
Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna

Sebastian Vrancx
Soldiers plundering Peasants
ca. 1620
oil on panel
Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin

Evening Without Angels

                                                                                    the great interests of man; air

                                                                                    and light, the joy of having a

                                                                                    body, the voluptuousness of

                                                                                    looking.

                                                                                                                Mario Rossi

Why seraphim like lutanists arranged

Above the trees? And why the poet as

Eternal chef d'orchestre?

                                          Air is air,

Its vacancy glitters round us everywhere.

Its sounds are not angelic syllables

But our unfashioned spirits realized

More sharply in more furious selves. 

                                          And light

That fosters seraphim and is to them

Coiffeur of haloes, fecund jeweller –

Was the sun concoct for angels or for men?

Sad men made angels of the sun, and of

The moon they made their own attendant ghosts,

Which led them back to angels, after death.

Let this be clear that we are men of sun

And men of day and never of pointed night,

Men that repeat antiquest sounds of air

In an accord of repetitions. Yet,

If we repeat, it is because the wind

Encircling us, speaks always with our speech.

Light, too, encrusts us making visible

The motions of the mind and giving form

To moodiest nothings, as, desire for day

Accomplished in the immensely flashing East,

Desire for rest, in that descending sea

Of dark, which in its very darkening

Is rest and silence spreading into sleep.

. . . Evening, when the measure skips a beat

And then another, one by one, and all

To a seething minor swiftly modulate.

Bare night is best. Bare earth is best. Bare, bare,

Except for our own houses, huddled low,

Beneath the arches and their spangled air,

Beneath the rhapsodies of fire and fire,

Where the voice that is in us makes a true response,

Where the voice that is great within us rises up,

As we stand gazing at the rounded moon. 

– Wallace Stevens (1935)

Lucas Cranach (Elder and Younger)

Lucas Cranach the Elder
Man of Sorrows with the Virgin and St John the Evangelist
ca. 1540
oil on panel
Hamburger Kunsthalle

Lucas Cranach the Elder
Christ at the Column as Man of Sorrows
1515
oil on panel
Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden

Lucas Cranach the Elder
Eve
ca. 1528-30
oil on panel
Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp

Lucas Cranach the Elder
Fall of Man
ca. 1510
woodcut
Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum, Braunschweig

Lucas Cranach the Elder
Crucifixion
ca. 1501
woodcut
(unique impression)
Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Lucas Cranach the Elder
Crucifixion with the Converted Centurion
1536
oil on panel
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

Lucas Cranach the Elder
Risen Christ
1537-38
oil on panel
Bildgalerie von Sanssouci, Potsdam

Lucas Cranach the Elder
St Eustace
ca. 1515-20
oil on panel
(altarpiece fragment)
Liechtenstein Museum, Vienna

Lucas Cranach the Elder
Martyrdom of the Seven Sons of St Felicitas
ca. 1530-35
oil on panel
(outer wings of altarpiece)
Landesmuseum Hannover

Lucas Cranach the Younger
Catherine, Princess of Brunswick-Grubenhagen
ca. 1540-41
tempera on paper
Musée des Beaux-Arts de Reims

Lucas Cranach the Younger
Portrait of a Prince of Saxony
ca. 1540
tempera on paper
Musée des Beaux-Arts de Reims

Lucas Cranach the Younger
Portrait of a Prince
ca. 1540
tempera on paper
Musée des Beaux-Arts de Reims

Lucas Cranach the Younger
Portrait of a Woman
ca. 1565
oil on panel
Alte Pinakothek, Munich

Lucas Cranach the Elder
Albrecht von Brandenburg-Ansbach
ca. 1511-12
drawing
Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna

Lucas Cranach the Elder
Portrait of a Man
1522
oil on panel
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

Lucas Cranach the Elder
Joachim I, Prince of Anhalt-Dessau
1532
oil on panel
Anhaltische Gemäldegalerie, Dessau

The function of representation in cubist paintings is not to inform us about guitars and apples, nor to stimulate our tactile sensations.  It is to narrow down the range of possible interpretations till we are forced to accept the flat pattern with all its tensions.  Even nonobjective art derives some of its meaning from the habits and mental sets we acquired in learning to read representations.  Indeed, we have seen that any three-dimensional shape on the canvas would be illegible or, which is the same, infinitely ambiguous, without some assumptions of probabilities that we must bring to it and test against it.  The painter who wants to wean us from these assumptions has perhaps only one way open to him.  He must try to prevent us from interpreting his marks on the canvas as representations of any kind by compelling us to switch over to that alternative which we have observed in the interpretation of drawings; he must make us read his brushmarks as traces of his gestures and actions.  This, I take it, is what the "action painter" aims at.  He wants to achieve an identification of the beholder with his Platonic frenzy of creation, or rather with his creation of a Platonic frenzy.  It is quite consistent that these painters must counteract all semblance of familiar objects or even of patterns in space.  But few of them appear to realize that they can drive into the desired identification only those who know how to apply the various traditional consistency tests and thereby discover the absence of any meaning except the highly ambiguous meaning of traces.  If this game has a function in our society, it may be that it helps us to "humanize" the intricate and ugly shapes with which industrial civilization surrounds us.  

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

Copper

Jean Fouquet
Self Portrait
ca. 1452-55
enamel on copper
Musée du Louvre

Master K.I.P. (French enameller)
Sacrifice of Noah
ca. 1550
enamel on copper
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Lorenzo Sabatini
Adoration of the Magi
ca. 1555
oil on copper
Museo Nazionale del Palazzo di Venezia, Rome

attributed to Pierre Pénicaud
Animals entering Noah's Ark
ca. 1580
enamel on copper
Musée du Louvre

Plautilla Nelli
St Catherine of Siena
before 1589
oil on copper
Gallerie degli Uffizi, Florence

Palma il Giovane
St Sebastian
ca. 1590
oil on copper
Milwaukee Art Museum, Wisconsin

Adam Elsheimer
Landscape with St Jerome and an Angel
ca. 1598-1610
oil on copper
Accademia Carrara, Bergamo

Annibale Carracci and Innocenzo Tacconi
Pietà with Saints
ca. 1603
oil on copper
(portable altarpiece commissioned by Cardinal Farnese)
Palazzo Barberini, Rome

Cigoli (Lodovico Cardi)
The Flight into Egypt
ca. 1608-10
oil on copper
Gallerie degli Uffizi, Florence

Joachim Wtewael
The Tribute Money
1616
oil on copper
Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts

Jobst Harrich
Christ and the Woman taken in Adultery
1617
oil on copper
Musée du Louvre

Jan Brueghel the Elder
San Pietro Celestino
before 1625
oil on copper
Palazzo Colonna, Rome

Mastelletta (Giovanni Andrea Donducci)
The Deposition
ca. 1630
oil on copper
private collection

Anonymous Lombard Painter after Bernardino Luini
Tobias healing his Father's Blindness
ca. 1630
oil on copper
Museo Poldi Pezzoli, Milan

Antoine Le Nain
Portraits in an Interior
1647
oil on copper
Musée du Louvre

Balthasar Denner
Head of Veiled Woman
1724
oil on copper
Musée du Louvre

William Grimaldi after Joseph Nollekens
Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington
1816
enamel on copper
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

from Ode to the West Wind

If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear;

        If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee;

A wave to pant beneath thy power, and share

        The impulse of thy strength, only less free

Than thou, O uncontrollable! if even

        I were as in my boyhood, and could be

The comrade of thy wanderings over heaven,

        As then, when to outstrip thy skiey speed

Scarce seemed a vision – I would ne'er have striven

        As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need.

– Percy Bysshe Shelley (1819)