Glazed

Christiaan Johannes Lanooy
Three Vessels
1920
glazed earthenware
Museum de Fundatie, Zwolle, Netherlands

Anonymous German Potter
Tile with Crucifixion Scene
ca. 1560-1600
lead-glazed earthenware stove tile
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

Florentine Imitator of Giovanni della Robbia
Judith and Holofernes
ca. 1800-1850
maiolica
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

Giovanni della Robbia
Virgin and Child with St John the Baptist and St Jerome
ca. 1525
glazed terracotta
Bode Museum, Berlin

Staffordshire Potteries
Dessert Dish
ca. 1755-65
lead-glazed earthenware
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

Anonymous Potter working in Delft
Birdcage
ca. 1700-1730
tin-glazed earthenware
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

Staffordshire Potteries
Medici Venus
ca. 1815-20
lead-glazed earthenware figurine
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

Jean-Baptiste Lemoyne the Younger
Portrait of Louis XV
ca. 1745
lead-glazed earthenware (faience)
Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts

Brislington Pottery (near Bristol)
Posset Pot
1699
tin-glazed earthenware
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

Bow Porcelain Manufactory (London)
Youth as Personification of Autumn
ca. 1765-70
porcelain
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

Patanazzi Family (Urbino)
Inkstand with River God
ca. 1575-1605
maiolica
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

attributed to Domenico da Venezia
Pharmacy Jar
ca. 1560-70
maiolica
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

attributed to Domenico da Venezia
Pharmacy Jar
ca. 1560-70
maiolica
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

Brislington Pottery (near Bristol)
Wash-Basin as Scallop-Shell
1683
tin-glazed earthenware
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

Anonymous British Potter
Game Board
1723
tin-glazed earthenware
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

Anonymous Japanese Potter
Hare
18th century
porcelain
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

When old Fuseli made the famous remark that Constable's landscapes made him call for his greatcoat and umbrella, he showed he understood the kind of truth the master was aiming at.  Not the dry but the humid, not the linear but the atmospheric, not the lasting but the transient.  As Constable himself said in the preface to his published landscapes, to give "one brief moment caught from fleeting time a lasting and sober existence."  Lasting and sober.  We do well to remember these beautiful honest words before we rashly fall in with the view that Constable's finished paintings are less interesting, less artistic than his sketches.

The source of this preference is clear.  We prefer suggestions to representations, we have adjusted our expectations to enjoy the very act of guessing, of projecting.  And we rationalize this preference by fancying that the sketch must be nearer to what the artist saw and to what he felt than the finished work.  I do not deny that artists are human and sometimes spoil their works.  But I consider it a heresy to think that any painting as such records a sense impression or a feeling.  All human communication is through symbols, through the medium of a language, and the more articulate that language the greater the chance for the message to get through.  

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

Preparatory

Edme Bouchardon
La Marne
ca. 1740
terracotta modello for marble sculpture
Musée du Louvre

Johan Tobias Sergel
Le Spartiate Othryades expirant
ca. 1777
terracotta modello for lost plaster (Salon of 1779)
Musée du Louvre

Antonio Canova
Monument to Titian
ca. 1792
painted wood and wax modello
Gallerie dell'Accademia, Venice

Antonio Canova
Funeral Stele of Giovanni Falier
ca. 1805-1808
plaster modello for marble relief
Gallerie dell'Accademia, Venice

Antonio Canova
Creugas
ca. 1796-1801
plaster modello for marble statue
Gallerie dell'Accademia, Venice

Antonio Canova
Socrates rejecting his Family
ca.1793-94
plaster modello for marble relief
Gallerie dell'Accademia, Venice

Antonio Canova
Madame Letizia Bonaparte
ca. 1804-1807
plaster modello for marble statue
Gallerie dell'Accademia, Venice

Antonio Canova
Allegory of Hope
ca. 1806-1808
plaster modello for marble relief
Gallerie dell'Accademia, Venice

Jacob Jordaens
The Ferry
ca. 1630-40
watercolor and gouache on paper (modello for tapestry)
British Museum

Jacob Jordaens
The Falconer
ca. 1630
watercolor and gouache on paper (modello for tapestry)
British Museum

Pierre Julien
Portrait of painter Nicolas Poussin
ca. 1787-88
terracotta modello for marble sculpture
Musée du Louvre

attributed to Jacques Sarazin
Caryatids in Pairs
ca. 1639
terracotta modelli for marble sculptures 
Musée du Louvre

Jean-Baptiste Claude Eugène Guillaume
L'art couronnant la beauté
1857
plaster modello for stone relief surrounding window
Musée du Louvre

François Rude
Le Génie de la patrie, dit la Marseillaise
1834
plaster modello for head of marble statue
Musée du Louvre

Francesco Mosca
Diana and Actaeon
ca. 1550-75
terracotta modello for marble relief
Musée du Louvre

Michelangelo Buonnaroti
River God
ca. 1526-27
wood, clay, wool, tow
(modello for unexecuted Medici tomb sculpture)
Accademia delle Arte del Disegno, Florence

Michelangelo Buonnaroti
River God
ca. 1526-27
wood, clay, wool, tow
(modello for unexecuted Medici tomb sculpture)
Accademia delle Arte del Disegno, Florence

Lines

(written in a blank leaf of the Prometheus Unbound)

Write it in gold – a Spirit of the sun,

An Intellect ablaze with heavenly thoughts,

A Soul with all the dews of pathos shining,

Odorous with love, and sweet to silent woe

With the dark glories of concentrate song,

Was sphered in mortal earth.  Angelic sounds

Alive with panting thoughts sunned the dim world. 

The bright creation of an human heart

Wrought magic in the bosom of mankind.

A flooding summer burst in Poetry;

Of which the crowning sun, the night of beauty,

The dancing showers, the birds whose anthems wild

Note after note unbind the enchanted leaves

Of breaking buds, eve, and the flow of dawn,

Were centred and condensed in his own name

As in a providence – and that was Shelley.

– Thomas Lovell Beddoes (1822)

Divine

Baccio Bandinelli
Mercury
ca. 1512
marble
(brought to France by François I in 1530,
mutilated by revolutionaries in 1793)
Musée du Louvre

Anonymous Italian Sculptor
Mercury with Money Bag
16th century
bronze
(collection of Louis XIV)
Musée du Louvre

Leonardo Grazia (Leonardo da Pistoia)
Hebe
ca. 1535
oil on panel
Palazzo Barberini, Rome

Pierino da Vinci (nephew of Leonardo)
Young River God
ca. 1547-48
marble
Musée du Louvre

Anonymous Italian Sculptor
Bust of Minerva
ca. 1550
bronze
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

attributed to Pierre Pénicaud
Juno
ca. 1580
enamel on copper (Limoges)
Musée du Louvre

Hendrick Goltzius after Polidoro da Caravaggio
Mercury
1592
engraving
Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York

Anonymous Italian Sculptor
Apollo vanquishing Python
ca. 1685-1715
marble
(originally from larger group)
Musée du Louvre

Gobelins Manufactory
Apollo
ca. 1696-97
wool and silk
(woven for Louis XIV after design by Noël Coypel)
Musée du Louvre

attributed to Giuseppe Piamontini
Juno with Peacock
ca. 1700
bronze
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

Nicolas de Largillière
Francesca Turrettini as the Goddess Diana
1721
oil on canvas
Musée d'Art et d'Histoire de Genève

Antonio Canova
Apollo
ca. 1775-76
terracotta
Gallerie dell'Accademia, Venice

Anne Seymour Damer
Portrait of Prince Henry Lubomirski as Bacchus
ca. 1777
marble
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

Christophe Gabriel Allegrain
Diana surprised by Actaeon
1778
marble
(commissioned by Madame du Barry)
Musée du Louvre

Francesco la Marra
Goddess at the Bath
before 1780
drawing
Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna

Francesco Righetti
Bust of Bacchus
ca. 1790
bronze
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

Isabella Bozzolini
Cabinet Miniature of the Goddess Diana
ca. 1810
oil on vellum
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

from The Romance of the Lily

   

    From the utmost tombs of earth,

    The vision-land of death and birth,

        Came a black, malignant power,

            A spectre of the desert deep:

And it is Plague, the spotted fiend, the drunkard of the tomb;

Upon her mildewed temples the thunderbolts of doom

And blight-buds of hell's red fire, like gory wounds in bloom,

            Are twisted for a wreath;

And there's a chalice in her hand, whence bloody flashes gleam,

While struggling snakes with arrowy tongues twist o'er it for a steam,

And its liquor is of Phlegethon and Aetna's wrathful stream,

            And icy dews of death.

– Thomas Lovell Beddoes (1825)