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| Mario Minniti Ecce Homo ca. 1610 oil on canvas Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna |
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| Lisette Model Promenade des Anglais, Nice ca. 1934 gelatin silver print National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa |
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| Gerald Mofchum Still Life 1965 oil on canvas Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC |
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| Jean-Baptiste Monnoyer Flowers in a Glass Vase ca. 1670-80 oil on canvas Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon |
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| Benedetto Montagna Sacrifice of Abraham ca. 1515 engraving Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna |
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| Adolphe Monticelli Strolling beneath Trees ca. 1855 oil on panel Musée des Beaux-Arts de Reims |
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| Clarence B. Moore La Haine before 1896 platinum print National Museum of American History, Washington DC |
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| Luis de Morales Virgin and Child ca. 1550 oil on panel Museum of Fine Arts, Boston |
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| Abelardo Morell $1 2002 gelatin silver print Whitney Museum of American Art, New York |
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| José Moreno Carbonero Gladiators 1882 oil on canvas Museo de Málaga |
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| Barbara Morgan Doris Humphrey 1938 gelatin silver print National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC |
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| Battista dell'Angolo del Moro Pandora 1557 etching Graphische Sammlung, ETH Zürich |
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| Francis James Mortimer Portrait of Alvin Langdon Coburn 1906 gelatin silver print National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC |
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| John Hamilton Mortimer Edward the Confessor stripping his Mother of her Effects ca. 1763 oil on canvas Huntington Library and Art Museum, San Marino |
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| Justin Mortimer Three Royal Court Theatre Directors (Katie Mitchell, Stephen Daldry, Ian Rickson) 2004 oil on canvas National Portrait Gallery, London |
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| Josef Müller-Brockmann Beethoven 1955 lithograph (concert poster) Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum |
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| Edvard Munch The Sick Girl 1894 drypoint Moderna Museet, Stockholm |
from Minturno, or, On Beauty
(Modeled on Plato's Hippias Major, Minturno is a conversation between the philosopher Antonio Minturno and Geronimo Ruscelli, a colorful courtier and dilettante)
Geronimo Ruscelli: Let's say then that the beautiful is what pleases everyone, just as the good is what everyone desires.
Antonio Minturno: But what kind of pleasure do we mean, that which pleases all the senses, or that which pleases only sight and hearing? For if what pleases taste and touch and smell is beautiful, as Aristotle seems to argue in his Problems and Nifo in his book on beauty, then sweet things will be beautiful by the fact that they are sweet, and bitter things by the fact that they are bitter, and the smell of amber and musk and the smoke of incense will be beautiful.
G.R.: I would certainly have thought so.
A.M.: And possibly it is not a false opinion, if it is understood of those things that are beautiful according to some usage. And yet to be subordinate to usage is a property of useful things, not of things beautiful or pleasing, and we are looking for what is beautiful in itself, without regard to the manner in which it can be used or abused. And because beauty is truly something divine, it seems to me very unfitting to make it subject to the judgment of material senses of taste and touch; indeed, it can barely be judged by the more spiritual senses, sight and hearing, which reserve the full judgment of beauty for the intellect – a judgment exercised in the contemplation of forms which are separate from the mixture and residue, as it were, of matter.