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| Benjamin West (England) Venus consoling Cupid stung by a bee ca. 1802 oil on canvas Hermitage, Saint Petersburg |
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| Pierre-Paul Prud'hon (France) Innocence preferring Love to Wealth 1804 oil on canvas Hermitage, Saint Petersburg |
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| Jacques-Louis David (France) Sappho and Phaon 1809 oil on canvas Hermitage, Saint Petersburg |
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| Pierre Guérin (France) Narcissus, Morpheus, and Iris 1811 oil on canvas Hermitage, Saint Petersburg |
"There is nothing more cosmopolitan than Eternity," Baudelaire once wrote, solving with a meteoric flourish some serious questions that were vainly to occupy the minds of many anthropologists of the century to come. Some problems have no answers because they don't need any. Among these, one is that of the clear affinity among the myths of the human species. Baudelaire's view was that these myths should be seen as branches of "a tree that grows everywhere, in all climes, under all suns, spontaneously and without any grafts." If myths are, as Lévi-Strauss once suggested, that which is not lost in translation, one can say that, among alleyways, forests, tents, and caravanserais, those stories have also been the most reliable lingua franca, and maybe the only one used since earliest times, efficiently and without interruption."
– from La Folie Baudelaire by Roberto Calasso, translated by Alastair McEwen (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012)
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| Charles Saligo (Belgium) Self-portrait ca. 1824-26 oil on canvas Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam |
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| August Matthias Hagen (Germany) Sea Bay 1835 oil on canvas Hermitage, Saint Petersburg |
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| Joseph Severn (England) Prayer to the Virgin near the Pantheon, Rome 1839 oil on canvas Hermitage, Saint Petersburg |
In the background of Joseph Severn's depiction of pious Romans praying before a street-side shrine (above) looms the silhouette of the ancient Pantheon, the most impressive building to have survived intact from the ancient world. Clearly visible as features of that silhouette are the outlines of two Christian bell-towers added in the 17th century by Gianlorenzo Bernini and his cronies at the Vatican. These erections were removed about two hundred years after their installation – and just a few years after Severn painted his vision of popular piety. Though successful as an expatriate artist, Joseph Severn is mainly remembered today as the friend who accompanied Keats to Rome in 1820, nursing him there until the poet's death.
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| Jean-Louis-Ernest Meissonier (France) Charlemagne ca. 1840 oil on canvas Hermitage, Saint Petersburg |
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| Samuel Palmer (England) Going home at curfew time 1864 watercolor Victoria & Albert Museum, London |
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| John Singer Sargent (USA) Model standing before stove ca. 1875-80 oil on canvas Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
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| Jean-Paul Laurens (France) Emperor Maximilian in Mexico before Execution 1882 oil on canvas Hermitage, Saint Petersburg |
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| Giovanni Boldini (Italy) The Recital 1884 oil on panel Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts |
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| Max Liebermann (Germany) In the field ca. 1890 pastel Hermitage, Saint Petersburg |
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| Nicolaas van der Waay (Netherlands) Amsterdam orphan girl ca. 1890-1910 oil on canvas Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam |
"We must discourage the fine arts": this celebrated mot of Degas's was also one of his most commendable and clear-sighted. As the end of the century loomed, Degas observed with steadily growing irritation the progressive aestheticization of everything. He felt that the world was on the verge of falling into the hands of a troop of interior decorators. In this he was of one mind with Karl Kraus, who, a few years later, was to declare that by then the world was divided between "those who use urns like chamber pots and those who use chamber pots like urns." The point that tormented him was this: the more widespread aesthetics grew, the less intense it became. The next century was opening up before Degas's eyes. A century in which everything, even massacres, would be subjected to the whim of some art director, while art – especially the ancient art of painting, the one that was most important to him – would become ever more inconsistent or might even dissolve."
– from La Folie Baudelaire by Roberto Calasso, translated by Alastair McEwen (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012)