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| Giovanni Antonio Fasolo Angels in flight before 1572 drawing Teylers Museum, Haarlem |
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| Hendrik Goltzius after Polidoro da Caravaggio Frieze of putti attending an altar 1590-91 drawing Teylers Museum, Haarlem |
'Influence' is a curse of art criticism primarily because of its wrong-headed grammatical prejudice about who is the agent and who the patient: it seems to reverse the active/passive relation which the historical actor experiences and the inferential beholder will wish to take into account. If one says that X influenced Y it does seem that one is saying that X did something to Y rather than that Y did something to X. But in the consideration of good pictures and painters the second is always the more lively reality. It is very strange that a term with such an incongruous astral background has come to play such a role, because it is right against the real energy of the lexicon. If we think of Y rather than X as the agent, the vocabulary is much richer and more attractively diversified: draw on, resort to, avail oneself of, appropriate from, have recourse to, adapt, misunderstand, refer to, pick up, take on, engage with, react to, quote, differentiate oneself from, assimilate oneself to, assimilate, align oneself with, copy, address, paraphrase, absorb, make a variation on, revive, continue, remodel, ape, emulate, travesty, parody, extract from, distort, attend to, resist, simplify, reconstitute, elaborate on, develop, face up to, master, subvert, perpetuate, reduce, promote, respond to, transform, tackle . . . – everyone will be able to think of others. Most of these relations just cannot be stated the other way round – in terms of X acting on Y rather than Y acting on X. To think in terms of influence blunts thought by impoverishing the means of differentiation.
– Michael Baxandall, from Patterns of Intention: on the historical explanation of pictures (Yale University Press, 1985)
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| Anonymous artist working in Rome Death of Clytemnestra ca. 1525-75 drawing Teylers Museum, Haarlem |
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| Annibale Carracci Landscape ca. 1590-1600 drawing Teylers Museum, Haarlem |
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| Federico Zuccaro Moses striking the rock before 1609 drawing Teylers Museum, Haarlem |
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| Hercules Seghers Still-life with books ca. 1615-30 etching Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam |
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| Nicolas Poussin Triumph of Bacchus and Ariadne ca. 1627 drawing (after relief sculpture) Royal Collection, Windsor |
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| Salvator Rosa Heads of soldiers with helmets ca. 1645-50 drawing Teylers Museum, Haarlem |
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| Giacinto Gimignani Four seated women in classical dress before 1680 drawing British Museum |
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| follower of Johann Paul Schor Design for console table ca. 1660-90 drawing Royal Collection, Windsor |
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| attributed to Alessandro Allori Study of crawling male nude ca. 1552 drawing Royal Collection, Windsor |
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| Andrea Camassei God the Father with Heavenly Host 1642 engraving British Museum |
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| Alessandro Tiarini God the Father before 1668 drawing Prado, Madrid |
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| Claes-Jansz. Visscher Design for Title-page ca. 1641 drawing Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam |