 |
| Anonymous Dutch painter Lady at her dressing table with a maid ca. 1650-60 oil on canvas Minneapolis Institute of Art |
 |
| William Merritt Chase Portrait of Lydia Field Emmet 1892 oil on canvas Brooklyn Museum |
 |
| Thomas Frye Portrait of Mrs Wardle 1742 oil on canvas Yale Center for British Art |
PYRRHA
What slender youth, bedew'd with liquid odours,
Courts thee on roses in some pleasant cave,
Pyrrha? For whom bind'st thou
In wreaths thy golden hair,
Plain in thy neatness? O how oft shall he
On faith and changed gods complain, and seas
Rough with black winds, and storms
Unwonted shall admire!
Who now enjoys thee credulous, all gold,
Who, always vacant, always amiable,
Hopes thee, of flattering gales
Unmindful! Hapless they
To whom thou, untried, seemst fair. Me in my vowed
Picture, the sacred wall declares to have hung
My dank and dripping weeds
To the stern god of sea.
– the ode Ad Pyrrham by Horace, as translated by John Milton (1608-1674)
 |
| Egon Schiele Kneeling woman in orange-red dress 1910 gouache drawing Leopold Museum, Vienna |
 |
| Robert Peake the Elder Portrait of Frances, Lady Reynell, of West Ogwell, Devon ca. 1595 oil on panel Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide |
 |
| Albert Bloch The Green Domino 1913 oil on canvas Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City |
 |
| Jan Adam Kruseman Portrait of a lady 1829 oil on canvas Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam |
 |
| Simon Vouet St Cecilia ca. 1625-27 oil on canvas Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, Texas |
 |
| Anselm Feuerbach Half-Length portrait of a Roman woman ca. 1862-66 oil on canvas Städelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt |
LA GIOCONDA
"The presence that thus so strangely rose beside the waters is expressive of what in the ways of a thousand years man had come to desire. Hers is the head upon which all 'the ends of the world are come,' and the eyelids are a little weary. It is a beauty wrought out from within upon the flesh, the deposit, little cell by cell, of strange thoughts and fantastic reveries and exquisite passions. Set it for a moment beside one of those white Greek goddesses or beautiful women of antiquity, and how would they be troubled by this beauty, into which the soul with all its maladies has passed? All the thoughts and experiences of the world have etched and moulded there in that which they have of power to refine and make expressive the outward form, the animalism of Greece, the lust of Rome, the reverie of the middle age with its spiritual ambition and imaginative loves, the return of the Pagan world, the sins of the Borgias. She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants; and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary; and all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which it has moulded the changing lineaments and tinged the eyelids and hands."
– Walter Pater, from Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873)
 |
| Frederick Sandys Grace Rose 1866 oil on panel Yale Center for British Art |
 |
| Alexander Roslin Portrait of Comtesse d'Egmont-Pignatelli in Spanish costume 1763 oil on canvas Minneapolis Institute of Art |
 |
| Jean-Étienne Liotard Portrait of Marie-Adelaide de France in Turkish dress 1753 oil on canvas Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence |
 |
| John Hesselius Portrait of Mrs Richard Brown ca. 1760 oil on canvas Smithsonian American Art Museum |
 |
| Kristian Zahrtmann Death of Queen Sophie Amalie 1882 oil on canvas Hirschsprung Collection, Copenhagen |
Queen Katharine:
After my death, I wish no other Herald,
No other speaker of my living Actions,
To keepe mine Honor from Corruption,
But such an honest Chronicler as Griffith.
Whom I most hated Living, thou has made mee
With thy Religious Truth and Modestie,
(Now in his Ashes) Honor: Peace be with him.
Patience, be neere me still, and set me lower.
I have not long to trouble thee. Good Griffith,
Cause the Musitians play me that sad note
I named my Knell; whil'st I sit meditating
On that Celestiall Harmony I go to.
Sad and solemne Musicke
– from Act iv, Scene ii of King Henry the Eighth by William Shakespeare and John Fletcher, first published in 1623