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| Perugino Study of Youth gazing upward ca. 1490-1505 drawing Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
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| Perugino Two Angels ca. 1490-1505 drawing Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
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| Anonymous Italian artist working in Lombardy The Flagellation ca. 1475-1500 drawing Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
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| Raphael Madonna and Child with Infant St John the Baptist ca. 1505-1506 drawing Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
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| Anonymous Italian artist Studies for Figure of a Bearded Saint ca. 1530-50 drawing Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
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| Parmigianino Female Figure in Armor (Minerva or Bellona) ca. 1535-38 drawing Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
Poem
No Minerva was I, coming to the world
Naked, the Gods' Head surely not my father.
Not from Neptune, but from death I won
To cities of tears.
The inner flow of tears on the avenue.
Childhood, golden mirror that gave me myself
Golden, image that I tried to embrace,
Fled before the years' pebble,
Drowned and no nymphs searched the sea.
From the unreasonable to the reasoned tear.
In blood's heydey, or melancholia,
I was given horns and hide, for I
Had seen the virgin huntress happy, nude.
That was my first sight: herself the world,
Geography become flesh.
I the heart. Since that sight
And the animal coming over me,
Days go by in sleep, yet, having still
One good myth, I search the night
For the turner of would-be stone to stone.
– David Sachs (published in Poetry, January 1939)
"David Sachs, maverick from a normal North Side fatherless Jewish family, phoned me after Rosemary, who'd met him at a party, said she had a brother "who wrote poetry." In fact I had even written a book. It was titled (gulp!) The Door to Sorrow's Chamber, combining the styles of Oscar Wilde, Radclyffe Hall, and James T. Farrell in a loose tale of Chicago behavior among the very young and bright and drunk. But I had never encountered a scholarly intellectual of my generation. David Sachs, impudent, of roan pigmentation, and resembling already at sixteen the famous bust of Socrates, was so far beyond me in literary repertory and organized thought that while praising my body he belittled my taste (except in music, which, like most intellectuals, he knew nothing about), giving me an inferiority complex which to some extent is retained still. David was self-assured, bad-mannered, disavowing of his sires, terribly likable, and, like Géorg, something of a pet of my parents, who dubbed him "the redheaded poet." Though not joined to the university as either student or teacher, he had connections there and took me to weekly gatherings of a poetry club, which convened in the Harriet Monroe Library. In the shadow of McKeon's protégés – Paul Goodman, Tom Stauffer, Edouard Roditi, Bill Earls, glib philosophers already in their late twenties – I learned to keep mum about my crush on Amy Lowell ("Christ! What are patterns for?" said the weary seamstress) when Ezra Pound was talked about. . . . Was there nothing David did not expound upon in his incongruous upper-class voice and above-it-all stance ("Don't be dismayed, dear Ned, just because my vocabulary consists of a few hundred more words than yours")? He would even be granted a cameo, as Miss Flora Sachs, in Goodman's first novel, The Grand Piano. But David did not develop as an inventor, nor, after a few years, did he persist. He went to Saint John's College in Annapolis, then to England for a while, them became a star in the philosophy department at Johns Hopkins. His habitual loftiness merging with teacherliness when we were kids was occasionally shattered by susceptibility. Look at this note – the only one I ever had from him – penned in red ink, with its echoing, mannered tone and final twist of Conrad Aiken so in vogue back then. It is honest, hence touching. And isn't the reference to art as "that formal sigh" as apt this evening as it was when David Sachs slipped these words under my door fifty-five years ago?"
Ned – This is the only water to write with in the house. Now, after this time, let me say this: I think your self, or what is you, is beautiful. That your person can still image as uncorrupt a landscape as any. That within you there is possible that formal sigh given to a handful. I doubt that I have it . . .
Believe me your physical presence has little for me. It is that which is not stuff of touch. Which is always wanting to bathe in pure waters. To wash what has been, and what is. Be alone, you will learn yourself. For those waters in your eye, are more than your eye.
– Ned Rorem, from Knowing When To Stop: A Memoir (2013)
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| Girolamo Mazzola Bedoli Putto seated on Frame ca. 1538-40 drawing Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
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| circle of Rosso Fiorentino Studies for a Costume ca. 1540 drawing Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
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| Rosso Fiorentino Figure Studies before 1540 drawing Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
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| circle of Rosso Fiorentino Two Figures in architectural setting ca. 1550 drawing Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
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| Anonymous Italian artist Figure from the back, after a drawing by Michelangelo 16th century drawing Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
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| Daniele da Volterra Study for figure of St Peter ca. 1545 drawing Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
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| Giorgio Vasari First Fruits of the Earth offered to Saturn ca. 1555-56 drawing (study for fresco) Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
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| Taddeo Zuccaro Martyrdom of St Paul ca. 1557-58 drawing Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |