Friday, December 31, 2021

Painted Figure Studies (Nineteenth Century)

Giulio Bargellini
Ulysses
ca. 1895
oil on canvas (sketch)
private collection

Viscardo Carton
Académie
ca. 1883-86
oil on canvas
Galleria d'Arte Moderna Achille Forti, Verona

Angelo Dall'Oca Bianca
Académie
1876
oil on canvas
Galleria d'Arte Moderna Achille Forti, Verona

Annunziato Vitrioli
Académie
ca. 1850-70
oil on canvas
Pinacoteca Civica di Reggio Calabria

Hippolyte Flandrin
Youth by the Sea
1836
oil on canvas
Musée du Louvre

Théodore Géricault
Shipwreck Survivor (detail)
ca. 1817-18
oil on canvas
National Gallery, London

Pieter Christoffel Wonder
Personification of Time
ca. 1810
oil on canvas
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Pierre-Paul Prud'hon
Young God Zephyr dropping into a Pool
ca. 1814
oil on canvas
Musée du Louvre

Jacques-Louis David
Cupid and Psyche (detail)
1817
oil on canvas
Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio

François-Édouard Picot
Cupid and Psyche (detail)
1817
oil on canvas
Musée du Louvre

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot
St Sebastian
ca. 1850-55
oil on canvas
Musée du Louvre

Edward Burne-Jones
The Wheel of Fortune (detail)
1883
oil on canvas
Musée d'Orsay, Paris

Edward Burne-Jones
The Wheel of Fortune (detail)
1883
oil on canvas
Musée d'Orsay, Paris

William-Adolphe Bouguereau
Dante and Virgil in Hell
with Capocchio and Gianni Schicchi

1850
oil on canvas
Musée d'Orsay, Paris

William-Adolphe Bouguereau
Dante and Virgil in Hell
with Capocchio and Gianni Schicchi
 (detail)
1850
oil on canvas
Musée d'Orsay, Paris

from To the One Who is Reading Me

You are invulnerable. Didn't they deliver
(those forces that control your destiny)
the certainty of dust? Couldn't it be
your irreversible time is that river
in whose bright mirror Heraclitus read
his brevity? A marble slab is saved
for you, one you won't read, already graved
with city, epitaph, dates of the dead.
And other men are also dreams of time,
not hardened bronze, purified gold. They're dust
like you . . . 

– Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986), translated by Tony Barnstone (2012)