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| attributed to Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio Head of a Youth wreathed with Oak Leaves before 1516 drawing Musée du Louvre |
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| Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio Portrait of a Youth before 1516 drawing Musée du Louvre |
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| Boccaccio Boccaccino Portrait of a Young Man before 1525 drawing Musée du Louvre |
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| Boccaccio Boccaccino Portrait of a Young Woman before 1525 drawing Musée du Louvre |
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| Cavaliere d'Arpino (Giuseppe Cesari) Self Portrait ca. 1590-95 drawing Musée du Louvre |
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| Lucas Cranach the Elder Portrait Study of a Youth ca. 1510 drawing, with watercolor and gouache Musée du Louvre |
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| Parmigianino Study of an Antique Head ca. 1522-23 drawing Musée du Louvre |
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| Parmigianino Head of a Youth ca. 1530-40 drawing Musée du Louvre |
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| Parmigianino Heads of Two Youths ca. 1524-27 drawing Musée du Louvre |
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| Bartolomeo Passarotti Head of a Young Woman before 1592 drawing Musée du Louvre |
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| Bartolomeo Passarotti Head of a Young Man ca. 1583 drawing Musée du Louvre |
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| Bartolomeo Passarotti Study for the Head of Christ before 1592 drawing Musée du Louvre |
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| Federico Zuccaro Portrait of a Man before 1609 drawing Musée du Louvre |
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| Federico Zuccaro Portrait of a Man before 1609 drawing Musée du Louvre |
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| Jacopo Bassano Portrait of a Young Man 1538 drawing Musée du Louvre |
Translating the Latin
We were inching our way through De Senectute,
a page or half-page at a time. One by one,
in a sequence of our names we never learned to predict,
he called on us to English the Latin we first
had to read aloud. Scanning our scrawls sequestered
in the margins of our page and cribbed from the best
translations we could find, we spoke in the meek
deferential tones befitting our plebeian rank.
("The noblest Roman of them all," our year-book called him.)
Did we ever fool him? We knew that he had heard
our plagiarisms hundreds of times before.
But never once did we guess how deep a game
we all were playing as he listened alike to the worst
and best dissemblers among us. What he heard
must have been that persistent music of old age,
not his, not Cicero's, but ours: a sonata
of the years which only our banal young voices
could compose and which he alone could hear.
How much he could teach us now, trapped inside
our grammar of shrinking sinews! Those subtle inflections,
for instance, to fortify our subjunctive or conditional
moods against unwarranted indicative statements;
those periphrastics to guide us safely around
the things we should have learned, or learned and forgot;
and those inversions of time which we now surmise,
subjects deferred years after the events of verbs
have commandeered their objects, direct and indirect.
But in surviving we have come to feel almost
at ease with the imperfect syntax of our lives.
We no longer have the will to rememorize
the niceties of our conjugations and declensions.
Besides, he is still ahead of us, some fifty
years beyond old age. What he might teach
us now and in what language we cannot imagine.
All he has left with us is our next assignment,
not telling us when it is due or what it requires.
– Ernest Sandeen (1984)