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| workshop of Bernardo Daddi Virgin and Child ca. 1345-49 tempera on panel Walters Art Museum, Baltimore |
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| Nicolás Francés Fall of the Rebel Angels ca. 1440 tempera on panel Cincinnati Art Museum, Ohio |
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| Nicolás Francés Fall of the Rebel Angels (detail) ca. 1440 tempera on panel Cincinnati Art Museum, Ohio |
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| Hans Memling Head of a Saint before 1494 tempera on paper Musée du Louvre |
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| Jacopo da Valenza The Resurrection ca. 1495-1505 tempera on panel Museo di Castelvecchio, Verona |
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| Jacopo da Valenza The Resurrection (detail) ca. 1495-1505 tempera on panel Museo di Castelvecchio, Verona |
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| Jean Bourdichon St Nicolas (from the Grandes Heures d'Anne de Bretagne) ca. 1503-1508 tempera on vellum Bibliothèque nationale de France |
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| Jean Bourdichon Reliquary containing the Crown of Thorns, borne by Angels (from the Grandes Heures d'Anne de Bretagne) ca. 1503-1508 tempera on vellum Bibliothèque nationale de France |
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| Francesco Granacci Crucifixion Triptych (with the Ascension and the Last Judgment) ca. 1510 tempera on panels Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
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| Albrecht Dürer Portrait of an Elderly Man 1520 tempera on paper, mounted on canvas Musée du Louvre |
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| Giulio Romano Jupiter and Danaë before 1546 tempera on paper (tapestry cartoon) Musée du Louvre |
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| attributed to Fermo Guisoni Battle of Ticinus ca. 1550-59 tempera on paper, mounted on canvas (tapestry cartoon) Musée du Louvre |
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| Anonymous French Artist Louis XIV as a Roman Emperor ca. 1790-1800 tempera on board (copy of lost portrait by Pierre Mignard) Bradford Museums and Galleries, Yorkshire |
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| William Blake Imaginary Portrait of Homer ca. 1800 tempera on canvas Manchester Art Gallery |
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| László Moholy-Nagy Circle Segments 1921 tempera on canvas Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid |
from Falling Water
Driving down to Evanston last week, I suddenly
Remembered driving down that road eight years ago,
So caught up in some story I'd just finished
That I'd missed the way the countryside was changing –
Remembered driving down that road eight years ago,
So caught up in some story I'd just finished
That I'd missed the way the countryside was changing –
How in place of trees there now were office towers
And theme parks, parts of a confusing panoply of
Barns and discount malls transfiguring a landscape
Filled with high, receding clouds and rows of flimsy
Houses in what used to be a field. I thought of
Other people's lives, and how impossible it seemed
To grasp them on the model of my own – as little
Mirrors of infinity – or sense their forms of
Happiness, or in their minor personal upheavals
Feel the sweep of time reduced to human scale
And see its abstract argument made visible.
I though of overarching dreams of plenitude –
How life lacks shape until it's given one by love,
And how each soul is both a kingdom in itself
And part of some incorporating whole that
Feels and has a face and lets it live forever.
All of these seemed true, and cancelled one another,
Leaving just the feeling of an unseen presence
Tracing out the contours of a world erased,
Like music tracing out the contours of the mind –
For life has the form of a winding curve in space
And in its wake the human figure disappears.
Look at our surroundings – where a previous age
Could visualize a landscape we see borders.
Yet I think the underlying vision is the same:
A person positing a world that he can see
And can't contain, and vexed by other people.
Everything is possible; some of it seemed real
Or nearly real, yet in the end it spoke to me alone,
In phrases echoing the isolation of a meager
Ledge above a waterfall, or rolling across a vast,
Expanding plain on which there's always room,
But only room for one. It starts and ends
Inside an ordinary room, while in the interim
Brimming with illusions, filled with commonplace
Delights that make the days go by, with simple
Arguments and fears, and with the nervous
Inkling of some vague, utopian conceit
Transforming both the landscape and our lives,
Until we look around and find ourselves at home,
But in a wholly different world. And even those
Catastrophes that seemed to alter everything
Seem fleeting, grounded in a natural order
All of us are subject to, and ought to celebrate.
– Yet why? That things are temporary doesn't
Render them unreal, unworthy of regretting.
It's not as though the past had never happened:
All those years were real, and their loss was real,
And it is sad – I don't know what else to call it.
I'm glad that both of us seem happy. Yet what
Troubles me is just the way what used to be a world
Turned out, in retrospect, to be a state of mind,
And no more tangible than that. And now it's gone,
And in its place I find the image of a process
Of inexorable decay, or of some great unraveling
That drags the houses forward into emptiness
And backwards into pictures of the intervening days
Love pieced together out of nothing.
– John Koethe (1997)