Wednesday, June 14, 2023

Neoclassical Prints (18th & 19th Centuries)

James 'Athenian' Stuart
Statue on the Choragic Monument
of Thrasyllus, Athens

1787
etching and engraving
Royal Academy of Arts, London

James 'Athenian' Stuart
View of the Eastern Front of the Parthenon
(surrounded by modern buildings, soon to be demolished)
1787
etching and engraving 
Royal Academy of Arts, London

Thomas Trotter after Henry Fuseli
Brutus
1791
etching and engraving
(Brutus often invoked, as here, to show
support for the French Revolution) 
Royal Academy of Arts, London

Thomas Banks
The Falling Titan
ca. 1795
etching
(after a marble sculpture by Thomas Banks)
Royal Academy of Arts, London

William Bond after William Hilton
The Falling Titan
1811
engraving
(after a marble sculpture by Thomas Banks)
Royal Academy of Arts, London

James Barry
Pandora
1804-1805
engraving
Art Institute of Chicago

George Stubbs
Human Body - Lateral View
1804-1806
etching
Royal Academy of Arts, London

Tommaso Piroli after John Flaxman
The Impostors
1807
etching
(illustration to Dante's Divine Comedy)
Royal Academy of Arts, London

Tommaso Piroli after John Flaxman
The Giant
1807
etching
(illustration to Dante's Divine Comedy)
Royal Academy of Arts, London

Thomas Baxter
Hercules, Minerva and Jupiter
1810
engraving
Royal Academy of Arts, London

Thomas Baxter
Three Grecian Heads
1810
engraving
Royal Academy of Arts, London

James Birch Sharpe
Écorché Figure
1818
etching
(after antique statue, Paetus and Arria)
Royal Academy of Arts, London

James Birch Sharpe
Écorché Figure
 1818
etching
(after antique statue, Borghese Gladiator)
Royal Academy of Arts, London

Thomas Stothard
Design for the Wellington Shield
1820
etching
Royal Academy of Arts, London

Richard Roffe after G.L. Taylor and Edward Cresy
Capital of Column, Temple of Mars Ultor, Rome
1821
etching
Royal Academy of Arts, London

attributed to Francis Cranmer Penrose
Temple of Zeus Olympia
1851
wood-engraving
(at left, the rope ladder used in the artists' ascent)
Royal Academy of Arts, London

This poem is not addressed to you.
You may come into it briefly,
But no one will find you here, no one.
You will have changed before the poem will.

Even while you sit there, unmovable,
You have begun to vanish. And it does not matter.
The poem will go on without you.
It has the spurious glamor of certain voids.

It is not sad, really, only empty.
Once perhaps it was sad, no one knows why.
It prefers to remember nothing.
Nostalgias were peeled from it long ago.

Your type of beauty has no place here.
Night is the sky over this poem.
It is too black for stars.
And do not look for any illumination.

You neither can nor should understand what it means.
Listen, it comes without guitar,
Neither in rags nor any purple fashion.
And there is nothing in it to comfort you.

Close your eyes, yawn. It will be over soon.
You will forget the poem, but not before
It has forgotten you. And it does not matter.
It has been most beautiful in its erasures.

O bleached mirrors! Oceans of the drowned!
Nor is one silence equal to another.
And it does not matter what you think.
This poem is not addressed to you.

– Donald Justice (1973)