Tuesday, February 20, 2024

Visual Relics (1800-1825)

Caspar David Friedrich
Woman with Raven at the Abyss
1803
woodcut
Milwaukee Art Museum

Pierre La Mésangère (publisher)
La Dansomanie
ca. 1804
hand-colored etching
British Museum

Henry Fuseli
Hercules killing the Mares of Diomedes
ca. 1805
drawing
Art Institute of Chicago

Henry Fuseli
The Slaying of Red Comyn
by Robert the Bruce

ca. 1810
drawing
Art Institute of Chicago

Edward Francis Burney
Pamphilia
(copy or imitation of antique gem)
ca. 1810
drawing, with watercolor
Yale Center for British Art

Edward Francis Burney
Bacchanalia
ca. 1810
drawing
Yale Center for British Art

Bartolomeo Pinelli
Cleopatra and Servants lowering Mark Antony from Window
1819
etching
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Anonymous British Printmaker
An Exquisite Day
(fashion plate)
1820
hand-colored etching and aquatint
Minneapolis Institute of Art

Thomas Stothard
The Dance
ca. 1820
oil on panel
Yale Center for British Art

William Blake
Menalcus watching Women Dancing
(illustration to Pastorals of Virgil)
1821
wood-engraving
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

William Blake
The Fire of God is Fallen from Heaven
(illustration to the Book of Job)
1825
engraving
Milwaukee Art Museum

Raphaelle Peale
Still Life with Fruit, Cakes and Wine
1821
oil on panel
Minneapolis Institute of Art

Jean-Charles-Joseph Rémond
Italian Landscape with a View of a Harbor
ca. 1821-25
oil on paper, mounted on canvas
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

Jean-Charles-Joseph Rémond
Entrance to the Grotto of Posillipo
ca. 1822
oil on paper, mounted on canvas
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Jean-Charles-Joseph Rémond
View of Tivoli from a Grotto
1823
oil on canvas
private collection

William Bonnell
Portrait of J. Ellis Bonham
1825
oil on panel
Art Institute of Chicago

Turnus who had outstripped his tardy column,
with twenty chosen horsemen after him,
comes first upon the city, unobserved.
He is mounted on a piebald Thracian stallion,
his golden helmet has a crimson crest:
"Young men, who will be first to face these Trojans
together with me? Look!" he cries and casts
his javelin high in the air. The fight
begins. Bold Turnus rides across the fields. 
His comrades take his shout up, follow him
with horrid din; they marvel at the coward
hearts of the Teucrians, at how they shun
the level plain and will not fight but hug
their camp. Fantastic Turnus scans the walls;
he rides from this side back to that, seeking
an entrance where there is none. Even as
a wolf who waits outside the full sheepfold
will howl beside the pens at midnight, facing
both wind and storm; beneath their dams the sheltered 
lambs keep bleating; fierce and desperate
with rage, the wolf is wild against his absent
prey; after such long famine now the frenzy
for food, his dry and bloodless jaws torment him:
just so, as he surveys the wall and camp,
is Turnus' anger kindled; indignation
is hot in his hard bones.

– Turnus attacks the new-built Trojan city, from Book IX of Virgil's Aeneid, translated by Allen Mandelbaum (1971)