Thursday, May 23, 2024

Arresting Compositions - III

Martin Schongauer
The Gryphon
ca. 1480-90
engraving
Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio

Alfred Russell
Twentieth-Century Machine
1946
engraving, aquatint and offset-color
Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio

Pseudo Pacchia
Marcus Curtius leaping into the Abyss
ca. 1530
drawing
Art Institute of Chicago

Odilon Redon
Orpheus
ca. 1903-1910
pastel
Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio

Louis Vallée
Silvio with the wounded Dorinda
(scene from Il Pastor Fido by Giovanni Battista Guarini)
ca. 1651
oil on canvas
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

Carl Van Vechten
Arthur Bryant
1948
gelatin silver print
Philadelphia Museum of Art

Charles Ricketts
Three-Headed Satyr holding Figure of Athena
ca. 1914
lithograph
Victoria & Albert Museum, London

Severo da Ravenna
Kneeling Satyr
supporting the Figure of an Emperor

ca. 1500
bronze
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

Anonymous Swiss Workshop
Wild Folk and Wild Beasts
ca. 1430-70
wool and silk tapestry
Victoria & Albert Museum, London

Jacques Stella
Five Men pushing a Block of Stone
ca. 1640-50
drawing
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Edmund Joseph Sullivan
The Imperial Spirit
(study for Dewar's Whiskey advertisement)
ca. 1923
drawing
Morgan Library, New York

Giuseppe Porta (Giuseppe Salviati)
Virtue disdaining Blind Fortune
ca. 1556
oil on canvas
(mounted on ceiling)
Biblioteca Marciana, Venice

Giovanni Battista Pittoni
Memorial to James, 1st Earl of Stanhope
1726
oil on canvas
Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk Virginia

Edvard Munch
Bathing Man
1918
oil on canvas
National Gallery of Norway, Oslo

John Piper
Foliate Heads II
1954
lithograph
Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri

Pietro Antonio Prisco
Grotesque Motif with Dolphin Head
1617
engraving
Victoria & Albert Museum, London

Pietro Corsi served at the Vatican as a composer of Latin orations and panegyric poetry under a succession of Renaissance Popes beginning with Julius II Della Rovere (reigned 1503-1513), the war-loving pontiff who commissioned the Sistine Chapel ceiling from Michelangelo.  Still in service under Clement VII Medici (reigned 1523-1534), Corsi had the bad luck to be present when Rome was sacked by a multinational assemblage of mercenary troops employed by the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V in 1527.  Corsi's Virgilian poem, Romae urbis excidium, reports that the very corpse of his original patron, Pope Julius, was no longer reverenced nor even safe from violation –

"Entry was made even into graves and rich tombs, and the diamond ring and emeralds were wrenched from fingers. Who could take such liberties with you, Julius (not to refer to the tombs that were indiscriminately unsealed), greatest of the popes and best father of fathers?  You, whom the Thracian hero and every region of the earth feared, and to whom, in your lifetime, every foreign nation ceded control of Italy, having admitted that the strength of men is inferior to God?  From you the unpacified Iberian has not feared to despoil the right hand of its signet-ring after you were buried."

– quoted by Kenneth Gouwens in Remembering the Renaissance: Humanist Narratives of the Sack of Rome (Brill, 1998)