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| Martin Schongauer The Gryphon ca. 1480-90 engraving Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio |
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| Alfred Russell Twentieth-Century Machine 1946 engraving, aquatint and offset-color Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio |
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| Pseudo Pacchia Marcus Curtius leaping into the Abyss ca. 1530 drawing Art Institute of Chicago |
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| Odilon Redon Orpheus ca. 1903-1910 pastel Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio |
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| 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 |
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| Carl Van Vechten Arthur Bryant 1948 gelatin silver print Philadelphia Museum of Art |
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| Charles Ricketts Three-Headed Satyr holding Figure of Athena ca. 1914 lithograph Victoria & Albert Museum, London |
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| Severo da Ravenna Kneeling Satyr supporting the Figure of an Emperor ca. 1500 bronze National Gallery of Art, Washington DC |
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| Anonymous Swiss Workshop Wild Folk and Wild Beasts ca. 1430-70 wool and silk tapestry Victoria & Albert Museum, London |
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| Jacques Stella Five Men pushing a Block of Stone ca. 1640-50 drawing Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
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| Edmund Joseph Sullivan The Imperial Spirit (study for Dewar's Whiskey advertisement) ca. 1923 drawing Morgan Library, New York |
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| Giuseppe Porta (Giuseppe Salviati) Virtue disdaining Blind Fortune ca. 1556 oil on canvas (mounted on ceiling) Biblioteca Marciana, Venice |
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| Giovanni Battista Pittoni Memorial to James, 1st Earl of Stanhope 1726 oil on canvas Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk Virginia |
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| Edvard Munch Bathing Man 1918 oil on canvas National Gallery of Norway, Oslo |
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| John Piper Foliate Heads II 1954 lithograph Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri |
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| 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)