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| Juan de Flandes Temptation of Christ ca. 1500-1504 oil on panel National Gallery of Art, Washington DC |
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| Domenico Campagnola Landscape with St Jerome ca. 1520 drawing Graphische Sammlung, Städel Museum, Frankfurt |
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| workshop of The Master of the Half-Lengths St Christopher carrying the Christ Child ca. 1540 oil on panel National Gallery, London |
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| Nicolas Poussin Danse Pastorale devant un Terme 1628 drawing Musée du Louvre |
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| Rembrandt The Mill ca. 1645-48 oil on canvas National Gallery of Art, Washington DC |
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| Aelbert Cuyp Horsemen and Herdsmen with Cattle ca. 1655-60 oil on canvas National Gallery of Art, Washington DC |
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| Cornelis Huysmans The Hollow Road ca. 1690 oil on canvas Art Institute of Chicago |
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| Jean-Baptiste Oudry The Rat and the Oyster (fable of La Fontaine) 1732 drawing Morgan Library, New York |
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| Jean-Baptiste Pater Réjouissances de Soldats before 1736 oil on canvas Princeton University Art Museum |
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| Hubert Robert Landscape with Steps ca. 1770-80 drawing Los Angeles County Museum of Art |
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| Thomas Gainsborough Landscape with Cattle ca. 1780-90 drawing Milwaukee Art Museum |
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| Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes Classical Landscape with Figures and Sculpture 1788 oil on panel Getty Museum, Los Angeles |
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| Edward Calvert The Brook 1829 wood-engraving Victoria & Albert Museum, London |
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| Thomas Eakins The Biglin Brothers racing 1872 oil on canvas National Gallery of Art, Washington DC |
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| Anonymous British Photographer At the Head of Loch Awe, Scotland ca. 1880 albumen print Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh |
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| Eric Slater Seaford Head, Sussex ca. 1928-37 color woodcut Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (Achenbach Foundation) |
Embassy Architecture
"In 186 B.C. the importation into Rome of the unrestrained worship of this god, identified with the Italian Bacchus or Liber, alarmed the Senate into fearing a threat to public order and taking measures of repression."
No frieze of abandon, goat-thigh, willow. And no
Classical sea. Just grave, husbanded power – like middle age,
Though the tan facing and the brown steel and glass
Glowed in the day, which was pale green, bright green,
Yellow, and marine blue. The building
Made you desire, somehow, to die young. Desire
Dark oak smothering in ivy, and pines
Shredding sunlight in the early damp, the cults
Of dead Bacchus, Antony, Malcolm X.
The state built its face as a blank wall to affirm
No mystery, and not to keep secrets, but because everyone,
Everyone, was inside. To die undoing the world's way,
Said the clean-shaven wall, also is the world's way,
And to deny me becomes mine. Then, its weight fell
Forward, but the turned backs of the dead heroes held it up.
Their strange dying seemed an uncaring seasonal response,
Query, or offering to those brown rectangles:
Flat, the official Gods of the Senate, stones deathless
And bathed unliving in the blood cults, like white villas
That merge, while southern days close, with stone
Cliffs grown redder than tile, sun redder than stone.
– Robert Pinsky (1969)