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| Sofonisba Anguissola Portrait of the Artist's Sister, Minerva ca. 1564 oil on canvas Milwaukee Art Museum |
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| George Frederic Watts Portrait of Agathonike Ionides 1880 oil on canvas Victoria & Albert Museum, London |
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| Anonymous Artist working in Britain Portrait of a Noblewoman ca. 1550 oil on panel Minneapolis Institute of Art |
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| attributed to Santi di Tito Portrait of a Young Man ca. 1560-75 oil on panel Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia |
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| Agostino Carracci Portrait of a Boy ca. 1593 oil on canvas Gemäldegalerie, Dresden |
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| Abraham Ragueneau Portrait of a Man 1663 oil on canvas Victoria & Albert Museum, London |
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| Rembrandt Woman holding a Pink 1656 oil on canvas National Gallery of Art, Washington DC |
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| Philippe de Champaigne Marie-Madeleine de Vignerod, duchesse d'Aiguillon (niece of Cardinal Richelieu) ca. 1650 oil on canvas Collection of Franco Maria Ricci, Fontanellato |
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| Aelbert Cuyp Portrait of Anna Blocken 1649 oil on panel Minneapolis Institute of Art |
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| Antonis Mor Portrait of a Gentleman 1569 oil on canvas National Gallery of Art, Washington DC |
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| Henry Raeburn Portrait of Miss Eleanor Urquhart ca. 1793 oil on canvas National Gallery of Art, Washington DC |
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| Thomas Gainsborough Portrait of Frances Susanna, Lady de Dunstanville ca. 1786 oil on canvas National Gallery of Art, Washington DC |
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| Frans Hals Portrait of a Man ca. 1648-50 oil on canvas National Gallery of Art, Washington DC |
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| Christen Købke Portrait of Cecilia Margaret Købke, the Artist's Mother 1829 oil on canvas Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh |
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| Christian Krohg Portrait of Lucy Parr Egeberg 1876 oil on canvas National Gallery of Norway, Oslo |
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| René Magritte The Spirit of Geometry 1937 gouache on paper Tate Gallery |
Prometheus
Summer thunder darkens, and its climbing
Cumulae, disowning our scale in the zenith,
Electrify this music: the evening is falling apart.
Castles-in-air; on earth: green, livid fire.
The radio simmers with static to the strains
Of this mock last-day of nature and of art.
We have lived through apocalypse too long:
Scriabin's dinosaurs! Trombones for the transformation
That arrived by train at the Finland Station,
To bury its hatchet after thirty years in the brain
Of Trotsky. Alexander Nikolayevitch, the events
Were less merciful than your mob of instruments.
Too many drowning voices cram this waveband.
I set Lenin's face by yours –
Yours, the fanatic ego of eccentricity against
Yours, the fanatic ego of eccentricity against
The systematic son of a schools inspector
Tyutchev on desk – for the strong man reads
Poets as the antisemite pleads: 'A Jew was my friend.'
Cymballed firesweeps. Prometheus came down
In more than orchestral flame and Kérensky fled
Before it. The babel of continents gnaws now
And tears at the silk of those harmonies that seemed
So dangerous once. You dreamed an end
Where the rose of the world would out like a close in music.
Population drags the partitions down
And we are a single town of warring suburbs:
I cannot hear such music for its consequence:
Each sense was to have been reborn
Out of a storm of perfumes and light
To a white world, an in-the-beginning.
In the beginning, the strong man reigns:
Trotsky, was it not then you brought yourself
To judgment and to execution, when you forgot
Where terror rules, justice turns arbitrary?
Chromatic Prometheus, myth of fire,
It is history topples you in the zenith.
Blok, too, wrote The Scythians
Who should have known: he who howls
With the whirlwind, with the whirlwind goes down.
In this, was Lenin guiltier than you
When, out of a merciless patience grew
The daily prose such poetry prepares for?
Scriabin, Blok, men of extremes,
History treads out the music of your dreams
Through blood, and cannot close like this
In the perfection of anabasis. It stops. The trees
Continue raining though the rain has ceased
In a cooled world of incessant codas:
Hard edges of the houses press
On the after-music senses, and refuse to burn,
Where an ice-cream van circulates the estate
Playing Greensleeves, and at the city's
Stale new frontier even ugliness
Rules with the cruel mercies of solidities.
– Charles Tomlinson (1968)