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| Villiers Huët Madame Catalani (Angelica Catalani, opera singer) 1807 hand-colored stipple-engraving Victoria & Albert Museum, London |
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| Louise Cochelet The Palais Royale at Piombières 1814 drawing Morgan Library, New York |
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| Benjamin Robert Haydon Study for Christ's Entry into Jerusalem ca. 1815 drawing Yale Center for British Art |
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| John Linnell Ann Law, 1st Lady Ellenborough ca. 1821 watercolor miniature on ivory Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio |
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| Alexandre Dubois-Drahonet Frances Anne Vane, Marchioness of Londonderry 1831 oil on canvas Victoria & Albert Museum, London |
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| Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg View through a Doorway to Hastening Figures 1845 oil on canvas Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen |
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| Henry Shaw after Isaac Oliver Rainbow Portrait of Elizabeth I at Hatfield ca. 1850 hand-colored aquatint Royal Collection, Great Britain |
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| Arthur Crowquill Cover Design for Precaution by James Fenimore Cooper ca. 1850-60 drawing, with watercolor Morgan Library, New York |
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| Edgar Degas Sheet of Studies made in Florence 1858 (misdated on sheet) drawing Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio |
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| Hablot Knight Browne (Phiz) Women on Seashore ca. 1860 drawing, with watercolor British Museum |
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| Thomas Couture The Thorny Path (satire on supposed French decadence after a series of political disasters) 1873 oil on canvas Philadelphia Museum of Art |
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| Winslow Homer Young Woman Sewing 1876 watercolor National Gallery of Art, Washington DC |
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| Alphonse Legros Study of an Italian Model (made in London) ca. 1880 etching National Gallery of Art, Washington DC |
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| Christian Krohg Portrait of Edvard Munch 1891 oil on canvas National Gallery of Norway, Oslo |
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| Odilon Redon Lumière 1893 lithograph Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio |
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| Thomas Eakins Portrait of Maud Cook 1895 oil on canvas Yale University Art Gallery |
"During the years 1527-1530, the intellectual community was deep in a stupor. The future of Italy weighed heavily on them, like a vast anxious silence broken only by the moans of ruined scholars and the laments of poets. It was just then that Erasmus had the cruel and ingenious idea of publishing his biting pamphlet [the Dialogus Ciceronianus] against the neopaganism of Medicean Rome. The perpetual masquerade of those "Ciceronians," with their pompous language borrowed from ancient authors, struck him as absurd. To believe, or pretend to believe, that one still lives like the ancient Romans, to speak of Jupiter and consuls, is a ridiculous obsession. For "Rome no longer exists, it is nothing but ruins and debris, traces and vestiges of its ancient misfortune." The Rome of today, the Rome of the Curia, has nothing in common with the ancient world. What kind of people are these "who still dream of the Rome that was once mistress of the world with its citizenry in togas?" These poor fools are unaware that the face of the world has changed and that a Roman citizen means less in Europe than a shopkeeper from Basel. They are above all unaware that their would-be world academy is no more than a coterie of people "more lettered than pious."
* * *
"What, in the final analysis, is this nefarious paganism? Unlike many other diatribes, Erasmus's is not directed against the lack of spirituality or moral laxity of the Curia. Nor is it directed against the commercialization of sacred matters, or superstitions, which Erasmus discussed elsewhere. It is equally unconcerned with the naive affectations of the Ciceronian style. What it is concerned with is the cult of the ancient world, the nostalgia for a non-Christian order that emerges from an unconditional love of antiquity and fascination with its remains. Erasmus is now railing against the intellectual passion for history, art, and ancient philosophy that cannot be restrained by Christian conscience. Archaeology, the collection of sculpture in palaces, the resurrection of Roman models, all cease being harmless hobbies and legitimate ancillaries of knowledge if they promote feelings of inadmissible superiority, total attachment, and formalized sensibility; then they are dangerous."
"If we do not misread it, the Ciceronianus reveals that Erasmus was now inclined to a new strictness, a more rigorous concept of culture. But most important, this is the first time in the history of the Renaissance that a fundamental critique of the "cult of antiquity" has been penned, not by a narrow-minded monk or a suspicious theologian, but by a humanist formed in the classical disciplines and the author of the Adagia [the best-selling anthology of extracts from ancient literature that had established the fame of Erasmus]. This was a major event. It can be explained by the general upheaval of those difficult years, by the pressure of reform evangelism, and by the very logic of Erasmian positions. The treatise forces us to recognize the extent of "paganization" that could be seen not only in the rhetoric, as expected, but in the whole of Roman life and culture. This raises a question of undeniable interest – and greater importance than is usually acknowledged, in interpreting the artistic development of Medicean Rome. It becomes easier to see how vastly indifferent Erasmus and his friends were to the strictly artistic aspect of the Renaissance. Perhaps the problem of Erasmus's attitude toward the arts is a false problem."
"The Italian passion for forms escapes him and scandalizes him. Art is of the realm of externals and lacks essence. . . . Erasmus was so well aware that the Roman attitude toward art was not just an isolated factor but formed an entire concept, that he introduced a critical digression against painting, attacking something that may appear as morally inoffensive – the art of portraiture. Painting can capture only one aspect of man and it is precisely the most inferior one. A painter's concern for detail is ridiculous: "If he had been able to express the truly profound form of man he would not have sought refuge in those parerga [extraneous ornaments]."
– André Chastel, The Sack of Rome, 1527, translated by Beth Archer, 1983 (expanded from the A.W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, 1977, and published by Princeton University Press and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.)