 |
| Vilhelm Hammershøi Interior ca. 1900-1905 drawing Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen |
 |
| Jean-Jacques Henner Standing Woman ca. 1903 oil on canvas National Gallery of Art, Washington DC |
 |
| Augustus John Head of Young Woman 1906 drawing Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh |
 |
| Edmund Joseph Sullivan Buy Victory for the Nation (Bonar Law addressing Crowd) 1918 drawing Morgan Library, New York |
 |
| Laura Knight A Box at the Theatre, Paris 1923 drypoint Victoria & Albert Museum, London |
 |
| Laura Knight Fastening Her Dress (Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies as Juliet) 1924 watercolor on paper Victoria & Albert Museum, London |
 |
| Alfred Buckham Aerial View of Edinburgh ca. 1920 gelatin silver print Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh |
 |
| Alfred Buckham Volcano: Crater of Popocatepetl ca. 1930 gelatin silver print Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh |
 |
| Charles Stafford Duncan Heads ca. 1930-40 drawing Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (Achenbach Foundation) |
 |
| Emil Nolde Ocean and Dark Clouds 1935 oil on canvas Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen |
 |
| Emil Nolde North Sea Dunes 1936 oil on canvas Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen |
 |
| Henry Moore Pink and Green Sleepers 1941 drawing (graphite, ink, gouache and wax) Tate Gallery |
 |
| Pablo Picasso Black Pitcher and Death's Head 1946 lithograph Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York |
 |
| John Piper Foliate Heads I 1954 lithograph Victoria & Albert Museum, London |
 |
| David Douglas Duncan Bronze Head by Picasso in Birdbath (at Picasso's villa in Southern France) 1958 gelatin silver print Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri |
 |
| Johannes Hendrikus Moesman Pavane pour un marquis défunt 1963 oil on canvas Centraal Museum, Utrecht |
"One of the reasons that Erasmians judged the Roman world so harshly and considered it incapable of directing the Church may quite simply have been the failure of Adrian VI's pontificate [like Erasmus, Adrian was Dutch]. His reign, though brief, was exceptional in every way. He was unexpectedly elected in a desperate attempt to break a deadlocked Conclave. . . . The most disastrous and, to our mind, the most significant aspect of the "barbarian" pope was his immediate and unredeemable unpopularity with the Romans. . . . Adrian was not forgiven his lack of decorum, his indifference to local traditions or to the grandeur of the capital. It is not enough to be a devout and honest priest in order to perform as sovereign of the papal states. Never had the contradiction between the two aspects of the papacy been so apparent. "He never had any appreciation of those great paintings and ancient statues." Vianese, the legate in Bologna, praised the Laocoön that Julius II had purchased at great expense and placed in the Belvedere garden to beautify the site. Adrian turned his eyes away at once and invoked curses on those statues of an impious people. To everyone's horror, these systematic expressions of hostility toward the art of antiquity extended to modern artworks beginning with the Sistine ceiling. Vasari reported this in detail:
Under the papacy of Adrian VI, the arts and the whole cultural impulse were so undermined that had the direction of the Holy See remained in his hands, what happened long before, when all the statues that had escaped the devastation of the Goths, guilty or not, were condemned to flames, would have happened in Rome under his rule. Adrian had already begun . . . to think that the chapel of the divine Michelangelo could be demolished by declaring it a "bathroom full of nude figures," despising fine paintings and statuary which he called lascivious, shameful, and abominable.
In Italian historiography, the pontificate of Adrian VI appears as a violent intrusion of ignorance and error into the Roman world."
– 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.)