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| Anonymous French Photographer Snake Charmer ca. 1920 autochrome Palais des Beaux-Arts de Lille |
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| Walt Kuhn Performer Resting 1929 oil on canvas Phillips Collection, Washington DC |
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| Henri Gissey Ballet Costume as La Guerre for Louis XIV ca. 1654 gouache on vellum Musée Carnavalet, Paris |
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| Paul Meyerheim The Lion Tamer, or, The Jealous Lioness 1885 oil on canvas Städel Museum, Frankfurt |
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| Louis-François Roubiliac George Frideric Handel 1738 terracotta (modello for marble statue) Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge |
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| Agostino Carracci The Actor Giovanni Gabrielli, called il Sivello ca. 1599 engraving Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney |
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| Marcello Provenzale Orpheus 1618 mosaic Galleria Borghese, Rome |
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| Anonymous British Photographer Strongman with Fur Loincloth ca. 1920-30 photographic postcard Wellcome Collection, London |
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| Anton Graff August Wilhelm Iffland in Pygmalion (melodrama by Jean-Jacques Rousseau) 1800 oil on canvas Bildgalerie von Sanssouci, Potsdam |
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| Greta Freist The Dancer 1938 oil on canvas Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna |
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| Gerrit van Honthorst Violin Player 1626 oil on canvas Mauritshuis, The Hague |
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| Melozzo da Forlì Angel playing a Lute ca. 1480 detached fresco Pinacoteca Vaticana, Rome |
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| Gabriel de Saint-Aubin Performance of Lully's Armide at the Palais Royale, Paris ca. 1761 drawing, with watercolor Museum of Fine Arts, Boston |
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| Giovanni Boldini The Recital ca. 1884 oil on panel Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts |
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| Auguste Lepère Study for Four Hands 1890 chiaroscuro woodcut National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne |
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| Franz Sedlacek Song in Twilight 1931 oil on panel Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna |
from The Insistence of Things
At the edge of conversations, uncompleting all acts of thought, looms the insistence of things which, waiting on our recognition, face us with our own death, for they are so completely what we are not. And thus we go on trying to read them, as if they were signs, or the embodied message of oracles.
– Charles Tomlinson (1974)