Ancient Roman Culture Head of Eros 1st century BC - 1st century AD marble Walters Art Museum, Baltimore |
Ancient Roman Culture Bust of Venus 2nd century AD head on 17th-century body marble Galleria Borghese, Rome |
Ancient Roman Culture Herm of Venus AD 100-125 marble Galleria Borghese, Rome |
Ancient Roman Culture Venus Genetrix 1st century AD marble Detroit Institute of Arts |
Ancient Roman Culture Venus 1st century AD body with 17th-century head marble Galleria Borghese, Rome |
Ancient Roman Culture Venus and Cupid 2nd century AD torso of Venus and fragments of Cupid elaborated and extended in the 17th century marble Galleria Borghese, Rome |
Doccia Manufactory (Florence) Venus plucking the Wings of Cupid 1745-46 porcelain Detroit Institute of Arts |
Riccio (Andrea Briosco) Venus, Cupid and Vulcan ca. 1500 bronze plaquette National Gallery of Art, Washington DC |
Master of the Berlin Nereid Neptune ca. 1520-30 bronze Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest |
Hubert Gerhard Hebe ca. 1590 bronze Detroit Institute of Arts |
Filippo and Ignazio Collino Flora ca. 1793 marble Galleria Sabauda, Turin |
Gianlorenzo Bernini Abduction of Proserpina 1621-22 marble Galleria Borghese, Rome |
Ancient Roman Culture Goddess Nemesis 1st-2nd century AD marble Národní Galerie, Prague |
Doccia Manufactory (Florence) Prometheus 1745-46 porcelain Detroit Institute of Arts |
Bartolomeo Ammanati Mars Gradivus 1559 bronze Gallerie degli Uffizi, Florence |
Ancient Etruscan Culture Votive Figure of the God Fufluns 480 BC bronze Gallerie Estense, Modena |
Roger Casement
I say that Roger Casement
Did what he had to do,
He died upon the gallows
But that is nothing new.
But that is nothing new.
Afraid they might be beaten
Before the bench of Time
They turned a trick by forgery
And blackened his good name.
A perjurer stood ready
To prove their forgery true;
They gave it out to all the world
And that is something new;
For Spring-Rice had to whisper it
Being their Ambassador,
And then the speakers got it
And writers by the score.
Come Tom and Dick, come all the troop
Come Tom and Dick, come all the troop
That cried it far and wide,
Come from the forger and his desk,
Desert the perjurer's side;
Come speak your bit in public
That some amends be made
To this most gallant gentleman
That is in quick-lime laid.
– W.B. Yeats (1938)
To this most gallant gentleman
That is in quick-lime laid.
– W.B. Yeats (1938)
[Excerpts from the so-called Black Diaries of Roger Casement were publicized by the British establishment shortly after he was hanged for treason in 1916. A former diplomat, Casement attempted to secure German military support during World War I for the Independence Movement in Ireland (hence his appeal to Yeats's intense Irish patriotism). The Diaries described a series of homosexual adventures in graphic detail. Yeats's poem reflects the widespread liberal opinion in the decades after Casement's death that these writings were forged at the behest of the British government in order to deflect public criticism at the harshness of the death sentence. Books and articles have continued to examine this controversy for more than a century without reaching a consensus, but the balance seems gradually to have shifted. Before the rise of LGTB freedom movements in the 1960s and 70s, Casement's defenders largely agreed that the Diaries had been faked. More recently, Casement has attracted new allies who hold the Diaries to be genuine and to justify promoting him as a gay martyr. This stance would very likely have seemed unintelligible to Yeats.]