Monday, September 9, 2024

Divine Shapes - IV

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.

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
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)

[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.]