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Peter Flötner Abraham and the Three Angels ca. 1525-35 lead plaquette National Gallery of Art, Washington DC |
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Peter Flötner Triumph of a Sea Goddess ca. 1530 carved soapstone with gilt-bronze rim Harvard Art Museums |
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Peter Flötner Foreshortened Figure on Stone Block (perspective study) ca. 1530-35 drawing British Museum |
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Peter Flötner Apollo playing the Lira da Braccio ca. 1530-40 (false date and monogram added later) ink and watercolor on paper British Museum |
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Peter Flötner Audience with Hungarian King 1534 woodcut (book illustration) Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum, Braunschweig |
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Peter Flötner Allegory of Wrath ca. 1535 bronze plaquette National Gallery of Art, Washington DC |
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Peter Flötner Allegory of Bad Government ca. 1540-45 stone relief (modello for plaquette) British Museum |
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Peter Flötner Lot and his Daughters ca. 1540 boxwood medallion British Museum |
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Peter Flötner Personification of Fortitude ca. 1540 bronze plaquette National Gallery of Art, Washington DC |
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Peter Flötner Triumphal Arch for Entry of Charles V into Nuremberg 1541 woodcut British Museum |
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Peter Flötner Caryatids in Motion 1541 woodcut (book illustration) British Museum |
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Peter Flötner Wandalus, King of the Lusatians (series, Ancestors and Early Kings of Germany) ca. 1543 hand-colored woodcut and letterpress British Museum |
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Peter Flötner Allegorical Scene before 1546 gilt-bronze plaquette National Gallery of Art, Washington DC |
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Peter Flötner Bacchanal with Silenus on an Ass before 1546 lead plaquette British Museum |
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Peter Flötner Lovers, Death and the Devil before 1546 woodcut Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum, Braunschweig |
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Peter Flötner Study of Male Figure from the back before 1546 drawing Universitätsbibliothek, Erlangen-Nürnberg |
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Peter Flötner Three Capitals before 1546 woodcut Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum, Braunschweig |
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Peter Flötner Woman in Roundel before 1546 ink and watercolor on paper Universitätsbibliothek, Erlangen-Nürnberg |
from Salome
No wonder, shaggy saint, breast-deep in Jordan's
Reflected gliding gardens,
That you assumed their swift compulsions sacred;
Nor that, dreaming you drank, so cool the water,
Regeneration, of which the first taste maddens,
You let spill on the naked
Stranger a pure and tripled mitre;
Nor that later, brooding, on the sacrament
Of flowing streams, you went
Back where none flow, and went in a new dread
Of water's claspings, whose rapt robe, whose crown
Make beggar and prince alike magnificent.
A dry voice inside said,
"Life is a pool in which we drown."
Finally then, small wonder the small king,
Your captor, slavering
In a gold litter, bitten to the bone
By what shall be, pretended not to hear
His veiled wild daughter sinuous on a string
Of motives all her own
Summon the executioner.
– James Merrill (1959)