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| William-Adolphe Bouguereau Les Oréades 1902 oil on canvas Musée d'Orsay, Paris |
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| Max Beckmann Aerialists 1928 oil on canvas Von der Heydt Museum, Wuppertal |
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| Daniel Nikolaus Chodowiecki The Great Hourglass of Time 1778 etching Museum Folkwang, Essen |
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| Laura Knight Swing Boats 1923 etching and aquatint Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh |
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| Vilhelm Tveteraas Around the Fire 1948 color woodblock print Stavanger Kunstmuseum, Norway |
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| Nikolai Stepanovich Trosjin Cigarette Butts into the Receptacle 1930 lithograph (poster) Moderna Museet, Stockholm |
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| Giovanni Battista Gaulli (il Baciccio) Thanks-Offering of Noah ca. 1700 oil on canvas Nasjonalmuseet, Oslo |
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| Thomas Ruff jpeg td02 2006 C-print Moderna Museet, Stockholm |
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| Juan de Valdés Leal Assumption of the Virgin ca. 1658-60 oil on canvas National Gallery of Art, Washington DC |
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| Pierre Puget Assumption of the Virgin ca. 1664-65 marble relief Bode Museum, Berlin |
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| Otto Gebhard Apotheosis of St Odile of Alsace ca. 1735 oil on canvas (modello for fresco) Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin |
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| Joseph Anton Koch Abduction of Ganymede ca. 1820-30 oil on panel Landesmuseum Hannover |
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| Antonio Campi Resurrection of Christ ca. 1560-70 oil on panel Galleria Sabauda, Turin |
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| Jacopo Tintoretto Risen Christ ca. 1540 drawing Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna |
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| Hans Thoma Mercury in Flight 1897 lithograph Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin |
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| Walter Hirsch Untitled 2002 gelatin silver print Moderna Museet, Stockholm |
As he spoke, he pressed into Nausikles' hand one of the royal rings. A magnificent, sublime thing it was, its hoop inset with amber, its bezel aflame with an Ethiopian amethyst as big in circumference as a maiden's eye and in beauty far surpassing the amethysts of Iberia and Britain, in which the bloom of crimson is pale and weak: they are like rosebuds just breaking into flower and blushing pink for the first time in sunlight, but from the heart of an Ethiopian amethyst blazes a pure radiance, fresh as springtime. If you held one and turned it in your hands, it would throw off a shaft of golden light that did not dazzle the eye with its harshness but illuminated it with its brilliance. Furthermore, there resides in it a power more authentic than in the stones of the west: its name is no misnomer, it truly is amethysos, "proof against intoxication," and keeps its owner sober at drinking parties.*
Every amethyst from India or Ethiopia is as I have described, but the stone the Kalasiris was now presenting to Nausikles was far superior to all others, for it had been incised and deeply carved to represent living creatures. The scene depicted was as follows: a young boy was shepherding his sheep, standing on the vantage point of a low rock, using a transverse flute to direct his flock as it grazed, while the sheep seemed to pasture obediently and contentedly in time to the pipe's melody. One might have said that their backs hung heavy with golden fleeces; this was no beauty of art's devising, for art had merely highlighted on their backs the natural blush of the amethyst. Also depicted were lambs, gamboling in innocent joy, a whole troop of them scampering up the rock, while others cavorted and frolicked in rings around their shepherd, so that the rock where he sat seemed like a kind of bucolic theater; others again, reveling in the sunshine of the amethyst's brilliance, jumped and skipped, scarcely touching the surface of the rock. The oldest and boldest of them presented the illusion of wanting to leap out through the setting of the stone but of being prevented from doing so by the jeweler's art, which had set the collet of the ring like a fence of gold to enclose both them and the rock. The rock was a real rock, no illusion, for the artist had left one corner of the stone unworked, using reality to produce the effect he wanted: he could see no point in using the subtlety of his art to represent a stone on a stone! Such was the ring.
*This etymology is specifically rejected by Pliny and Plutarch (Table Talk), who suggests that the amethyst was so called because its color was like that of wine so watered down as to remove any threat of inebriation.
– Heliodorus, from The Aethiopica, or, Theagenes and Charikleia (3rd or 4th century AD), translated from Greek by J.R. Morgan (1989)