Tuesday, August 19, 2025

Pensive - IV

Pablo Picasso
Harlequin
1923
oil on canvas
Museum Ludwig, Cologne

Palma il Vecchio
Salvator Mundi
ca. 1518-22
oil on panel
Musée des Beaux-Arts de Strasbourg

Lütfi Özkök
Portrait of poet Tomas Tranströmer
ca. 1965
gelatin silver print
Moderna Museet, Stockholm

Amedeo Modigliani
Portrait of writer Beatrice Hastings
1914
oil on canvas
High Museum of Art, Atlanta

Jean Fautrier
Visage Violet
1947
color etching
Moderna Museet, Stockholm

Giorgione (Giorgio Barbarelli)
Portrait of a Young Man
(the so-called Broccardo Portrait)
ca. 1508-1510
oil on canvas
Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest

Joshua Reynolds
Portrait of Captain William Hamilton
ca. 1762
oil on canvas
Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio

Henri Doucet
Young Woman
ca. 1910
oil on canvas
Nasjonalmuseet, Oslo

Henry Goodwin
Greta Garbo
1926
gelatin silver print
Moderna Museet, Stockholm

Louis Kolitz
Study of a Young Woman
wearing an 18th-century Wig

ca. 1895
oil on canvas
Museumslandschaft Hessen Kassel

Bertold Löffler
Portrait of artist Melitta Feldkircher
ca. 1910
oil on canvas (unfinished)
Leopold Museum, Vienna

Giuseppe Signorini
Boy in Rome
ca. 1880
watercolor on paper
Morgan Library, New York

George Minne
Bust of Model
1910-11
painted plaster
Belvedere Museum, Vienna

Oscar Gustave Rejlander
Lord Elcho with his Son
ca. 1860
albumen print
Moderna Museet, Stockholm

Laurits Andersen Ring
The artist's son Ole at the Window
1930
oil on canvas
Randers Kunstmuseum, Denmark
 
Thomas Gainsborough
Portrait of Mrs Charles Purvis
ca. 1775-80
oil on canvas
Cincinnati Art Museum, Ohio

While King Antiochus was perpetrating these atrocities, a very wealthy young man of Tyrian stock, named Apollonius, arrived by ship in Antioch.  He set out to the king and saluted him thus. "Greetings, my lord, King Antiochus." And he said: "Because you are a dutiful father, I have hurried here to comply with your will.  I am descended from a royal family, and I seek your daughter's hand in marriage." When the king heard these unwelcome words, he gave the young man an angry look and said to him, "Young man, do you know the conditions of marriage?" He said, "I know them, and I saw them on the city gate." The king said: "Listen to the riddle, then: I ride on crime; I feed on a mother's flesh; I seek my brother, my mother's husband, my daughter's son; I do not find them."* 

After hearing the riddle, the young man left the king for a short time.  By subjecting the riddle to his intelligent consideration he found the solution to it by the grace of God.  He set out to the king and spoke thus. "My lord king, you set a riddle for me; therefore, hear its solution.  When you said 'I ride on crime,' you did not lie: look to yourself.  When you said 'I feed on a mother's flesh,' you did not lie about this either: look to your own daughter."

The king realized that the young man had found the solution to the riddle and spoke to him thus: "You're wrong.  Nothing you've said is true.  You'll surely earn a beheading for yourself, but you have thirty days: think some more.  When you return with the solution to the riddle, you'll have my daughter's hand in marriage." The young man was greatly disturbed.  He boarded the ship that he had been keeping in readiness and set sail for his native Tyre.

*None of the story's riddles is invented by the author; all are found elsewhere in antiquity (or late antiquity), which was fond of such puzzles.

– from The Story of Apollonius, King of Tyre, after anonymous Latin manuscripts of the 5th-6th century AD translating a lost Greek text of the 2nd-3rd century AD, and translated into English by Gerald N. Sandy (1989)