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| Gandhara Culture Seated Buddha 2nd century AD schist Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia |
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| Desiderio da Settignano Portrait of Marietta Strozzi ca. 1460 marble Bode Museum, Berlin |
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| Andrea Bregno Cardinal Raffaele Sansoni Riario (Papel nephew) ca. 1478 marble Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston |
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| Giovanni della Robbia Goddess Fortuna on Dolphin with Sail ca. 1500-1510 maiolica (half life-size) British Museum |
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| Giovanni della Robbia Goddess Fortuna on Dolphin with Sail ca. 1500-1510 maiolica (underside and back) British Museum |
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| Giorgio Ghisi Parade Shield with Allegorical and Mythological Themes 1554 iron, damascened with gold and plated with silver British Museum |
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| Suzanne de Court Casket with the Story of Abraham and Isaac ca. 1575-1600 Limoges enamel on copper panels set into modern gilt-metal mount British Museum |
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| attributed to Francesco Cabianca Head of a Woman ca. 1710 marble Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest |
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| Antonio Canova Bust of Paris 1812 marble Neue Pinakothek, Munich |
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| Thomas Crawford Paris presenting the Golden Apple to Venus 1837 marble (carved in Rome) Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia |
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| John Gibson Head of Greek Helen before 1866 marble Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney |
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| Moses Ezekial Jessica 1880 marble Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC |
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| Constantin Brâncusi Sleeping Muse I 1909-1910 marble Hirshhorn Museum, Washington DC |
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| Jo Davidson Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney 1917 marble Whitney Museum of American Art, New York |
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| Herbert Ferber The Flame 1949 brass and lead on stone base Whitney Museum of American Art, New York |
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| Christo (Christo Javacheff) Package on Hand-Truck 1973 tarpaulin, rope and hand-truck Whitney Museum of American Art, New York |
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| Carol Bove Adventures in Poetry 2002 assemblage of found materials Whitney Museum of American Art, New York |
What have the dearest favourites of the world created to the patterns of the fairest ideas of mortality, to glory in? Is it greatness? Who can be great on so small a round as is this earth, and bounded with so short a course of time? How like is that to castles or imaginary cities raised in the skies by chance-meeting clouds; or to giants modelled, for a sport, of snow, which at the hotter looks of the sun melt away and lie drowned in their own moisture! Such an impetuous vicissitude touzeth the estate of this world. But we have not yet attained to a perfect understanding of the smallest flower, and why the grass should rather be green than red. The element of fire is quite put out, the air is but water rarefied, the earth is found to move and is no more the centre of the universe, is turned into a magnet; stars are not fixed, but swim in the ethereal spaces, comets are mounted above the planets. Some affirm there is another world of men and sensitive creatures, with cities and palaces, in the moon: the sun is lost, for it is but a light made of the conjunction of many shining bodies together, a cleft in the lower heavens, through which the rays of the highest diffuse themselves; is observed to have spots.
– William Drummond of Hawthornden, from A Cypress Grove (London: Hawthornden Press, 1919, reprinting the original edition of 1623)