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| Anonymous Italian Maker Double Cameo - recto, Head of a Woman ca. 1400-1450 - onyx carved ca. 1530-50 - gold mount added in Antwerp British Museum |
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| Anonymous Italian Maker Double Cameo - verso, Virgin and Child ca. 1400-1450 - onyx carved ca. 1530-50 - gold mount added in Antwerp British Museum |
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| Francesco di Simone Ferrucci Virgin adoring the Child ca. 1470-90 marble relief Museum of Fine Arts, Boston |
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| Anonymous French Makers Book Clasps ca. 1500 silver-gilt with embroidered silk straps British Museum |
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| Anonymous German Makers Book Cover for the Epistles commissioned for Ulm Münster ca. 1506 silver (partly enameled and partly gilt) British Museum |
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| Anonymous Italian Makers Hat Jewel with the Judgment of Paris ca. 1525-75 enameled gold set with garnets, sapphire and peridot British Museum |
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| Anonymous German Makers Hat Jewel with the Conversion of Saul ca. 1550 enameled gold set with rubies and diamonds British Museum |
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| Anonymous Mexican Makers Reliquary Pendant in Lantern Form holding wooden Ecce Homo ca. 1550-1600 partly-enameled gold, rock crystal, wood British Museum |
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| Anonymous Flemish Maker Marcus Curtius leaping into the Chasm (fragment of parade armour for a horse) ca. 1570 embossed, chased and damascened iron British Museum |
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| Suzanne de Court Dish with Apollo and the Muses ca. 1600 enamel on copper British Museum |
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| Anonymous English Maker Locket ca. 1610-20 enameled-gold set with diamonds and pearl British Museum |
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| Anonymous Dutch Maker Portrait of Frederick Henry, Prince of Orange 1627 partly-enameled gold British Museum |
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| Anonymous Austrian Sculptor Hercules and Achelous ca. 1650-75 ivory Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
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| Anonymous Austrian Sculptor Hercules and Achelous ca, 1650-75 pear wood British Museum |
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| Anonymous Italian Maker Plaque with Sale of Cupids (after antique fresco excavated at Herculaneum) ca. 1800-1830 rock crystal British Museum |
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| Giacomo Balla Ballerina II 1922 (reconstructed in 1968) chrome-plated brass wire Hirshhorn Museum, Washington DC |
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| Herbert Ferber Running Water I 1954 brass and copper Whitney Museum of American Art, New York |
Our strength, matched with that of the unreasonable creatures, is but weakness. All we can set our eyes upon in these intricate mazes of life is but alchemy, vain perspective and deceiving shadows, appearing far otherwise afar off than when enjoyed and looked upon at a near distance. O! who, if before he had a being he could have knowledge of the manifold miseries of it, would enter this woeful hospital of the world and accept of life upon such hard conditions?
If death be good, why should it be feared, and if it be the work of nature, how should it not be good? For nature is an ordinance, disposition and rule which God hath established in creating this universe, as is the law of a King which can not err. For how should the maker of that ordinance err, sith in him there is no impotency and weakness by the which he might bring forth what is unperfect, no perverseness of will, of which might proceed any vicious action, no ignorance, by the which he might go wrong in working; being most powerful, most good, most wise, nay, all-wise, all-good, all-powerful? He is the first orderer and marshalleth every other order, the highest essence, giving essence to all other things; of all causes the cause. He worketh powerfully, bounteously, wisely, and maketh nature (his artificial organ) do the same. How is not death of nature, sith what is naturally generate is subject to corruption, and sith such an harmony, which is life, arising of the mixture of the four elements, which are the ingredients of our bodies, can not ever endure; the contrarieties of their qualities, as a consuming rust in the baser metals being an inward cause of a necessary dissolution? O of frail and instable things the constant, firm and eternal order! For even in their changes they keep ever universal, ancient and uncorruptible laws.
– William Drummond of Hawthornden, from A Cypress Grove (London: Hawthornden Press, 1919, reprinting the original edition of 1623)