Sunday, December 7, 2025

Compositions with Ordeals

Master of the Kremsmünster Diptych (French sculptor)
Funeral of the Virgin
14th century
ivory (diptych fragment)
British Museum


Martino di Bartolomeo
The Crucifixion
ca. 1410
tempera and gold on panel (predella fragment)
El Paso Museum of Art, Texas

Master of the Playing Cards (German artist)
Man of Sorrows
with Instruments and Villains of the Passion 

ca. 1450
hand-colored engraving
British Museum

Matteo di Giovanni
The Crucifixion
ca. 1470-80
tempera and oil on panel (predella fragment)
Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio

Master I.A.M. of Zwolle (Netherlandish printmaker)
Lamentation
ca. 1470-95
engraving
British Museum

Master of the Subjects in Boccaccio
(Netherlandish printmaker)
Marcus Manlius Capitolinus thrown into the Tiber
1476
engraving
British Museum

Master M.Z. (German printmaker)
Martyrdom of St Catherine of Alexandria
(wingless angels kneeling at right with shroud)
ca. 1501
engraving
British Museum

Master of the Beheading of St John the Baptist
(Italian printmaker)
Beheading of St John the Baptist
ca. 1500-1520
engraving
British Museum

Lucas van Leyden
The Expulsion from Paradise
1529
engraving
British Museum

Master of the Die (Italian printmaker)
St Sebastian
ca. 1530-60
engraving
British Museum

Master N.D. (Italian printmaker) after Raphael
Massacre of the Innocents
1544
chiaroscuro woodcut with key-block only
(School of Fontainebleau)
British Museum

Daniel Lindtmayer
The Crucifixion, with Ornamental Surround
1580
drawing
British Museum

Alessandro Maganza
Beheading of St John the Baptist
before 1630
drawing
British Museum

Giovanni Battista Cipriani
Fall of the Rebel Angels
before 1785
drawing
British Museum

Domenico Mondo
A Beheading in Progress
before 1806
drawing
British Museum

Joseph Anton Koch
Charon's Bark in Dante's Hell
1808
etching (book illustration)
British Museum

Judith Linhares
Purgatory
1991
linocut and lithograph
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

Madrigal

    Like the Idalian queen,
    Her hair about her eyne,
With neck and breast's ripe apples to be seen,
    At first glance of the morn
In Cyprus' gardens gathering those fair flowers
    Which of her blood were born,
I saw, but fainting saw, my paramours.
The Graces naked danced about the place,
    The winds and trees amazed
    With silence on her gazed,
The flowers did smile, like those upon her face;
And as their aspen stalks those fingers band,
    That she might read my case,
A hyacinth I wished me in her hand. 

– William Drummond of Hawthornden (1585-1649)