Appearances

Anonymous Florentine Sculptor
Idealized portrait of Empress Faustina
ca. 1470-80
relief in pietra serena
Musée du Louvre

Alessandro Araldi
Portrait of Beatrice d'Este
ca. 1491
oil on panel
Gallerie degli Uffizi, Florence

Bernardino de' Conti
Portrait of Bianca Maria Sforza
ca. 1495
oil on panel
Musée du Louvre

Giulio della Torre
Portrait of Marcantonio di Girolamo della Torre
ca. 1519
bronze medallion
British Museum

Michelangelo Buonarroti
Idealized Head - Woman with Elaborate Coiffure
ca. 1525-28
drawing
British Museum

attributed to Jean II Pénicaud
Pompey the Great
ca. 1540
enamel on copper
Musée du Louvre

Léonard Limosin
Portrait of Henri II, King of France
ca. 1550
enamel on copper
Musée du Louvre

Pier Leone Ghezzi
Sketch of Francesco Maria Carafa della Stadera,
Principe di Belvedere
ca. 1740
drawing
British Museum

John Everett Millais
Portrait of Ford Madox Brown
1853
watercolor on paper
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

George Du Maurier
Head of a Woman
ca. 1865
drawing
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

Lucien Pissarro
Portrait of Esther reading
ca. 1892
pastel on blue paper
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

Jean-Jacques Henner
Madame Hélène Lyon née Loeb
ca. 1900
oil on canvas
Musée du Louvre

Simon Bussy
Chameleon
ca. 1920-30
pastel on paper
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

Edward Steichen
John Barrymore
ca. 1922
cyanotype and palladium print
Museum of Modern Art, New York

Paul Cadmus
Fidelma (sister of the artist)
ca. 1926
drypoint
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC

Leonard Baskin
Thomas Eakins House Restoration
1972
silver commemorative medal
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

Susan Rothenberg
Black in Place
1976
acrylic and tempera on canvas
Museum of Modern Art, New York

from Dialogues concerning Natural Religion

"Hesiod and all ancient mythologists were so struck with this analogy that they universally explained the origin of nature from an animal birth and copulation.  Plato too, so far as he is intelligible, seems to have adopted some such notion in his Timaeus.  The Brahmins assert that the world arose from an infinite spider who spun this whole complicated mass from his bowels and annihilates afterwards the whole or any part of it by absorbing it again and resolving it into his own essence.  Here is a species of cosmogony which appears to us ridiculous, because a spider is a little contemptible animal whose operations we are never likely to take for a model of the whole universe.  But still here is a new species of analogy, even in our globe.  And were there a planet wholly inhabited by spiders (which is very possible) this inference would there appear as natural and irrefragable as that which in our planet ascribes the origin of all things to design and intelligence."

– David Hume (written ca. 1750, published 1779)