Glazed

Christiaan Johannes Lanooy
Three Vessels
1920
glazed earthenware
Museum de Fundatie, Zwolle, Netherlands

Anonymous German Potter
Tile with Crucifixion Scene
ca. 1560-1600
lead-glazed earthenware stove tile
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

Florentine Imitator of Giovanni della Robbia
Judith and Holofernes
ca. 1800-1850
maiolica
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

Giovanni della Robbia
Virgin and Child with St John the Baptist and St Jerome
ca. 1525
glazed terracotta
Bode Museum, Berlin

Staffordshire Potteries
Dessert Dish
ca. 1755-65
lead-glazed earthenware
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

Anonymous Potter working in Delft
Birdcage
ca. 1700-1730
tin-glazed earthenware
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

Staffordshire Potteries
Medici Venus
ca. 1815-20
lead-glazed earthenware figurine
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

Jean-Baptiste Lemoyne the Younger
Portrait of Louis XV
ca. 1745
lead-glazed earthenware (faience)
Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts

Brislington Pottery (near Bristol)
Posset Pot
1699
tin-glazed earthenware
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

Bow Porcelain Manufactory (London)
Youth as Personification of Autumn
ca. 1765-70
porcelain
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

Patanazzi Family (Urbino)
Inkstand with River God
ca. 1575-1605
maiolica
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

attributed to Domenico da Venezia
Pharmacy Jar
ca. 1560-70
maiolica
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

attributed to Domenico da Venezia
Pharmacy Jar
ca. 1560-70
maiolica
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

Brislington Pottery (near Bristol)
Wash-Basin as Scallop-Shell
1683
tin-glazed earthenware
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

Anonymous British Potter
Game Board
1723
tin-glazed earthenware
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

Anonymous Japanese Potter
Hare
18th century
porcelain
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

When old Fuseli made the famous remark that Constable's landscapes made him call for his greatcoat and umbrella, he showed he understood the kind of truth the master was aiming at.  Not the dry but the humid, not the linear but the atmospheric, not the lasting but the transient.  As Constable himself said in the preface to his published landscapes, to give "one brief moment caught from fleeting time a lasting and sober existence."  Lasting and sober.  We do well to remember these beautiful honest words before we rashly fall in with the view that Constable's finished paintings are less interesting, less artistic than his sketches.

The source of this preference is clear.  We prefer suggestions to representations, we have adjusted our expectations to enjoy the very act of guessing, of projecting.  And we rationalize this preference by fancying that the sketch must be nearer to what the artist saw and to what he felt than the finished work.  I do not deny that artists are human and sometimes spoil their works.  But I consider it a heresy to think that any painting as such records a sense impression or a feeling.  All human communication is through symbols, through the medium of a language, and the more articulate that language the greater the chance for the message to get through.  

– E.H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: a Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (Princeton University Press, 1960)

Swords

Anonymous German Artist
Our Lady of Sorrows
15th century
hand-colored woodcut
Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna

Albrecht Altdorfer
Expulsion from Paradise
ca. 1508
woodcut
Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna

Michael Wolgemut and Wilhelm Pleydenwurff
Nero
1493
hand-colored woodcut
(illustration to the Nuremberg Chronicle) 
Herzog August Bibliothek, Wulfenbüttel

Jacob Matham after Hendrik Goltzius
Personification of Wrath
ca. 1600
engraving
Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel

Ubaldo Gandolfi
Warrior
before 1781
drawing
Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna

Agnolo Gaddi
St Julian
ca. 1393-96
tempera and gold on panel
Alte Pinakothek, Munich

Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Joan of Arc kissing the Sword of Deliverance
1863
oil on canvas
Musée d'Art Moderne et Contemporain de Strasbourg

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres
Sword of Henri IV
1813
drawing
Museum de Fundatie, Zwolle, Netherlands

Anonymous Netherlandish Artist
Judith with the Head of Holofernes
ca. 1540-50
oil on panel
Alte Pinakothek, Munich

René-Marie Castaing
St Martin
ca. 1935
gouache on paper
(study for altarpiece)
Musée des Beaux-Arts de Pau

Juan de Flandes
Beheading of St John the Baptist
ca. 1496-99
oil on panel
Musée d'Art et d'Histoire, Genève

Anonymous Flemish Artist
Beheading of St John the Baptist
ca. 1520-30
oil on panel
(altarpiece fragment)
Musées d'Art et d'Histoire, Genève

Crispijn de Passe the Elder
Lucretia
ca. 1620
engraving
Herzog August Bibliothek, Wulfenbüttel

Anselm Feuerbach
Illustration Design for the Nibelungenlied
1844
drawing
Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Anton Koberger (printer)
Death of King Saul
ca. 1479-83
hand-colored woodcut
(Bible illustration)
Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna

Sebastian Vrancx
Soldiers plundering Peasants
ca. 1620
oil on panel
Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin

Evening Without Angels

                                                                                    the great interests of man; air

                                                                                    and light, the joy of having a

                                                                                    body, the voluptuousness of

                                                                                    looking.

                                                                                                                Mario Rossi

Why seraphim like lutanists arranged

Above the trees? And why the poet as

Eternal chef d'orchestre?

                                          Air is air,

Its vacancy glitters round us everywhere.

Its sounds are not angelic syllables

But our unfashioned spirits realized

More sharply in more furious selves. 

                                          And light

That fosters seraphim and is to them

Coiffeur of haloes, fecund jeweller –

Was the sun concoct for angels or for men?

Sad men made angels of the sun, and of

The moon they made their own attendant ghosts,

Which led them back to angels, after death.

Let this be clear that we are men of sun

And men of day and never of pointed night,

Men that repeat antiquest sounds of air

In an accord of repetitions. Yet,

If we repeat, it is because the wind

Encircling us, speaks always with our speech.

Light, too, encrusts us making visible

The motions of the mind and giving form

To moodiest nothings, as, desire for day

Accomplished in the immensely flashing East,

Desire for rest, in that descending sea

Of dark, which in its very darkening

Is rest and silence spreading into sleep.

. . . Evening, when the measure skips a beat

And then another, one by one, and all

To a seething minor swiftly modulate.

Bare night is best. Bare earth is best. Bare, bare,

Except for our own houses, huddled low,

Beneath the arches and their spangled air,

Beneath the rhapsodies of fire and fire,

Where the voice that is in us makes a true response,

Where the voice that is great within us rises up,

As we stand gazing at the rounded moon. 

– Wallace Stevens (1935)

Eaux

Jacques-Laurent Agasse
La Fontaine Personnifiée
1837
oil on canvas
Musées d'Art et d'Histoire, Genève

Emile Burdet
Pyramids of Cheops and Khafre reflected in Flood Water
ca. 1885
albumen print
Cabinet d'Arts Graphiques des Musées d'Art et d'Histoire, Genève

Jeroen Krabbe
Suriname River at Danpaati II
2006
oil on canvas
Museum de Fundatie, Zwolle, Netherlands

Agricol-Louis Montagné
Fountain at Nîmes
ca. 1910
oil on canvas
Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nîmes

Gaetano Gandolfi
Design for Fountain
ca. 1785-95
drawing
Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna

Jørgen Roed
Fountain in Gardens of Villa Borghese, Rome
ca. 1839
oil on canvas
Nivaagaard Museum, Denmark

Hubert Robert
Wall Fountain
1767
drawing
Musée du Louvre

Susanne Maria von Sandrart after Jean Le Pautre
Fountain Design with Salmacis and Hermaphroditus
1678
etching
Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum, Braunschweig

Franz Sigrist the Elder
Fountain with Nymphs
ca. 1760
etching
Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Vienna

Abraham van Diepenbeeck
The Deluge
ca. 1636-39
drawing
(print study for illustration to Ovid)
Städel Museum, Frankfurt

Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld
The Deluge
1826
drawing
(print study for Bible illustration)
Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden

Friedrich Reclam
Staircase with Cascade in a Park
ca. 1760
drawing
Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna

Thomas Ender
Ladder Falls near Heiligenblut
1845
watercolor on paper
Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna

Franz Kobell 
Landscape with Waterfall and Temple Ruins
before 1822
drawing
Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden

Adrian Zingg
River Keppbach near Dresden
ca. 1780-90
drawing
Kupferstichkabinett,
Staatliche Kunstsammlungen,Dresden

Lucas van Valckenborch
Mountain Landscape with Waterfall
1595
oil on panel
Liechtenstein Museum, Vienna

And yet Leonardo, if anyone, knew that the artist's desire to create, to bring forth a second reality, finds its inexorable limits in the restrictions of his medium.  I feel we catch an echo of the disillusionment with having created only a picture that we found in Lucien [sic] Freud when we read in Leonardo's notes: "Painters often fall into despair . . . when they see that their paintings lack the roundness and the liveliness which we find in objects seen in the mirror . . . but it is impossible for a painting to look as rounded as a mirror image . . . except if you look at both with only one eye."

Perhaps the passage betrays the ultimate reason for Leonardo's deep dissatisfaction with his art, his reluctance to reach the fatal moment of completion: all the artist's knowledge and imagination are of no avail, it is only a picture that he has been painting, and it will look flat.  Small wonder that contemporaries describe him in his later years as most impatient of the brush and engrossed in mathematics.  Mathematics was to help him to be the true maker.  Today we read of Leonardo's project to build a "flying machine," but if we look into Leonardo's notes we will not find such an expression.  What he wants to make is a bird that will fly, and once more there is an exultant tone in the master's famous prophecy that the bird would fly.  It did not.  And shortly afterward we find Leonardo lodging in the Vatican – at the same time when Michelangelo and Raphael were there creating their most renowned works – quarreling with a German mirror maker and fixing wings and a beard to a tame lizard in order to fighten his visitors.  He made a dragon, but it was only a whimsical footnote to a Promethean life.  The claim to be a creator, a maker of things, passed from the painter to the engineer – leaving to the artist only the small consolation of being a maker of dreams. 

– E.H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: a Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (Princeton University Press, 1960).

Sebald

Sebald Beham
Eve seated on Tree Stump
1519
engraving
Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum, Braunschweig

Sebald Beham
Adam with Serpent and Apple
1524
engraving
Graphische Sammlung, ETH Zürich

Sebald Beham
Adam and Eve
1529
engraving
Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum, Braunschweig

Sebald Beham
Man of Sorrows at Foot of the Cross
1520
engraving
Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna

Sebald Beham
Allegorical Figure - Cognicio
ca. 1540
engraving
Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum, Braunschweig

Sebald Beham
Allegorical Figure - Fortitudo
1539
engraving
Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum, Braunschweig

Sebald Beham
Allegorical Figure - Fortuna
1541
hand-colored engraving
Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum, Braunschweig

Sebald Beham
Allegorical Figure - Justicia
ca. 1540
engraving
Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum, Braunschweig

Sebald Beham
Allegorical Figure - Melancolia
1539
engraving
Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum, Braunschweig

Sebald Beham
Allegorical Figure - Temperancia
1539
engraving
Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum, Braunschweig

Sebald Beham
Leda and the Swan
1548
engraving
Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum, Braunschweig

Sebald Beham
Joseph and Potiphar's Wife
1544
engraving
Graphische Sammlung, ETH Zürich

Sebald Beham
Grammatica
(series, Seven Liberal Arts)
before 1550
engraving
Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum, Braunschweig

Sebald Beham
Saturn
(series, Seven Planets)
ca. 1539
engraving
Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum, Braunschweig

Sebald Beham
Venus
(series, Seven Planets)
ca. 1539
engraving
Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum, Braunschweig

Sebald Beham
Moses and Aaron
1526
engraving
Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum, Braunschweig

The Athenians and Rhegians that were now in Sicily made war the same winter on the islands called the islands of Aeolus with thirty galleys.  For in summer it was impossible to war upon them for the shallowness of the water.  These islands are inhabited by the Liparaeans who are a colony of the Cnidians and dwell in one of the same islands, no great one, called Lipara, and thence they go forth and husband the rest which are Didyme, Strongyle, and Hiera.  The inhabitants of those places have an opinion that in Hiera Vulcan exerciseth the craft of a smith.  For it is seen to send forth abundance of fire in the daytime and of smoke in the night.  These islands are adjacent to the territory of the Siculi and Messanians but were confederates of the Syracusians.  When the Athenians had wasted their fields and saw they would not come in, they put off again and went to Rhegium.  And so ended this winter and the fifth year of this war written by Thucydides.

The next summer the Peloponnesians and their confederates came as far as the isthmus under the conduct of Agis the son of Archidamus, intending to have invaded Attica, but by reason of the many earthquakes that then happened, they turned back, and the invasion proceeded not.  About the same time (Euboea being then troubled with earthquakes), the sea came in at Orobiae on the part which then was land and, being impetuous withal, overflowed most part of the city, whereof part it covered and part it washed down and made lower in the return so that it is now sea which before was land.  And the people, as many as could not prevent it by running up into the higher ground, perished.

– from The Peloponnesian War as written by Thucydides (5th century BC) and translated by Thomas Hobbes (1628) and edited by David Grene (1959)