Cynosures

Marwan (Marwan Kassab Bachi)
Portrait of poet Bader Chaker al-Sayyab
1965
oil on canvas
Tate Modern, London

Daniel Massad
Night Piece
1987
pastel on paper
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC

Master of the 1540s
Portrait of a Man
1545
oil on panel
Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen

Margrethe Mather
Pierrot (actor Otto Matiesen)
ca. 1920
platinum palladium print
National Museum of American History, Washington DC

Henri Matisse
Nature Morte avec Livres
ca. 1895
oil on canvas
Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam

Leonard Maurer
Proust
1973
linocut
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC

Gabriel Max
The Anatomist
1869
oil on canvas
Neue Pinakothek, Munich

Ludovico Mazzolino
Circumcision of Christ
1526
oil on panel (altarpiece)
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

Rollie McKenna
Portrait of art historian Agnes Claflin
ca. 1955
gelatin silver print
Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York

William McTaggart
Group of Classical Casts
ca. 1860
drawing
Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh

Mendell & Oberer (Munich)
Gerhard Richter - Neue Bilder Galerie
1967
offset lithograph (exhibition poster)
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

William Menelaws
Portrait of Mrs John Muir
1905
oil on canvas
Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, British Columbia

Hans Mettler
Venetian Laundry II
2001
C-print
Ottawa Art Gallery, Ontario

Nicolas Mignard
Portrait présumé de
Françoise Marguerite de Sévigné, comtesse de Grignan
before 1668
oil on canvas
Musée d'Art et d'Histoire de Narbonne

Hieronymus van der Mij
Portrait of Johan van den Bergh
1746
oil on panel
Museum De Lakenhal, Leiden

Peter Milton
The Jolly Corner III (Henry James)
1971
etching and engraving
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC

George Minne
De Kleine Relikwiedrager
1897
marble
Kunstmuseum, The Hague

from Minturno, or, On Beauty

(Modeled on Plato's Hippias Major, Minturno is a conversation between the philosopher Antonio Minturno and Geronimo Ruscelli, a colorful courtier and dilettante)

Giacomo Ruscelli:  If the beautiful is not what is pleasing to the senses of hearing and sight, what other definition can we find that is equally satisfactory?

Antonio Minturno:  Let's not abandon the search for one.

G.R.:  I have often read that beauty is a proportion between parts that are well arranged.  This opinion, which many have shared, is not easy to dismiss.

A.M.:  There is proportion only where there are dissimilar parts.  But if beauty were a proportion between parts that do not resemble each other, there would be no beauty in simple things, but gold and silver are beautiful, in the judgment of miserable mortals, as well as diamonds, rubies, and other precious stones; colors are beautiful, and light, in which there is no proportion at all, is very beautiful indeed.  Besides, there are times when the proportion between the parts remains – as in bodies grown old and feeble – but not beauty, which is lost with the flower of youth.  For these reasons I am not satisfied with this definition either.

G.R.:  I do not know if I can produce any other that will satisfy you more.  But you must recall the definitions of Plutarch and Plotinus.  The first is that beauty is an ornament or glory of the soul which irradiates the body, the other that it is a victory of form over matter.  To these one could add another that beauty is an appearance or an image of the good, as ugliness is a darkened face of evil.

A.M.:  I remember having read something of these things and heard them spoken about, but I find myself with the same doubts.  For if beauty is an ornament of the soul imparted to the body or a victory of form over matter, then it must exist in bodily and material things, in which there is perhaps no beauty at all, or not the kind we are seeking.  And I wonder at Nifo and the other Peripatetics, who have located beauty in the body and in matter, because by its nature matter is ugly and deformed in the extreme, or rather is ugliness itself, so that the beautiful would be found to exist in the ugly as its proper medium, which is not at all fitting, for the beautiful should issue from the beautiful as flower issues from flower.  Besides, if the opinion of those who have defined it in this way is true, the angels would not be beautiful, since in the angelic nature matter is not overcome by form, and there is no body to which the soul's quality can be imparted.  

– Torquato Tasso (ca. 1593-94), translated by Dain A. Trafton and Carnes Lord (1982)

Suspensions

Charles Noel Flagg
Harriet Smith Brown (Mrs Horace Brown)
1898
oil on canvas
New Britain Museum of American Art, Connecticut

Georg Flegel
Still Life with Fish
ca. 1630-40
oil on panel
Deutsche Barockgalerie, Augsburg

Jean-Jacques Flipart after Joseph-Marie Vien
La Jeune Corinthienne
1765
engraving
British Museum

Marcello Fogolino
Return of the Prodigal Son
before 1549
oil on canvas
Musée Ingres Bourdelle, Montauban

Simon Fokke
Looting of a Wine Merchant in Rotterdam
1751
hand-colored etching
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Jean-Louis Forain
The Verdict
ca. 1900-1910
oil on canvas
North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh

Una Foster
Onions
1951
linocut
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Giacomo Francia
Holy Family with St Elizabeth and St John the Baptist
ca. 1513
engraving
Graphische Sammlung, ETH Zürich

Ivor Francis
Presiding Genius
1942
oil on canvas
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Ambrosius Francken the Elder
Martyrdom of St Crispin and St Crispinian of Soissons
before 1618
oil on panel (altarpiece)
Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp

John Peter Frankenstein
Portrait of Godfrey Frankenstein
ca. 1840
oil on canvas
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC

Antonio Frasconi
Moon
(from series, Ode to Lorca)
1962
lithograph
Art Institute of Chicago

Leonard Freed
Katowice, Poland
1973
gelatin silver print
Art Institute of Chicago

Don Freeman
Ladies of the Evening
1934
lithograph
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC

Roman Freulich
Gloria Swanson
1947
gelatin silver print
National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC

Francis Frith
Wells Cathedral
1890
albumen silver print
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Jesse Frohman
Donna Karan
1996
inkjet print
National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC

from Minturno, or, On Beauty

(Modeled on Plato's Hippias Major, Minturno is a conversation between the philosopher Antonio Minturno and Geronimo Ruscelli, a colorful courtier and dilettante)

Geronimo Ruscelli:  The beautiful will then be a part of the pleasing, for as that which gives delight is the object of all the senses, only that small part of it deserves to be called beautiful which is judged to be so by the nobler senses.  Not only therefore, will colors and lights and the various images of things be beautiful, but also songs and the music of instruments, which provide a most beautiful harmony for ears that are suitably refined.  But it seems to me that to these senses belongs as well everything that has been written of customs, laws, and the sciences – things which yield many marvelous beauties.

Antonio Minturno:  What you say is undoubtedly true.  Still, the senses judge in one way of color and sound, and in another way of proportions or the things that belong to the sciences, for of the latter the senses are unable to make a judgment that is true, and act instead as ministers or messengers to the intellect, bringing to the mind what they learn from the world outside.  And so it seems that the beauty we are in the process of seeking is not one and the same, for the objects of the material senses must of necessity be corruptible, as must the senses themselves, but the mind, which is divine and immortal, judges only of those things that resemble it.  The genius of beauty is not, then, one or univocal, as the philosophers say and as Nifo believed, but just as the light of the glow-worm or of rotting mushrooms appearing at night differs from the light of the stars or the sun, so the beauty of the things of this world is very different from that beauty which may be contemplated in the eternal and divine forms.  If this is true, that which is beautiful in itself will not be pleasing to the senses, for they will not be able to judge of it.  

– Torquato Tasso (ca. 1593-94), translated by Dain A. Trafton and Carnes Lord (1982)

Constraints

Mario Minniti
Ecce Homo
ca. 1610
oil on canvas
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

Lisette Model
Promenade des Anglais, Nice
ca. 1934
gelatin silver print
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa

Gerald Mofchum
Still Life
1965
oil on canvas
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC

Jean-Baptiste Monnoyer
Flowers in a Glass Vase
ca. 1670-80
oil on canvas
Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon

Benedetto Montagna
Sacrifice of Abraham
ca. 1515
engraving
Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna

Adolphe Monticelli
Strolling beneath Trees
ca. 1855
oil on panel
Musée des Beaux-Arts de Reims

Clarence B. Moore
La Haine
before 1896
platinum print
National Museum of American History, Washington DC

Luis de Morales
Virgin and Child
ca. 1550
oil on panel
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Abelardo Morell
$1
2002
gelatin silver print
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

José Moreno Carbonero
Gladiators
1882
oil on canvas
Museo de Málaga

Barbara Morgan
Doris Humphrey
1938
gelatin silver print
National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC

Battista dell'Angolo del Moro
Pandora
1557
etching
Graphische Sammlung, ETH Zürich

Francis James Mortimer
Portrait of Alvin Langdon Coburn
1906
gelatin silver print
National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC

John Hamilton Mortimer
Edward the Confessor
stripping his Mother of her Effects
ca. 1763
oil on canvas
Huntington Library and Art Museum, San Marino

Justin Mortimer
Three Royal Court Theatre Directors
(Katie Mitchell, Stephen Daldry, Ian Rickson)
2004
oil on canvas
National Portrait Gallery, London

Josef Müller-Brockmann
Beethoven
1955
lithograph (concert poster)
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Edvard Munch
The Sick Girl
1894
drypoint
Moderna Museet, Stockholm

from Minturno, or, On Beauty

(Modeled on Plato's Hippias Major, Minturno is a conversation between the philosopher Antonio Minturno and Geronimo Ruscelli, a colorful courtier and dilettante)

Geronimo Ruscelli:  Let's say then that the beautiful is what pleases everyone, just as the good is what everyone desires.

Antonio Minturno:  But what kind of pleasure do we mean, that which pleases all the senses, or that which pleases only sight and hearing?  For if what pleases taste and touch and smell is beautiful, as Aristotle seems to argue in his Problems and Nifo in his book on beauty, then sweet things will be beautiful by the fact that they are sweet, and bitter things by the fact that they are bitter, and the smell of amber and musk and the smoke of incense will be beautiful.

G.R.:  I would certainly have thought so.

A.M.:  And possibly it is not a false opinion, if it is understood of those things that are beautiful according to some usage.  And yet to be subordinate to usage is a property of useful things, not of things beautiful or pleasing, and we are looking for what is beautiful in itself, without regard to the manner in which it can be used or abused.  And because beauty is truly something divine, it seems to me very unfitting to make it subject to the judgment of material senses of taste and touch; indeed, it can barely be judged by the more spiritual senses, sight and hearing, which reserve the full judgment of beauty for the intellect – a judgment exercised in the contemplation of forms which are separate from the mixture and residue, as it were, of matter.

– Torquato Tasso (ca. 1593-94), translated by Dain A. Trafton and Carnes Lord (1982)