Solids

Gregorio di Lorenzo
(Master of the Marble Madonnas)
Portrait of a Young Woman
ca. 1460-70
stucco
Bode Museum, Berlin

Andrea della Robbia
St Ambrose
ca. 1490
glazed terracotta
Bode Museum, Berlin

Anonymous Italian Artist
Dish with Death of Nadab and Abihu
16th century
tin-glazed earthenware (maiolica)
Victoria & Albert Museum, London

Anonymous French Artist after Odoardo Fialetti
Venus combing Cupid's Hair
ca. 1650
tin-glazed earthenware (faience)
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Jacob Cressant
Portrait of silk merchant David van Mollem
1740
terracotta
Centraal Museum, Utrecht

Roman Anton Boos
Hercules and the Erymanthean Boar
ca. 1779
terracotta
Bayerisches Nationalmuseum, Munich

Joseph-Charles Marin
Bacchante carrying Child
ca. 1780-95
terracotta
North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh

Anonymous Italian Artist
Vase with Cover
18th century
tin-glazed earthenware (maiolica)
Victoria & Albert Museum, London

Staffordshire Potteries
Cachepot with Triton (detail)
19th century
glazed earthenware
Newport Mansions Preservation Society, Rhode Island

Albert-Ernest Carrier-Belleuse
Portrait of a Woman
ca. 1870-75
terracotta
North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh

Paul Gauguin
Vase
ca. 1887-88
painted stoneware
Art Institute of Chicago

Charles Francis Annesley Voysey
Panel of Six Tiles
ca. 1900
glazed earthenware
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Rookwood Pottery (Cincinnati, Ohio)
Tile
ca. 1905
glazed earthenware
National Museum of American History, Washington DC

Betty Woodman
Vase
ca. 1989-90
glazed and painted earthenware
Phoenix Art Museum

Virgil Ortiz
St Bartholomew
2014
painted terracotta
Denver Art Museum

Koen Taselaar
Le monde entier est un cactus (Totem #1)
2016
partly-glazed earthenware and wood
Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam

Look not in my eyes, for fear

    They mirror true the sight I see,

And there you find your face too clear

    And love it and be lost like me.

One the long nights through must lie

    Spent in star-defeated sighs,

But why should you as well as I

    Perish? gaze not in my eyes. 

– A.E. Housman (1896)

Italian Artefacts

Anonymous Italian Artist
Head of Livia
17th century
marble relief
Museumslandschaft Hessen Kassel

Anonymous Italian Artist
Head of Augustus
17th century
marble relief
Museumslandschaft Hessen Kassel

Anonymous Italian Artist after Giovanni Bellini
Circumcision of Christ
16th century
oil on panel
Musée Ingres Bourdelle, Montauban

Anonymous Italian Artist
Flying Putto
16th century
drawing
Hamburger Kunsthalle

Anonymous Italian Artist
Portrait of a Young Woman
ca. 1450-1500
limestone
Bode Museum, Berlin

Anonymous Italian Artist after Andrea Mantegna
Portraits of Ludovico Gonzaga and Barbara of Brandenburg,
Marquis and Marchioness of Mantua
ca. 1450-1550
etching and engraving
Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, Munich

Anonymous Italian Artist
Penitent Magdalen
ca. 1625-50
oil on canvas
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

Anonymous Italian Artist
Head of Emperor Septimius Severus
ca. 1600-1625
marble
Galleria Borghese, Rome

Anonymous Italian Artist
Apollo Belvedere
ca. 1510
drawing
Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Anonymous Italian Artist
Saint Carlo Borromeo
ca. 1625
red and white marble
Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia

Anonymous Italian Artist
Julius Caesar
17th century
engraving
Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Vienna

Anonymous Italian Artist
Bust of Scipio Africanus
17th century
porphyry (head) and alabaster (body)
Hall of the Emperors, Galleria Borghese, Rome

Anonymous Venetian Artist
Woman with Parrots
16th century
oil on canvas
Palais des Beaux-Arts de Lille

Anonymous Florentine Artist after Donatello
Virgin and Child
ca. 1450-1500
painted stucco relief
Bode Museum, Berlin

Anonymous Bolognese Artist
Half-Length Figure in Raking Light
ca. 1642-44
drawing
Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest

Anonymous Italian Artist
Pressmark of the Giunti of Florence
1573
woodcut and letterpress
Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Vienna

Chorus of the daughters of Danaus:

Go now to the town, glorifying

the blessed lords, the gods, 

both those of the city and those who dwell around

the ancient stream of Erasinus.

Accept our song,

you escorts, and let praise enfold this city 

of the Pelasgians; no longer let us

sing in honour of the mouths of the Nile,

but of the rivers that pour their tranquil waters

through this land, to drink for health

and for fertility, softening the soil of the land

with their oil-smooth streams.

May chaste Artemis watch over

this band in pity, and may Cytherea's consummation

not come to us by compulsion:

may that prize be won only in Hades. 

Argive Soldiers:  

But it is a wise rule not to ignore Cypris;

for she holds power very close to Zeus, together with Hera,

a goddess of cunning wiles

who is honoured for awesome deeds.

Partners and associates with their dear mother

are Desire and the charmer Persuasion,

to whom nothing can be refused,

and also given to Aphrodite as her portion are Union

and the whispering paths of love-making.

For the fugitives I foresee and fear punishments still to come,

dire suffering and bloody wars:

why, why did they get good sailing

in their swift-sped pursuit? 

Whatever is fated, you know, that will happen –

the great, unfathomable mind of Zeus

cannot be crossed –

and this outcome, marriage, would be shared

with many women before you.

Chorus:  May great Zeus defend me 

                from marriage with the sons of Aegyptus!

Argive Soldiers:  That would certainly be best –*

Chorus:  You're trying to cajole the uncajolable. 

Argive Soldiers:  And you don't know the future.

– Aeschylus, from Suppliants (ca. 470-460 BC), translated by Alan H. Sommerstein (2008)

*the Danaids, it seems, rightly infer that the Argives are about to urge them to be less uncompromising, and interrupt to insist that such advice will be wasted on them

Afterlife

Oskar Kokoschka
Pietà
(poster for Kokoschka's play, Murderer the Hope of Women)
1909
lithograph
Leopold Museum, Vienna

James Ensor
The Dead Rooster
1894
oil on canvas
Kunsthalle Mannheim

Jeanne-Élisabeth Chaudet
Young Woman mourning Death of a Pigeon
1808
oil on canvas
Musée des Beaux-Arts d'Arras

Gustave Courbet
The German Hunter
1859
oil on canvas
Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lons-le-Saunier

George Bellows
Punchinello in the House of Death
1923
lithograph
Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas

Paul Delaroche
Louise Vernat on her Deathbed
(spouse of the artist)
1846
oil on canvas
Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nantes

Hippolyte Flandrin
Pietà
1842
oil on canvas
Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon

Käthe Kollwitz
Woman with Dead Child
1903
etching
Kunsthalle zu Kiel

Simon Vouet
The Deposition
1635
oil on canvas
Musée d'Art Moderne André Malraux, Le Havre

Giovanni Cesare Testa after Pietro Testa
Dead Christ mourned by Angels
ca. 1650-55
etching
Graphische Sammlung, ETH Zürich

Roman Empire
Funerary Altar of Caetenia Polita
AD 100
marble
Rijksmuseum van Oudheden, Leiden

Roman Egypt
Funerary Mask of a Young Woman
AD 50
painted stucco
Museumslandschaft Hessen Kassel

Roman Egypt
Mummy Portrait of a Woman
AD 70
encaustic on wood
Rhode Island School of Design, Providence

Roman Egypt
Mummy Portrait of Herakleides
AD 120-140
pigment and gold leaf on wood
Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Lovis Corinth
Slaughtered Ox
1905
oil on canvas
Ostdeutsche Galerie, Regensburg

Chaїm Soutine
Carcass of Beef
ca. 1925
oil on canvas
Musée de Grenoble

Queen:  Aiai, what a great sea of troubles has burst upon the Persians and the whole Eastern race! 

Messenger:  Well, be sure of this, the tale of disaster is not yet even half told: such a calamitous event has occurred, on top of what I have told you, that it outweighs that in the scale fully twice over. 

Queen:  What possible misfortune could be even more hateful than the one we have heard of?  Tell us what you say is this further disaster that has come upon the army that weighs even more heavily in the scale of evil.

Messenger:  All those Persians who were in their bodily prime, outstanding in courage, notable for high birth, and who always showed the highest degree of loyalty to the person of the King, have perished shamefully by a most ignoble fate.

Queen:  Ah, wretched me, my friends, this terrible catastrophe!  By what kind of death do you say they have perished? 

Messenger:  There is an island in front of Salamis, small and offering no good anchorage for ships, whose seashore is a haunt of Pan, lover of dances.  Xerxes sent these men there so that, when shipwrecked enemy men were trying to reach safety on the island, they could kill the Greek warriors when they were an easy prey while rescuing their own men from the straits of the sea; he was reading the future badly.  When god had given the triumph in the naval battle to the Greeks, that same day they clad themselves in stout bronze armour, leaped off their ships, and landed all around the island, so that the Persians had no idea which way to turn.  They were being heavily battered by hand-thrown stones, and hit and killed by arrows shot from the bowstring, until finally the Greeks charged them in a simultaneous rush and struck them down, hacking the wretched men's limbs until they had extinguished the life of every one of them.  Xerxes wailed aloud when he saw this depth of disaster; he was seated in plain sight of the whole army, on a high cliff close to the sea.  He tore his robes, uttered a piercing cry of grief, and immediately gave an order to the land army, sending them off in helter-skelter flight.  Such, I tell you, is the disaster you have to mourn, in addition to the previous one.  

– Aeschylus, from Persians (472 BC), translated by Alan H. Sommerstein (2008)

Olden-Days Young - I

Pierre Dupuis
Antique Maiden bitten by a Lizard
1866
oil on canvas
Musée des Beaux-Art d'Orléans

Roman Empire
Bust Portrait of a Boy
2nd century AD
marble
Antikensammlung, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Roman Empire
Erotes bringing in Harvest
AD 350
marble mosaic fragment
(extended as table-top in the 18th century)
Galleria Borghese, Rome

Roman Empire
Putto with Lightning Bolt
AD 50
marble relief
Gallerie degli Uffizi, Florence

Roman Egypt
Funerary Mask of a Child
1st century AD
stucco
Museumslandschaft Hessen Kassel

attributed to Bonifacio Bembo
Portrait of a Youth
before 1480
tempera on panel
Musée Jacquemart-André. Paris

Hans Mielich
Cupid
ca. 1536
tempera on panel
Historisches Museum, Regensburg

Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun
Prince Henryk Lubomirski as Genius of Fame
ca. 1787-88
oil on panel
Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Lucas Cranach the Younger
Portrait of Prince Alexander von Sachsen
ca. 1564
tempera on paper
Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna

Diana Scultori after Raffaellino da Reggio
Conjoined Twins
1577
engraving
Graphische Sammlung, ETH Zürich

Pietro Faccini
Youth wearing a Ruff
ca. 1590
drawing
Fondation Custodia, Paris

Hendrik Goltzius
St John the Baptist
ca. 1595
chiaroscuro woodcut
Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest

Peter Paul Rubens
Vincenzo Gonzaga, later 7th Duke of Mantua
ca. 1604-1605
oil on canvas
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

Bartolomé González
The future Philip IV of Spain at age 8
1613
oil on canvas
Musée Massey, Tarbes

Ottavio Leoni
Portrait of a Boy
ca. 1620
drawing
Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna

Frans Luyckx
Portrait of a Boy
ca. 1635
oil on canvas
Sinebrychoff Art Museum, Helsinki

[Athena returns, accompanied by a herald, a trumpeter, and eleven judges. The essential paraphernalia of law-courts have been set in place: a chair for Athena as presiding officer, benches for the judges, and a table with two voting-urns. Athena takes her seat.] 

Athena:  Herald, make proclamation, and call the public to order; and let the piercing Etruscan trumpet, filled with human breath, sound heavenward and exhibit its shrill voice to the host.  For now that this council is being convened, it will be helpful if all are silent and attentive to my ordinances – both the whole city for all time to come, and also these men [indicating the judges], so that the case may be properly decided.  

[The trumpet is sounded, and the herald is about to make his proclamation when he is forestalled by the unexpected arrival of Apollo.]  

Athena:  Lord Apollo, rule over your own domain.  Say what concern you have with this dispute. 

Apollo:  I have come to bear witness – for this man is a lawful supplicant who came to the hearth of my house, and it was I who purified him from the taint of homicide – and also to speak myself as his advocate.  I bear the responsibility for the killing of this man's mother.  Do you please bring this case before the court, and determine it to the best of your wisdom. 

– Aeschylus, from Eumenides (458 BC), translated by Alan H. Sommerstein (2008)