Characteristic

Oskar Kokoschka
Lecture by Oskar Kokoschka -
Association for Literature and Music
1912
lithograph (poster)
Leopold Museum, Vienna

Anonymous Dutch Artist
Head for Physiognomic Study
1786
etching
(book illustration)
Graphische Sammlung, Zentralbibliothek Zürich

Isaac Israëls
Self Portrait
ca. 1917
oil on canvas
Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, Netherlands

Max Liebermann
Portrait of surgeon Ferdinand Sauerbruch
1932
oil on canvas
Hamburger Kunsthalle

Isaac Oliver
Miniature Portrait of a Man at age 57
1588
watercolor on vellum
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

Pier Francesco Mola
Diogenes
ca. 1650
oil on canvas
Musée Fesch, Ajaccio, Corsica

Lucebert (Lubertus Jacobus Swaanswijk)
Person
1966
acrylic on canvas
Dordrechts Museum, Netherlands

Egon Tschirch
Portrait of artist Adolf Jöhnssen
1927
oil on canvas
Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg

Jacopo Tintoretto
Antique Head of Julius Caesar
ca. 1570-80
drawing
Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam

Oskar Schlemmer
H.K.
1926
watercolor on paper
Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Emil Orlik
The Japanese Master Kano Tomonobu
1901
color woodblock print
Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Jan de Bisschop
Bust of Scipio Africanus
ca. 1660-70
etching
Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, Munich

attributed to Jan Lievens
Portrait of a Man
ca. 1630
oil on panel
Museumslandschaft Hessen Kassel

Melchior Lorck
Cossack Artilleryman
1582
woodcut
Graphische Sammlung, ETH Zürich

Pietro Sarto
Verlaine
1962
lithograph
Cabinet d'Arts Graphiques
des Musées d'Art et d'Histoire Genève

Erich Salomon
Portrait of art collector Eduard von der Heydt
ca. 1930
gelatin silver print
Von der Heydt Museum, Wuppertal

Vasari's account is so interesting because it shows his awareness of the link between the imagination of the artist and that of his public.  Only works that are created in a state of heightened imagination, he said in effect, will appeal to the imagination.  In the context of Renaissance theories and prejudices, insistence on inspiration and imagination goes hand in hand with emphasis on art as the high intellectual activity and the rejection of mere menial skill.  Careful finish betrays the artisan who has to observe the standards of his guild.  The true artist, like the true gentleman, will work with ease.  This is Castiglione's famous doctrine of sprezzatura, the nonchalance which marks the perfect courtier and the perfect artist.  "One single unlabored line, a single brushstroke, drawn with ease so that it seems that the hand moved without any effort or skill and reached its end all by itself, just as the painter intended it, reveals the excellence of the artist."

It is clear that an entirely new idea of art is taking shape here.  It is an art in which the painter's skill in suggesting must be matched by the public's skill in taking hints.  The literal-minded Philistine is excluded from this closed space.  He does not understand the magic of sprezzatura because he has not learned to use his own imagination to project.  He lacks the appropriate mental set to recognize in the loose brushstrokes of a "careless work" the images intended by the artist; least of all is he able to appreciate the secret skill and cunning which hide behind this lack of finish.  

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

Rest

Quinten Metsys
Rest on the Flight into Egypt
ca. 1510
oil on panel
Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, Massachusetts

Anonymous Netherlandish Artist
Rest on the Flight into Egypt
ca. 1550-1600
oil on panel
Museum De Lakenhal, Leiden

Luca Cambiaso
Rest on the Flight into Egypt
ca. 1560
drawing
Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon

Camillo Procaccini
Rest on the Flight into Egypt
ca. 1583
etching
Graphische Sammlung, ETH Zürich

Hans Rottenhammer
Rest on the Flight into Egypt
ca. 1595-97
oil on copper
Alte Pinakothek, Munich

Jan Brueghel the Elder and workshop
Rest on the Flight into Egypt
ca. 1600
oil on panel
Alte Pinakothek, Munich

Francesco Albani
Rest on the Flight into Egypt
ca. 1604
oil on panel
Princeton University Art Museum

Simone Cantarini (il Pesarese)
Rest on the Flight into Egypt
ca. 1630-40
engraving
Graphische Sammlung, ETH Zürich

Simon Vouet
Rest on the Flight into Egypt
ca. 1638-39
oil on canvas
Musée de Grenoble

Claude Lorrain
Rest on the Flight into Egypt
ca. 1640
oil on canvas
Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha

Francesco Albani
Rest on the Flight into Egypt
ca. 1640
oil on canvas
Národní Galerie, Prague

Pier Francesco Mola
Rest on the Flight into Egypt
ca. 1660
drawing
Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Antonio Domenico Triva
Rest on the Flight into Egypt
ca. 1675
etching
Hamburger Kunsthalle

Carlo Saraceni
Rest on the Flight into Egypt
ca. 1692
oil on canvas
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

Ignác Bendl
Rest on the Flight into Egypt
1700
etching
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Giuseppe Bartolomeo Chiari
Rest on the Flight into Egypt
1720
oil on canvas
Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen

The Athenians, as long as the army of the enemy lay about Eleusis and the fields of Thrius and as long as they had any hope it would come on no farther, remembering that also Pleistoanax the son of Pausanias, king of Lacedaemon, when fourteen years before this war he entered Attica with an army of the Peloponnesians as far as Eleusis and Thriasia, retired again and came no farther (for which he was also banished Sparta as thought to have gone back for money), they stirred not.  But when they saw the army now at Acharnas but sixty furlongs from the city, then they thought it no longer to be endured; and when their fields were wasted (as it was likely) in their sight, which the younger sort had never seen before nor the elder but in the Persian war, it was taken for a horrible matter and thought fit by all, especially the youth, to go out and not endure it any longer.  And holding councils apart from one another, they were at much contention, some to make a sally and some to hinder it.  And the priests of the oracles giving out prophecies of all kinds, everyone made the interpretation according to the sway of his own affection.  But the Acharnians, conceiving themselves to be no small part of the Athenians, were they that, whilst their own lands were wasting, most of all urged their going out.  Insomuch as the city was every way in tumult and in choler against Pericles, remembering nothing of what he had formerly admonished them, but reviled him for that being their general he refused to lead them into the field, and imputing unto him the cause of all their evil. 

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

Visualized

Garofalo (Benvenuto Tisi)
Pico transformed by Circe into a Woodpecker
(illustration to Ovid)
ca. 1530-35
oil on panel
Palazzo Barberini, Rome

Anonymous Flemish Painter
Ulysses demanding that Circe reverse her Enchantment
ca. 1570-75
oil on panel
Gallerie degli Uffizi, Florence

Bartolomeo Passarotti
Portrait of Ulisse Aldrovandi as Ulysses with Circe
ca. 1575
oil on canvas
Palazzo Fava, Bologna

Pier Francesco Mola
Homer dictating his Poetry
before 1666
drawing
British Museum

Giacomo del Pò
Circe working her Magic
ca. 1708-1710
oil on canvas
Palazzo Lanfranchi, Matera

Sir James Thornhill
Mercury and Calypso
(study for painted panel at Kiveton House)
ca. 1715
drawing
British Museum

Mathieu Ignace van Brée
Alexander the Great committing the writings of Homer to Safety
ca. 1810
ink and gouache on paper
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

Louis Vincent Léon Pallière
Ulysses and Telemachus slaying the Suitors
1812
oil on canvas
Petit Palais, Paris

Christophe Thomas Degeorge
Ulysses and Telemachus slaying the Suitors
1812
oil on canvas
Musée d'Art Roger Quilliot, Clermont-Ferrand

François Chifflart
Ulysses recognized by Euriclea
1849
oil on canvas
Musée de l'Hôtel Sandelin, Saint-Omer

Julia Margaret Cameron
Circe
1865
albumen silver print from glass negative
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Arnold Böcklin
Sirens
1875
tempera on canvas
Alte Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Louis Chalon
Circe with companions of Ulysses as Pigs
1888
oil on canvas
private collection

Jean-Alfred Marioton
Ulysses and Nausicaa
1888
oil on canvas
Musée d'Orsay, Paris

Max Klinger
The Siren
1895
oil on canvas
Galleria d'Arte Moderna, Florence

Joseph Cornell
Circe III (Surface and Volume in Nature)
ca. 1960-65
printed paper collage and pigment on board
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

Rodolfo Abularach
Circe
1969
drawing
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

But standing now I see

The diver's brilliant bow,

His quiet break from the sea,

With one trained movement throw

The hair from his forehead;

And I, stung by the sun,

Think, semi-satisfied

That, ere the smile is done,

The eye deliberate

May qualify the joy

And that which we create

We also may destroy.

– W.H. Auden (1927)

Arched - II

Erhard Schön
Geometric Figures in Perspective
1538
woodcut
(book illustration)
Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Vienna

Rudolf Weyditz
Triumphal Arch
with Figures of the Seven Liberal Arts
ca. 1550
woodcut
Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Vienna

Pieter Jansz Saenredam
Interior of the Church of Saint Bavo, Haarlem
1635
oil on panel
National Museum, Warsaw

Pier Francesco Mola
Study of Bridge
ca. 1650
drawing
Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna

Herman Coets
Title-Page Design for Nautical Publication
1700
engraving
(printed in sepia)
Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Alessandro Specchi after Carlo Fontana
Triumphal Arch erected for Pope Clement XI
1701
etching
Kupferstichkabinett,
Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden

Filippo Juvarra
Capriccio of Ruins with Triumphal Arch
1732
drawing
Kupferstichkabinett,
Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden

Mauro Antonio Tesi
Church Interior with Statue
ca. 1750-60
drawing
Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna

Gian Paolo Panini
Capriccio with Ruinous Arches
before 1765
watercolor on paper
Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna

Christian Wilhelm Ernst Dietrich
Rock Arch with Holy Image and Pilgrims
1766
drawing
Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna

Christoph Nathe
Young Woman in Antique Dress entering a Grotto
1785
drawing
Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna

Johann Franz Gout
Capriccio of Ruins
1789
tempera on paper
Städel Museum, Frankfurt

Abel Schlicht
Ruin of Antique Baths
ca. 1790
watercolor on paper
Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna

Luigi Rossini
Porta San Sebastiano, Rome
ca. 1830-40
lithograph
Max Planck Institute for Art History, Florence

Carl Wilhelm Gropius
Stage Design for Opera by Daniel Auber
ca. 1840
watercolor on paper
Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden

August von Bayer
View from a Cloister
ca. 1840
oil on canvas
Staatliche Kunsthalle, Karlsruhe

Archidamus, having thus spoken and dismissed the council, first sent Melesippus the son of Diacritus, a man of Sparta, to Athens to try if the Athenians, seeing them now on their journey, would yet in some degree remit of their obstinacy.  But the Athenians neither received him into their city nor presented him to the state; for the opinion of Pericles had already taken place, not to receive from the Lacedaemonians neither herald nor ambassador as long as their army was abroad.  Therefore they sent him back without audience with commandment to be out of their borders the selfsame day, and that hereafter if they would anything with them, they should return everyone to his home and send their ambassadors from thence.  They sent with him also certain persons to convoy him out of the country to the end that no man should confer with him, who, when he came to the limits and was to be dismissed, uttered these words, "This day is the beginning of much evil unto the Grecians," and so departed.  When he returned to the camp, Archidamus, perceiving that they would not relent, dislodged and marched on with his army into their territory.  

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