Night

Robert Mapplethorpe
Marianne Faithfull
1976
gelatin silver print
Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh

Thomas Ruff
Nacht 21
1992
C-print
Museum of Modern Art, New York

Bartolomé Estebán Murillo
The Vision of Fray Julián of Alcalá
(Ascension of the Soul of King Philip II of Spain)
1645–46
oil on canvas
Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts

Robert Frank
New Yorker Theater, New York
1962
gelatin silver print
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Takuma Nakahira
La Nuit 3
ca. 1969
photogravure
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Giovanni Domenico Lombardi (l'Omino)
Adoration of the Shepherds
ca. 1735-40
oil on canvas
Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Lucca

Alvin Langdon Coburn
New York Subway Entrance, Madison Square Park
1912
photogravure
Princeton University Art Museum

Samuel Palmer
Cornfield by Moonlight
ca. 1830
watercolor and gouache on paper
British Museum

Eli Reed
Castro Theater, San Francisco
ca. 1980
gelatin silver print
Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (Achenbach Foundation)

Augusto Giacometti
Summer Night
1917
oil on canvas
Museum of Modern Art, New York

Arthur Segal
RCA Building
ca. 1949
gelatin silver print
Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco
(Achenbach Foundation)

Kohei Yoshiyuki
Untitled
1979
gelatin silver print
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Brassaï
Les Arbres des quais, avec le Pont Neuf
ca. 1945
gelatin silver print
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Edward Hopper
Night Windows
1928
oil on canvas
Museum of Modern Art, New York

Matthew Pillsbury
Tanya & Sartaj Gill - CSI: Miami
2002
inkjet print
Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York

Weegee
Tenement Fire
ca. 1944
gelatin silver print
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Jacopo Bassano
The Deposition
ca. 1575-77
oil on canvas
Musée du Louvre

    To the true Browne enthusiast, indeed, there is something almost shocking about the state of mind which would exchange 'pensile' for 'hanging' and 'asperous' for 'rough,' and would do away with 'digladiation' and 'quodlibetically' altogether.  The truth is, that there is a great gulf fixed between those who naturally dislike the ornate, and those who naturally love it.  There is no remedy; and to attempt to ignore this fact only emphasizes it the more.  Anyone who is jarred by the expression 'prodigal blazes' had better immediately shut up Sir Thomas Browne.  

– Lytton Strachey on Sir Thomas Browne (1906)

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)

Genoux - II

Bartolomeo Montagna
Penitent St Jerome
ca. 1500-1507
oil and tempera on canvas
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa

Pietro Perugino
St Jerome in the Wilderness
ca. 1498-1502
oil on panel
Musée des Beaux-Arts de Caen

Hans Baldung
St Jerome
ca. 1506
chiaroscuro woodcut
Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna

El Greco
St Jerome
ca. 1610-14
oil on canvas
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

Giovanni Lanfranco
The Annunciation
ca. 1616
oil on canvas
Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nîmes

Niccolò Circignani (il Pomarancio)
The Annunciation
ca. 1560
oil on panels
Musée Fesch, Ajaccio, Corsica

Hans Baldung
Virgin and Child with Cherubs
1516
oil on panel
Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg

Parmigianino (Francesco Mazzola)
Virgin and Child with young St John the Baptist
ca. 1527-30
drawing
Rhode Island School of Design, Providence

Matthias Stom
Adoration of the Magi
ca. 1633
oil on canvas
Musée des Augustins de Toulouse

Correggio (Antonio Allegri)
Adoration of the Child
ca. 1518-20
oil on canvas
Gallerie degli Uffizi, Florence

Giuseppe Caletti (il Cremonese)
St Roch kneeling on a Stone
ca. 1620-30
etching
Metropolitan Museum of Art,  New York

Pierre Subleyras
Drapery Study - Kneeling Prelate
before 1749
drawing
Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna

Christian Wilhelm Ernst Dietrich
Return of the Prodigal Son
1730
drawing
Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna

Rueland Frueauf the Elder
Christ on the Mount of Olives
ca. 1490-91
oil on panel
(altarpiece fragment)
Belvedere Museum, Vienna

Hippolyte Flandrin
Sacrifice of Isaac
ca. 1860
oil on board
Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Hippolyte Flandrin
Fra Angelico overcome with Piety while Painting
and spied upon by Adoring Angels
1894
oil on canvas
Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rouen

The Plataeans, when they perceived that the Thebans were already entered and had surprised the city, through fear and opinion that more were entered than indeed were (for they could not see them in the night), came to composition and accepting the conditions rested quiet, and the rather, for that they had yet done no man harm.  But whilst that these things were treating, they observed that the Thebans were not many and thought that if they should set upon them, they might easily have the victory.  For the Plataean commons were not willing to have revolted from the Athenians.  Wherefore it was thought fit to undertake the matter, and they united themselves by digging through the common walls between house and house that they might not be discovered as they passed the streets.  They also placed carts in the streets without the cattle that drew them to serve them instead of a wall, and every other thing they put in readiness, as they severally seemed necessary for the present enterprise.  When all things according to their means were ready, they marched from their houses towards the enemies, taking their time while it was yet night and a little before the break of day because they would not have to charge them when they should be emboldened by the light and on equal terms, but when they should by night be terrified and inferior to them in knowledge of the places of the city.  So they forthwith set upon them and came quickly up to hand strokes.

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