The notion here is to supply the Yeatsian visual
vocabulary by providing as many links as possible to images of places and objects that
appear in his work. One crucial lack so far is the large number of art works that appear
in the two major Dublin galleries, the National Gallery of Ireland and the Municipal
Gallery. As far as I can determine, neither of these institutions has yet posted
images from its collection on the web, nor have I found them in any of the various
virtual museums. If anyone can help with these or any other Yeatsian images, please
email me.
Yeats and the visual arts
The Poems
Urbino's windy hill
picture of Urbino
Michelozzo's latest plan
the San Marco library, Florence
In the green shadow of Ferrara wall
picture of a Ferrara wall
the steep street of Urbino
To where the duchess and her people talked
an Urbino street and the ducal palace
this altar-piece
Cosimo Tura's St George and the Dragon, Ferrara
sinew that has been pulled tight
tomb of Giuliano de'Medici (Night and Day)
tomb of Lorenzo de'Medici (Dusk and Dawn)
O sages standing in God's holy fire
frieze at S. Apollinare Nuovo, Ravenna
detail of Three Wise Men
A starlit or a moonlit dome
interior of dome of Hagia Sophia
A revolutionary soldier kneeling to be blessed.
An Abbot or Archbishop with an upraised hand
Blessing the Tricolour.
Lavery's The Blessing of the Colours
And here's John Synge himself, that rooted man
'Forgetting human words,' a grave deep face.
John Butler Yeats's portrait of Synge (b/w, alas)
half-awakened Adam
Michelangelo's Creation of Adam, Sistine Chapel
The lineaments of a plummet-measured face
funerary kouros
Autobiographies
I had seen Dante's Dream...a picture painted when Rossetti had lost his dramatic power and to-day not very pleasing to me, and its coulour, its people, its romantic architecture had blotted all other pictures away.
Rossetti's Dante's Dream
Titian's Ariosto that I loved beyond other portraits...its grave look, as if waiting for some perfect final event
Titian's Ariosto
Was it he or his father who had possessed the Arab horses, painted by Stubbs?
detail from Stubbs's Mares and Foals in a Landscape
Essays
the lily in the hand of the angel
Rossetti's Ecce Ancilla Domini
When I close my eyes and pronounce the word 'Christianity' and await its unconscious suggestion, I do not see Christ crucified, or the good Shepherd from the catacombs, but a father and mother and their children, a picture by Leonardo da Vinci most often.
The Madonna of the Rocks
some flower of Botticelli's, perhaps, that seems a separate intellectual existence
La Primavera
the face of the Virgin in Siennese painting, preserving, after the supporting saints had lost it, a Byzantine character
Duccio's Maesta
the Spiritual dawn
Raphael's Camera della Segnatura
I have never blamed the brothers Carracci for painting the butcher's shop they came from
Annibale Carracci's The Butcher's Shop
all the world's power in their moving bodies, and in a movement that seemed, so were the hearts of man and beast set upon it, that of a dance
the cavalcade of the Parthenon frieze
A Vision
a precocious and abundant man
Masaccio's Expulsion from Paradise
faces disfigured by their suffering
detail of Masaccio's Expulsion from Paradise
deliberate strangeness
Botticelli's Nativity
Angels and shepherds embracing
detail of Botticelli's Nativity
the materialistic movement...all that has its very image and idol in Bernini's big altar in St. Peter's
Bernini's Cathedra Petri
figures contorted and convulsed by religion as though by the devil
detail of the Cathedra Petri
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