Library

Mythos, Eros, and Beauty are the coordinates by which the following set of works have been judged and selected

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CREATION

Drama

All the extant plays by Sophocles and Aeschylus.

Sculpture

Mattei Amazon, Lansdowne Amazon, Sciarra Amazon, and Sosicles Amazon (c. 5th c. BC) by Unknown

Laokoön and His Sons (c. 3rd c. BC) by Unknown

Bacchus (c. 1496) by Michelangelo Buonarroti

Enceladus (c. 1677) by Gaspard Marsy 

Painting

The Primavera (c. 1482) by Sandro Botticelli

The Birth of Venus (c. 1485) by Sandro Botticelli

Male Torso (1851) by Jean Ingres

Poetry

Venus and Adonis (c. 1593) by William Shakespeare

Comus (c. 1637) by John Milton

Imaginative literature

Pierre: or, The Ambiguities (1852) by Herman Melville

The Marble Faun: or, The Romance of Monte Beni (1860) by Nathaniel Hawthorne

Music

Symphony No. 9 in D minor (1824) by Ludwig Beethoven

Tristan und Isolde (1865) by Richard Wagner

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SPECULATION

Poetics (c. 4th century BC) by Aristotle

Peri Hypsous (c. 1st century AD) by Longinus

Reflections on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture (1755) by Johann Winckelmann

Laocoön: A Study on the Limits of Painting and Poetry (1766) by Gotthold Lessing

Critique of Judgment (1790) by Immanuel Kant

Biographia Literaria (1817) by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music (1872) by Friedrich Nietzsche

Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873) by Walter Pater

Seven Types of Ambiguity (1873) by William Empson

“The Laugh of the Medusa” (1975) by Hélène Cixous