Standing Figure of a Man
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Derived from classical antiquity, this nude male stands in the contrapposto pose, bearing his weight on his left leg, with his right leg bent, as if in motion. He steps lightly, so that only the toes of his right leg touch the ground. He stands on a laurel wreath, a plant which in antiquity would be waved as a symbol of joy after a military victory. During the Renaissance, small bronzes were kept in cabinets, bringing the gods and goddesses of ancient times into the home. Flaws in the bronze casting suggest that this piece is from the early Renaissance. In 1971, Ulrich Middeldorf rejected Olga Raggio's original attribution to an anonymous Florentine, attributing it instead to the sixteenth-century Sienese artist Francesco di Giorgio Martini (1439-1501), based partly on its resemblance to Francesco's bronze angels in Siena's Duomo. However, such details as the awkward posture and frozen motion of the body relate this work more closely to Francesco's pupil Giacomo Cozzarelli (1453-1515). Standing Figure of a Man is attributed to the circle of Francesco di Giorgio Martini, as uncertainties remain regarding its exact author.
Background drawn from Cleveland Museum of Art
Today's poem
From Sunset to Star Rise
Go from me, summer friends, and tarry not: I am no summer friend, but wintry cold, A silly sheep benighted from the fold, A sluggard with a thorn-choked garden plot. Take counsel, sever from my lot your lot, Dwell in your pleasant places, hoard your gold; Lest you with me should shiver on the wold, Athirst and hungering on a barren spot. For I have hedged me with a thorny hedge, I live alone, I look to die alone: Yet sometimes, when a wind sighs through the sedge, Ghosts of my buried years, and friends come back, My heart goes sighing after swallows flown On sometime summer's unreturning track.
Christina Rossetti · Public domain
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Christina Rossetti (English) wrote romantic and devotional poems, among them "Goblin Market" and "Remember." "From Sunset to Star Rise" belongs to her broader body of introspective and religious verse.
The poem is a sonnet. Its octave rejects "summer friends," urging them to keep their distance from a speaker who describes herself as "wintry cold," isolated, and hedged about "with a thorny hedge." The sestet turns to the isolation's costs: living and expecting to die alone, the speaker admits that memories of "buried years" and departed friends still return, her heart "sighing after swallows flown."
Built on imagery of seasons, the poem sets summer's warmth and companionship against winter's barrenness and solitude. It voices a deliberate withdrawal from human ties while acknowledging the lingering pull of loss and the past.
Background drawn from PoetryDB & Wikipedia