William Shakespeare | The Sonnets, 1609

Italian translation ➦ William Shakespeare ~ I Sonetti, 1609

Sonnet V

Those hours, that with gentle work did frame

The lovely gaze where every eye doth dwell,

Will play the tyrants to the very same

And that unfair which fairly doth excel:

For never-resting time leads summer on

To hideous winter and confounds him there;

Sap cheque'd with frost and lusty leaves quite gone,

Beauty o'ersnow'd and bareness every where:

Then, were not summer's distillation left,

A liquid prisoner pent in walls of glass,

Beauty's effect with beauty were bereft,

Nor it nor no remembrance what it was:

But flowers distill'd though they with winter meet,

Leese but their show; their substance still lives sweet.

Tom Lovell | Western painter and illustrator

Tom Lovell (1909-1997) was a founding member of the National Academy of Western Art. He received many honors for his illustrations and paintings. He was winner of the prestigious Prix de West award twice for his paintings. He was inducted into the Society of Illustrators in 1974. In 1992, Lovell received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Cowboy Hall of Fame and the Robert Lougheed Memorial Award for Traditional Painter of Western History.

Robert Hagan, 1947 | Western painting

Robert Hagan raised in the lush, languorous sub-tropical northern New South Wales, Australia and educated at Newcastle University, he communicates in a typical offhanded Aussie manner.

Widely traveled with studios in Suffolk, England, San Diego, USA, Southport, Australia and Pattaya, Thailand.

Lorenzo Bartolini | Neoclassical sculptor

Lorenzo Bartolini (7 January 1777 - 20 January 1850) has been recognised as one of the great sculptors of Europe.

His style is quite different from the traditional Neo-Classical style of Antonio Canova and Bertel Thorvaldsen, because it is not based on the antique or on standard Academic principles.

He was a controversial and polemical artist.

His fascinating life has all the drama of a novel by Stendhal.

Giambologna | Hercules and the Centaur Nessus, 1599

The marble group of Hercules and the Centaur Nessus, was completed in 1599 by Flemish sculptor Giambologna, born Jean Boulogne (1529-1608). The sculpture was carved, impressively, from a single block of marble by Giambologna and it sits in the open-air gallery Loggia dei Lanzi on the Piazza della Signoria in Florence, among the square's other famous marble occupants.

Showing an advanced understanding of anatomy - visible in Hercules' rib cage, showing through his taut skin and the veined legs of the centaur, poised in battle - Giambologna's statue is a powerful evocation of the strength of mortal man.