Art History

North wall:

PYTHAGORAS PRAXITELES ANTHEMIUS

West wall, north:

MICHAEL ANGELO DONATELLO GHIBERTI PHEIDIAS CELLINI CANOVA JEAN GOUJON

Entrance

West wall, south:

GIOTTO RAPHAEL TITIAN REMBRANDT MURILLO RUBENS ANDREA DEL SARTO

South wall:

BOTTOCELLI BELLINI CIMABUE CORREGGIO LEONARDO DA VINCI TINTORETTO VELASQUEZ VANDYCK GAINSBOROUGH

East wall:

WREN PHILIBERT DE L'ORME PERRAULT JUAN DE HERRERA MANSART INIGO JONES


(Last night, for reasons that are still obscure but which may become clear in time, I went out and wrote down the names of the artists inscribed on the facade of the Art Gallery of NSW. It was dark night, and there were people exercising distractingly on the forecourt, so perhaps some of my transcription is inaccurate - I will at some point check. On the north wall I suspect some names from antiquity are obscured beneath the recent extensions to the edifice. Underneath each of those four grand names - Giotto, Raphael, Titian, Rembrandt - is a relief, sculpted in bronze, it looks like, after famous scenes from Assyria, Egypt, Greece and Rome, respectively. Again, I will return one day or night to find out exactly what each of these shows. All I know at present is that the first depicts Ashurbanipal, who built the great library at Nineveh where a cuneiform text of the Epic of Gilgamesh was recovered in the mid-19th century.)