RON HENGGELER

Sublime Beauty: Raphael's "Portrait of a Lady with a Unicorn"

At the palace of the Legion of Honor
January 9, 2016 – April 10, 2016

This focused exhibition features one of Raphael’s most beguiling and enigmatic paintings. The masterpiece, presented in the United States for the first time, is lent by the Galleria Borghese in Rome, where it was first recorded in the collection in 1682.

Portrait of a Lady with a Unicorn (ca. 1505–1506) features an unidentified blond-haired sitter and epitomizes the beauty of Raphael’s female portraits during his Florentine period. The exhibition explores the possible identity of this subject, as well as the painting’s distinct iconography, including the unicorn she holds in her lap. Scholars believe that the painting was commissioned to celebrate a wedding, and the unicorn, a conventional symbol of chastity, may offer clues to her familial lineage.

A view of the distant San Francisco from the Pan Toll Road on Mt. Tamalpais

A view of the distant San Francisco from the Pan Toll Road on Mt. Tamalpais

A view of the distant Stinson Beach and Bolinas from the West Ridgecrest Road on Mt Tamalpais

A view of the distant Stinson Beach and Bolinas from the West Ridgecrest road on Mt Tamalpais

A view of the distant Bolinas Lagoon from the West Ridgecrest road on Mt Tamalpais

A lone coyote being harassed by three crows on the West Ridgecrest Road on Mt Tamalpais

My soul can find no staircase to Heaven unless it be through Earth's loveliness.

Michelangelo

Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better.

Albert Einstein

The good man is the friend of all living things.

Mahatma Gandhi

Nature always wears the colors of the spirit.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Trees are the earth's endless effort to speak to the listening heaven.

Rabindranath Tagore

One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.

William Shakespeare

Mother Nature is always speaking. She speaks in a language understood within the peaceful mind of the sincere observer. Leopards, cobras, monkeys, rivers and trees; they all served as my teachers when I lived as a wanderer in the Himalayan foothills.

Radhanath Swami

The woods are lovely, dark and deep. But I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep.

Robert Frost

It is not so much for its beauty that the forest makes a claim upon men's hearts, as for that subtle something, that quality of air that emanation from old trees, that so wonderfully changes and renews a weary spirit.

Robert Louis Stevenson

In all things of nature there is something of the marvelous.

Aristotle

Nature uses human imagination to lift her work of creation to even higher levels.

Luigi Pirandello

The best remedy for those who are afraid, lonely or unhappy is to go outside, somewhere where they can be quiet, alone with the heavens, nature and God. Because only then does one feel that all is as it should be.
Anne Frank

Nature is so powerful, so strong. Capturing its essence is not easy - your work becomes a dance with light and the weather. It takes you to a place within yourself.

Annie Leibovitz

There is pleasure in the pathless woods, there is rapture in the lonely shore, there is society where none intrudes, by the deep sea, and music in its roar; I love not Man the less, but Nature more.

Lord Byron

The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness.

John Muir

The nature of God is a circle of which the center is everywhere and the circumference is nowhere.

Empedocles

A bird doesn't sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song.

Maya Angelou

As the poet said, 'Only God can make a tree,' probably because it's so hard to figure out how to get the bark on.

Woody Allen

The mountains are calling and I must go.

John Muir

How inappropriate to call this planet Earth when it is quite clearly Ocean.

Arthur C. Clarke

I understood at a very early age that in nature, I felt everything I should feel in church but never did. Walking in the woods, I felt in touch with the universe and with the spirit of the universe.

Alice Walker

I knew, of course, that trees and plants had roots, stems, bark, branches and foliage that reached up toward the light. But I was coming to realize that the real magician was light itself.

Edward Steichen

Sunshine is delicious, rain is refreshing, wind braces us up, snow is exhilarating; there is really no such thing as bad weather, only different kinds of good weather.

John Ruskin

It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth. I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn't feel like a giant. I felt very, very small.

Neil Armstrong

The sun, with all those planets revolving around it and dependent on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as if it had nothing else in the universe to do.

Galileo Galilei

Nature is the source of all true knowledge. She has her own logic, her own laws, she has no effect without cause nor invention without necessity.

Leonardo da Vinci

I love to think of nature as an unlimited broadcasting station, through which God speaks to us every hour, if we will only tune in.

George Washington Carver

Even Kings and emperors with heaps of wealth and vast dominion cannot compare with an ant filled with the love of God.

Guru Nanak

In every walk with nature one receives far more than he seeks.

John Muir

For every person who has ever lived there has come, at last, a spring he will never see. Glory then in the springs that are yours.
Pam Brown

If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.

Carl Sagan

And this, our life, exempt from public haunt, finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything.

William Shakespeare

A woodland in full color is awesome as a forest fire, in magnitude at least, but a single tree is like a dancing tongue of flame to warm the heart.

Hal Borland

The poetry of the earth is never dead.

John Keats

Just living is not enough... one must have sunshine, freedom, and a little flower.

Hans Christian Andersen

Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.

Helen Keller

Nature is trying very hard to make us succeed, but nature does not depend on us. We are not the only experiment.

R. Buckminster Fuller

To me a lush carpet of pine needles or spongy grass is more welcome than the most luxurious Persian rug.

Helen Keller

To cherish what remains of the Earth and to foster its renewal is our only legitimate hope of survival.

Wendell Berry

I experience a period of frightening clarity in those moments when nature is so beautiful. I am no longer sure of myself, and the paintings appear as in a dream.

Vincent Van Gogh

Reading about nature is fine, but if a person walks in the woods and listens carefully, he can learn more than what is in books, for they speak with the voice of God.

George Washington Carver

I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars.

Walt Whitman

There are no passengers on spaceship earth. We are all crew.

Marshall McLuhan

Some people walk in the rain, others just get wet.

Roger Miller

Let the rain kiss you. Let the rain beat upon your head with silver liquid drops. Let the rain sing you a lullaby.
Langston Hughes

Sunshine is delicious, rain is refreshing, wind braces us up, snow is exhilarating; there is really no such thing as bad weather, only different kinds of good weather.

John Ruskin

The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way. Some see nature all ridicule and deformity... and some scarce see nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself.

William Blake

I would feel more optimistic about a bright future for man if he spent less time proving that he can outwit Nature and more time tasting her sweetness and respecting her seniority.

E. B. White

The ground we walk on, the plants and creatures, the clouds above constantly dissolving into new formations - each gift of nature possessing its own radiant energy, bound together by cosmic harmony.

Ruth Bernhard

I go to nature to be soothed and healed, and to have my senses put in order.

John Burroughs

The world is mud-luscious and puddle-wonderful.

e. e. cummings

For an Impressionist to paint from nature is not to paint the subject, but to realize sensations.

Paul Cezanne

Just living is not enough... one must have sunshine, freedom, and a little flower.

Hans Christian Andersen

The San Francisco Bay Area seen from the summit of Mt Tamalpais

San Francisco seen from the summit of Mt Tamalpais with a 300mm zoom lens

I thank you God for this most amazing day, for the leaping greenly spirits of trees, and for the blue dream of sky and for everything which is natural, which is infinite, which is yes.

e. e. cummings

When I have a terrible need of - shall I say the word - religion. Then I go out and paint the stars.

Vincent Van Gogh