I have presumed upon your patience long enough, dear poll entrants; the wait is now over. The votes have all been counted and I can bring you the results: your choices for 'a representative collection of the Arts of Humankind', to be preserved in a sealed container for the benefit of future beings of intelligence who might happen upon it.
When I devised the poll, my intention was to have just one winner in each category. But the way the votes have split, this doesn't always make sense since a few of the outcomes are very close indeed. I've therefore decided that all those artists who obtained 10 or more votes make the cut. It's few enough in any case to fit within the aforementioned container.
There were 133 entries. They yielded the following for the normblog Posterity Collection (numbers of votes are in brackets):
1. Poets: W.B. Yeats (15); Homer (11); T.S. Eliot (10).
2. Playwright: William Shakespeare (93).
3. Novelists: Jane Austen (24); Charles Dickens (22); Leo Tolstoy (14).
4. Composers: J.S. Bach (40); Ludwig van Beethoven (38); Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (35)
5. Jazz musicians: Miles Davis (25); Louis Armstrong (24).
6. Rock or pop stars: The Beatles (41); Bob Dylan (16).
7. Country music stars: Johnny Cash (18); Hank Williams (17).
8. Movie directors: Alfred Hitchcock (21); John Ford (10).
9. Painters: Rembrandt van Rijn (14); Vincent van Gogh (11); Pablo Picasso (10).
10. Photographer: Henri Cartier-Bresson (12).
11. Sculptor: Michelangelo Buonarroti (46).
12. Architects: Andrea Palladio (13); Christopher Wren (13); Frank Lloyd Wright (10).
Thanks, as ever, to all those who took part.