Jan Saenenredam 1665-1607. Taken from the 7 Planetary Gods series.

The artwork of George Catlin bears as much significance aesthetically as it does anthropologically for its time. Known for his predominant realism-inspired approach, he documented extensively the Native Peoples of Northern, Southern and Central America during the early 19th century. From initiation rites to animal studies, hunting scenes to landscapes, Catlin witnessed it all and re-interpreted it with as much grace as genuine interest. His love for the then declining and relatively untouched Native world has allowed these lost cultures to be preserved and catalogued within his art: in many cases acting as a sole reference to some of the rarest sights witnessed by an outsider. Many of those he depicted were deeply rooted around traditional means of adornment and modification of the body for ritual, beauty and religious appeasement. Body suspensions, multiple piercings, stretchings, body painting and tattooing were all commonplace and staple aspects of which is now a diminishing or in some cases, a lost Native life.

www.georgecatlin.org

Existing somewhere within the aftermath of a collision between Classical Art, the macabre and the deconstruction of the human form, lies the work of Italian Oil Painter and Sculptor Nicola Samori. By using darkness as an alienating and overpowering element within his paintings, Samori is able to dramatise and bring his subjects to life, in a way that is both grotesque and hauntingly realistic.

His sculpting work is scattered with tell-tale origins of an elaborate Greco-Roman approach, but have violently been moulded into twisted figures reminiscent of melted humanoid’s. Painting on a mix of copper, wood and linen, he incorporates a range of techniques such as staining, action painting and in many cases actual incompletion; leaving dominant spaces blank or heavily obscured. Peril is at home within his work as decay, but-none-the-less an air of beauty is able to creep through, as we look to his subjects with an equal amount of pity as deserving grace.

www.nicolasamori.com

II
Liquid Peneus was flowing—
And all dark Tempe lay
In Pelion’s shadow, outgrowing
The light of the dying day,
Speeded by my sweet pipings.
The Sileni and Sylvans and fauns,
And the Nymphs of the woods and wave
To the edge of the moist river-lawns,
And the brink of the dewy caves,
And all that did then attend and follow,
Were silent with love,—as you now, Apollo,
With envy of my sweet pipings.

III
I sang of the dancing stars,
I sang of the dedal earth,
And of heaven, and the Giant wars,
And Love, and Death, and Birth.
And then I changed my pipings,—
Singing how down the vale of Mænalus
I pursued a maiden, and clasped a reed.
Gods and men, we are all deluded thus;
It breaks in our bosom, and then we bleed.
All wept—as I think both ye now would,
If envy or age had not frozen your blood—
At the sorrow of my sweet pipings.

Painting by JW Waterhouse; Poem entitled “Hymn of Pan” by Percy Bysshe Shelley

Herbert Draper is well known for interpreting mythological stories into paintings and here he has adapted the legend of Icarus in a truly lavish manner. Draper was inspired by the wings of the birds of paradise when painting this overwhelming piece of art at the turn of the century. To me this painting encompasses the Pre Raphaelite/Symbolist feeling of living fast, dying young and leaving a beautiful corpse in all its extravagant glory.

The Lament for Icarus is currently on display at the Tate Britain in London.

Philip IV of Spain in his parade armour. Gaspar de Crayer. 1620′s

The dissection of a young, beautiful woman directed by J. Ch. G. Lucae (1814-1885) in order to determine the ideal female proportions. Chalk drawing by J. H. Hasselhorst, 1864.