Bitten in the Eighth Circle: Bouguereau's Dante and Virgil in Hell
A twenty-five-year-old academic painter spent eight months painting two damned souls biting each other in the eighth circle of hell. The Salon hung it on the back wall.
A twenty-five-year-old academic painter spent eight months painting two damned souls biting each other in the eighth circle of hell. The Salon hung it on the back wall.
Cabanel was twenty-three when he painted Lucifer's tears of rage. The painting was rejected from the Salon. A century later it became the most-shared image on Tumblr.
Velazquez painted himself painting the king and queen, who are not in the picture except as a reflection, in a Madrid room you can still stand in.
Monet painted his wife Camille standing on a windy hilltop in 1875. Eleven years later, four years after she died, he painted her again from memory.
Van Gogh's Road with Cypress and Star is the last picture he painted in Provence. It is also the one where he finally told Theo what cypresses meant to him.
Ivan Aivazovsky painted Constantinople nearly forty times. The 1884 view of the Tophane mosque is the one that explains why he kept going back.
Manet's last great painting, A Bar at the Folies-Bergere (1882), hides a mirror that does not work. Here is what is actually broken about it, and why.
Primavera by Botticelli has nine figures. Here is a figure-by-figure decode of each one — Mercury, the Three Graces, Venus, Cupid, Flora, Chloris, Zephyr — read right to left, the way the painting wants to be read.
The Birth of Venus is in the Uffizi, in Florence, in the Botticelli room. Here is exactly where to find it, what is on the walls around it, and how to actually see it through the crowd.
Uffizi Gallery Florence first-timer walkthrough. Where it sits in the city, the route through the U-shaped building, where to enter and exit, and what to do before and after on the same day.