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Philip Pullman ranked second on US banned books list

Temple à la Pensée, dédié à Beethoven, vue en cours de construction (1897).
Another artist discovered whilst searching for something quite unrelated. The Musée d’Orsay are custodians of this drawing by François Garas (1866–1925), and they also have the most substantial appraisal of his career.
François Garas remains a mysterious architect, whose artistic pantheon included Baudelaire and [...]

Faust’s blood, sweat and hell-fire | A lavish new stage production of Goethe.

Looking at Willy Pogàny’s work last week I was reminded that as well as illustrating books he worked in Hollywood for a while as an art director and set designer. Among those jobs was a credit for “Technical staff” on the only film for which director Harry Lachman is remembered today, a curious 1935 melodrama, [...]

Following yesterday’s post, some panoramas of the standing stone complex at Callanish on the isle of Lewis in north west Scotland. The rest of Robin Wilson’s site is also worth exploring for his impressive range of views showing the beauty of Scotland in the summer months.
(Apologies to anyone having trouble accessing the site over the [...]

Ave Pan by the amazing J Allen St John. Via.
In the spirit of basic human generosity I try not to be too anti-Christian here, especially when so many churchgoers these days feel themselves rather beleaguered; after centuries persecuting much of the world, the world has finally pushed them back and it hurts the poor things. [...]

Sturminster Newton, South aisle window (detail).
More from one of Ireland’s great artists. Harry Clarke’s book illustration is oft-reproduced but his stained glass work remains little seen unless you visit the churches where the windows are installed or find a copy of Nicola Gordon Bowe’s out-of-print monograph. Happily there’s a Flickr group who’ve done a great [...]

Satan (1833).
I always enjoy it when a search for a piece of information about an artist leads to works you hadn’t come across before. Today it was a quest for the identity of the Satan statue above, created, as it turns out, by French sculptor Jean-Jacques Feuchère (1807–1852). The Louvre site has another view of [...]

Pan teaching Daphnis to play the panpipes; Roman copy of a Greek original from the 3rd-2nd centuries BCE by Heliodoros.

“The worship of Pan never has died out,” said Mortimer. “Other newer gods have drawn aside his votaries from time to time, but he is the Nature-God to whom all must come back at last. He [...]

Johann Hari: Dear God, stop brainwashing children | Worship is forced on 99 per cent of children without even asking what they think.

Coincidence abounds: on Wednesday I was following a few referral URLs to see who’d been linking here and was led to a Lexic.us page about hermaphrodites which in turn had me looking again at the wonderful Borghese Hermaphroditus in the Louvre. Thursday’s postal delivery brought issue 1 of The Gnostic which prominently features the Louvre [...]

Four out of five Britons repudiate creationism | Thank god for that.

Man is But a Worm by Edward Linley Sambourne (1882).
Happy birthday Charles Darwin. The reaction to Darwin’s work from Punch and other journals was typical. While his studies remain controversial among those who believe there were dinosaurs on Noah’s Ark, his life and work are now celebrated on the Bank of England’s Ten Pound Note [...]

Attenborough: Genesis? It can go forth and multiply

Oscar Wilde’s faithless Christianity

Trigger Finger and two Ribs of Santo Guerro (detail).
Amazing sculpture from Al Farrow’s Reliquaries series. Gun parts, bullets and bones, about which the artist says this:
I am not a gun person. My fascination with guns is with their function and use. It is the ubiquitous presence, seeming necessity and actual accessibility of guns in our [...]

Respect for religion now makes censorship the norm

Falling out with Oscar
| John Gray, Oscar Wilde and Dorian Gray.

Dante’s Inferno, Map of Whole Hell (1587?).
Continuing the theme of yesterday’s post, Wikimedia Commons has a substantial section devoted to Dante’s Inferno including some maps, the best being this one and another, both by Giovanni Stradano aka Stradanus (1523–1605).
And taking a broader view, there’s Michelangelo Cactani’s depiction of Dante’s entire cosmos showing the pit [...]

More cult stuff from Ubuweb, you lucky people. Being a big Tom Phillips enthusiast I’ve been watching A TV Dante (1989) for years, having taped the one and only broadcast of the series. I also bought the accompanying booklet (below).
This ambitious program, produced by the award-winning film director Peter Greenaway and internationally-known artist Tom Phillips, [...]