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More from Ezio Anichini (1886–1948), the Italian artist responsible for yesterday’s Salomé, these are part of a series of postcards on the theme of sacred music dated from between 1915 to 1920. The precision of these drawings is remarkable. See the (complete?) set here. Elsewhere on { feuilleton } • The illustrators archive Previously on [...]

St Eustace (c. 1501) by Albrecht Dürer. As is often the case with his engraving on religious themes, Dürer is less concerned with the Biblical story—in this case St Eustace’s vision of Christ appearing between the horns of a stag—than with the opportunity to render with great fidelity a wealth of natural detail. Everything here [...]

Christ Church, Spitalfields, London, in 2001. A photo I took with a disposable film camera. And so let us beginne; and, as the Fabrick takes its Shape in front of you, alwaies keep the Structure intirely in Mind as you inscribe it. First, you must measure out or cast the Area in as exact a [...]

The Tower of Babel (c. 1563) by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. Seeing as how I have a fetish for Towers of Babel I ought to have examined this one sooner, the copy at the Google Art Project being one which allows you to explore the surface of the picture in greater detail [...]

Judith with the Head of Holofernes (1520–1540) by Lucas Cranach the Elder. It doesn’t take much effort to refute the jeremiads of those who complain that popular culture is exclusively violent, all that’s usually required is to direct attention to Titus Andronicus or The Revenger’s Tragedy. Compared to the stage, the art world seems at [...]

Thanks to Callum for pointing the way to a beautiful set of playing cards designed by Picart le Doux. • Of cigars and pedants by Houman Barekat, in which Vladimir Nabokov has a problem with Henry James. Tangentially related: Post-Punk’s Nabokov: Howard Devoto and Magazine, live from Berlin, 1980. (Given A Song From Under The [...]

The Titan’s Goblet (1833). Thomas Cole’s Titan’s Goblet isn’t featured at the Google Art Project, unfortunately, but the following paintings are, and all benefit from being able to explore their details. Cole’s colossal vessel predates Surrealism by a century, and is one of many paintings which always has me mentally labelling him as the American [...]

Photo by Ursula & David Molenda. Panoramas of Borobudur, the Buddhist monument in Magelang, Central Java, which lay undisturbed and overgrown for centuries until restoration began following the British occupation of the island in the 19th century. The bell-like structures are stupas, many of which contain statues of the Buddha in different symbolic postures. The [...]

Atalanta and Hippomenes (c. 1612). More golden apples appear in this painting by Guido Reni, not the most famous ones in art history—those would be all the Apples of Discord seen in the various Judgements of Paris—these are the fruit of the sacred tree in the Garden of the Hesperides which Hippomenes drops to prevent [...]

A suspended fluid photograph from Demersal, a series by Luka Klikovac. • “Soon, Mr. Lachman was writing occult music. His song “(I’m Always Touched by Your) Presence, Dear,” which appeared on Blondie’s 1977 album Plastic Letters, was an example.” Gary Lachman: from Blondie to Swedenborg. • Neil Krug’s cover art for the new Scissor Sisters [...]

The Martyrdom of St Denis (1885). Léon Bonnat’s depiction of St Denis reaching for his detached head might be included with St Lucy (always shown with her dish of eyeballs) and St Peter of Verona (seldom without an axe stuck in his skull) in a facetious list of Saints Do The Funniest Things. Bonnat’s gory [...]

No Blu-ray as yet but this is another excellent BFI release so it looks and sounds fantastic. There’s been some grumbling that the 1971 director’s cut is still being embargoed by Warner Brothers but when the rest of the film looks so pristine I find it difficult to get worked up over a few missing [...]

It’s taken me a while to see this but the long search for a genuinely psychedelic feature film is over. That’s genuinely psychedelic not in the debased sense of a handful of garish or trippy visuals, but in the full-spectrum expanded-consciousness sense for which Humphrey Osmond invented the term in 1956: I have tried to [...]

Growing up in the 1970s put cinema-going kids of my generation in a frustrating position: we knew that the censorship of decades past was over but we weren’t old enough to see any of the films benefiting from the relaxed strictures. Consequently some notorious releases grew larger in the imagination than they might have otherwise, [...]

Portrait of Dr. Ignacio Chavez (1957) by Remedios Varo (1908–1963) some of whose Surrealist paintings can be seen at Frey Norris, San Francisco, from 19th January. There’s also In Wonderland: The Surrealist Adventures of Women Artists in Mexico and the United States at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art from 29th January. The current crop [...]

Here’s a picture whose myriad details I’ve wanted to scrutinise for many years. Lieven Cruyl was the draughtsman and Coenraet Decker the etcher while the picture itself appears as an illustration in Athanasius Kircher’s (deep breath) Turris Babel, Sive Archontologia Qua Primo Priscorum post diluvium hominum vita, mores rerumque gestarum magnitudo, Secundo Turris fabrica civitatumque [...]

The Breamore Miz-Maze, Hampshire. Photo by Jim Champion. As part of the work-related research this week I was looking for designs of old turf labyrinths. It turns out I have two pages of the things in a book I’d earlier considered dropping into Oxfam so that particular volume may have gained a reprieve. Before I [...]

Since John Martin’s tumultuous canvases are back in the news it’s worth remembering another 19th-century painter of Biblical cataclysm, Francis Danby (1793–1861), whose enormous The Deluge (1840) used to hang in the same room as the Martins at Tate Britain. Danby was a contemporary of Martin although not as enthusiastic about this kind of subject [...]

Every man and every woman is a star by Sveta Dorosheva. • Matt Taylor (illustration) with Gregg Kulick and Paul Buckley (design) provide new Penguin covers for John Le Carré. I love the look which seems inspired by Daniel Kleinman’s title sequence for Casino Royale even if it doesn’t quite suit the shabby world of [...]

A design by Emma Kunz (1892–1963). • Following the news this week it’s worth reminding people of a great post put together by Adam Curtis back in January, Rupert Murdoch—A portrait of Satan. One detail there concerns the death of chat show host Russell Harty in 1988. This week the London Review of Books posted [...]