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Michelangelo (by Michelangelo): Self-portrait discovered hidden in his final painting

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 [...]

Another Archive.org discovery, this is a PDF copy of one of Austin Spare’s first illustrated works. Behind the Veil was a small book of mystical fiction by Ethel Rolt Wheeler, published in 1906. Spare was only 20 at the time and the drawings, while accomplished, lack the finesse of his later work. They also owe [...]

The Prophecy is a Michelangelo-esque collaboration between BeautifulMag and digital artist Aymeric Giraudel which you can download at high resolution here and here. (If you want a single picture you’ll have to stitch them together yourself.) Among the models for this are Les Farfadais whose work was mentioned here last June.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
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Previous posts about gay or homoerotic art or artists.

• The art of Robert Sherer

• The art of Goh Mishima, 1924–1989

• The art of Benoit Prévot

• The art of Robert R Bliss, 1925–1981

• The art of Oliver Frey

• The Great God Pan

• Jerry by Paul Cadmus

• The art of Ralf Paschke

• The recurrent pose #26

• The [...]

A belated shout of appreciation for this film whose distribution appears to have been so limited that everyone missed it, me included. That’s a shame as Roman Coppola’s debut (he’s the son of Francis) has a lot to commend it although it helps if you’re familiar with pulpy European spy/science fiction/horror movies of the late [...]

Detail from La Havane by René Portocarrero; photo by C. Marker.
This week’s book finds are a pair of titles I hadn’t come across before in these particular editions, another haul from the vast continent that is the Penguin Books back catalogue. Labyrinths I’ve had for years in a later edition (see below) but the [...]

Hardly a week passes without the religious right in America getting their knickers in a twist over some new iniquity, a condition so commonplace that new outbreaks are barely worth acknowledging. However, this week’s storm in a teacup caught my attention for being art-related.
If there’s one thing certain American Christians have in common with Muslim [...]

Laocoön and His Sons attributed to Agesander, Athenodoros
and Polydorus of Rhodes (c. 160–20 BCE).
No jokes about snakes in a frame, please. Bram Dijkstra’s Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin de Siècle Culture (1986) is a wide-ranging study of the “iconography of misogyny” in 19th century painting. Dijkstra examines the numerous ways that [...]

Portrait of Mephisto #1 (2006).

Portrait of Mephisto #5 (2006).
The carefully-constructed and coloured tableaux of Shanghai-based art Maleonn Ma remind me of Joel-Peter Witkin’s grainier and nastier works only without the body parts or dead babies. The repeated use of Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam in contemporary culture is a whole subject in itself.
Via [...]

Another one bites the dust… What are the odds against two of the last surviving big names of cinema expiring in the same week? I could never get fully behind Antonioni the way I could with Bergman, I didn’t think much of the Neo-Realist school that Antonioni began as a part of and his later [...]

Non-Brits may not be aware that The South Bank Show is a long-running arts programme (or “show”, as Americans prefer) and the last bastion of cultural broadcasting on the otherwise completely moribund ITV channel. Over the years the SBS has produced some great documentaries and this one from 1985 is particularly good, capturing artist Francis [...]

Two Studies for the Risen Christ by Michelangelo (both 1533).
Following the predictable outrage over Cosimo Cavallaro’s My Sweet Lord, aka the Chocolate Jesus, it’s worth remembering that the depiction of Jesus sans clothing is nothing new. Aside from all the paintings of Jesus as a naked infant, a quick search turns up these two examples [...]

Michelangelo’s ‘David’ (1987).
In a similar vein to the dismembered Soviet monument in the previous post, there’s the sculpture of the late, great Eduardo Paolozzi (1924–2005). The giant head of Invention is especially impressive when seen in situ outside London’s Design Museum, its pieces separated by the words of a Leonardo da Vinci quotation: “Human subtlety [...]

The Michelangelo-esque photography of Steven Vaschon.

Left: Michael Jones.
Irony abounds. In the Protect-me-from-what-I-want Dept, Pastor Ted Haggard gave this sermon four days before his gay liaisons were brought to light: “Heavenly Father give us grace and mercy, help us this next week and a half as we go into national elections and Lord we pray for our country. Father we pray [...]

The Netherlands celebrate four hundred years of Rembrandt’s genius.
While looking around for links I noticed this story for the first time:
Margaret S. Livingstone and Bevil R. Conway, neurobiologists at Harvard Medical School, say Rembrandt’s many self-portraits reveal that his eyes are focused in slightly different directions, depriving him of the “stereo” effect that makes vision [...]

This year sees the 20th anniversary of the publication of Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. This landmark comic book, one of the few to deserve the designation “graphic novel”, remains a particular favourite of mine, and one that still excites today for its consummate command of the comics medium. The following is a [...]

Ask anyone for a definition of this term and most people would immediately mention Leonardo Da Vinci (can his reputation survive Dan Brown?) or Michelangelo, the two most highly-regarded geniuses of the Italian Renaissance. While Leonardo’s numerous achievments are well-documented, Michelangelo’s work as a painter and sculptor tends to overshadow his other talents as an [...]

In order to coincide with the British Museum’s exhibition of Michelangelo drawings, the current edition of Gay Times tries to imitate some of the more famous works in their main photo spread. What’s interesting about these pictures is seeing how much they lack the compelling dynamics of the artist at his best. Maybe this is [...]