Chiara C. Rizzarda's Blog, page 22

#AdventCalendar 3: The Phantom Coach

Amelia B. Edwards (1831–1892) was a pioneering English novelist, journalist, traveller and Egyptologist, recognized for her significant contributions to the popularization of Egyptology during the Victorian era. Her literary career began early, with her first poem published at age seven and her first novel, My Brother’s Wife, released in 1855; she later gained fame for her novels and ghost stories, notably Barbara’s History (1864) and The Phantom Coach (1864) presented below, but her most influential work was her travelogue A Thousand Miles Up the Nile (1877), which documented her journey through Egypt and highlighted the threats to its ancient monuments from tourism and modern development.

The story of The Phantom Coach follows a sportsman who, eager to return home to his wife, departs from the residence of an old recluse late at night. As he travels through a desolate landscape blanketed in snow, he encounters a mysterious coach.

The circumstances I am about to relate to you have truth to recommend them. They happened to myself, and my recollection of them is as vivid as if they had taken place only yesterday. Twenty years, however, have gone by since that night. During those twenty years I have told the story to but one other person. I tell it now with a reluctance which I find it difficult to overcome. All I entreat, meanwhile, is that you will abstain from forcing your own conclusions upon me. I want nothing explained away. I desire no arguments. My mind on this subject is quite made up, and, having the testimony of my own senses to rely upon, I prefer to abide by it.

Well! It was just twenty years ago, and within a day or two of the end of the grouse season. I had been out all day with my gun, and had had no sport to speak of. The wind was due east; the month, December; the place, a bleak wide moor in the far north of England. And I had lost my way. It was not a pleasant place in which to lose one’s way, with the first feathery flakes of a coming snowstorm just fluttering down upon the heather, and the leaden evening closing in all around. I shaded my eyes with my hand, and staled anxiously into the gathering darkness, where the purple moorland melted into a range of low hills, some ten or twelve miles distant. Not the faintest smoke-wreath, not the tiniest cultivated patch, or fence, or sheep-track, met my eyes in any direction. There was nothing for it but to walk on, and take my chance of finding what shelter I could, by the way. So I shouldered my gun again, and pushed wearily forward; for I had been on foot since an hour after daybreak, and had eaten nothing since breakfast.

Meanwhile, the snow began to come down with ominous steadiness, and the wind fell. After this, the cold became more intense, and the night came rapidly up. As for me, my prospects darkened with the darkening sky, and my heart grew heavy as I thought how my young wife was already watching for me through the window of our little inn parlour, and thought of all the suffering in store for her throughout this weary night. We had been married four months, and, having spent our autumn in the Highlands, were now lodging in a remote little village situated just on the verge of the great English moorlands. We were very much in love, and, of course, very happy. This morning, when we parted, she had implored me to return before dusk, and I had promised her that I would. What would I not have given to have kept my word!

Even now, weary as I was, I felt that with a supper, an hour’s rest, and a guide, I might still get back to her before midnight, if only guide and shelter could be found.

And all this time, the snow fell and the night thickened. I stopped and shouted every now and then, but my shouts seemed only to make the silence deeper. Then a vague sense of uneasiness came upon me, and I began to remember stories of travellers who had walked on and on in the falling snow until, wearied out, they were fain to lie down and sleep their lives away. Would it be possible, I asked myself, to keep on thus through all the long dark night? Would there not come a time when my limbs must fail, and my resolution give way? When I, too, must sleep the sleep of death. Death! I shuddered. How hard to die just now, when life lay all so bright before me! How hard for my darling, whose whole loving heart but that thought was not to be borne! To banish it, I shouted again, louder and longer, and then listened eagerly. Was my shout answered, or did I only fancy that I heard a far-off cry? I halloed again, and again the echo followed. Then a wavering speck of light came suddenly out of the dark, shifting, disappearing, growing momentarily nearer and brighter. Running towards it at full speed, I found myself, to my great joy, face to face with an old man and a lantern.

“Thank God!” was the exclamation that burst involuntarily from my lips.

 

Blinking and frowning, he lifted his lantern and peered into my face.

“What for?” growled he, sulkily.

“Well — for you. I began to fear I should be lost in the snow.”

“Eh, then, folks do get cast away hereabouts fra’ time to time, an’ what’s to hinder you from bein’ cast away likewise, if the Lord’s so minded?”

“If the Lord is so minded that you and I shall be lost together, friend, we must submit,” I replied; “but I don’t mean to be lost without you. How far am I now from Dwolding?”

“A gude twenty mile, more or less.”

“And the nearest village?”

“The nearest village is Wyke, an’ that’s twelve mile t’other side.”

“Where do you live, then?”

“Out yonder,” said he, with a vague jerk of the lantern.

“You’re going home, I presume?”

“Maybe I am.”

“Then I’m going with you.”

The old man shook his head, and rubbed his nose reflectively with the handle of the lantern.

“It ain’t o’ no use,” growled he. “He ‘ont let you in — not he.”

“We’ll see about that,” I replied, briskly. “Who is He?”

“The master.”

“Who is the master?”

“That’s nowt to you,” was the unceremonious reply.

“Well, well; you lead the way, and I’ll engage that the master shall give me shelter and a supper to-night.”

“Eh, you can try him!” muttered my reluctant guide; and, still shaking his head, he hobbled, gnome-like, away through the falling snow. A large mass loomed up presently out of the darkness, and a huge dog rushed out, barking furiously.

“Is this the house?” I asked.

“Ay, it’s the house. Down, Bey!” And he fumbled in his pocket for the key.

I drew up close behind him, prepared to lose no chance of entrance, and saw in the little circle of light shed by the lantern that the door was heavily studded with iron nails, like the door of a prison. In another minute he had turned the key and I had pushed past him into the house.

Once inside, I looked round with curiosity, and found myself in a great raftered hall, which served, apparently, a variety of uses. One end was piled to the roof with corn, like a barn. The other was stored with flour-sacks, agricultural implements, casks, and all kinds of miscellaneous lumber; while from the beams overhead hung rows of hams, flitches, and bunches of dried herbs for winter use. In the centre of the floor stood some huge object gauntly dressed in a dingy wrapping-cloth, and reaching half way to the rafters. Lifting a corner of this cloth, I saw, to my surprise, a telescope of very considerable size, mounted on a rude movable platform, with four small wheels. The tube was made of painted wood, bound round with bands of metal rudely fashioned; the speculum, so far as I could estimate its size in the dim light, measured at least fifteen inches in diameter. While I was yet examining the instrument, and asking myself whether it was not the work of some self-taught optician, a bell rang sharply.

“That’s for you,” said my guide, with a malicious grin. “Yonder’s his room.”

 

He pointed to a low black door at the opposite side of the hall. I crossed over, rapped somewhat loudly, and went in, without waiting for an invitation. A huge, white-haired old man rose from a table covered with books and papers, and confronted me sternly.

“Who are you?” said he. “How came you here? What do you want?”

“James Murray, barrister-at-law. On foot across the moor. Meat, drink, and sleep.”

He bent his bushy brows into a portentous frown.

“Mine is not a house of entertainment,” he said, haughtily. “Jacob, how dared you admit this stranger?”

“I didn’t admit him,” grumbled the old man. “He followed me over the muir, and shouldered his way in before me. I’m no match for six foot two.”

“And pray, sir, by what right have you forced an entrance into my house?”

“The same by which I should have clung to your boat, if I were drowning. The right of self-preservation.”

“Self-preservation?”

“There’s an inch of snow on the ground already,” I replied, briefly; “and it would be deep enough to cover my body before daybreak.”

He strode to the window, pulled aside a heavy black curtain, and looked out.

“It is true,” he said. “You can stay, if you choose, till morning. Jacob, serve the supper.”

With this he waved me to a seat, resumed his own, and became at once absorbed in the studies from which I had disturbed him.

I placed my gun in a corner, drew a chair to the hearth, and examined my quarters at leisure. Smaller and less incongruous in its arrangements than the hall, this room contained, nevertheless, much to awaken my curiosity. The floor was carpetless. The whitewashed walls were in parts scrawled over with strange diagrams, and in others covered with shelves crowded with philosophical instruments, the uses of many of which were unknown to me. On one side of the fireplace, stood a bookcase filled with dingy folios; on the other, a small organ, fantastically decorated with painted carvings of medieval saints and devils. Through the half-opened door of a cupboard at the further end of the room, I saw a long array of geological specimens, surgical preparations, crucibles, retorts, and jars of chemicals; while on the mantelshelf beside me, amid a number of small objects, stood a model of the solar system, a small galvanic battery, and a microscope. Every chair had its burden. Every corner was heaped high with books. The very floor was littered over with maps, casts, papers, tracings, and learned lumber of all conceivable kinds.

I stared about me with an amazement increased by every fresh object upon which my eyes chanced to rest. So strange a room I had never seen; yet seemed it stranger still, to find such a room in a lone farmhouse amid those wild and solitary moors! Over and over again, I looked from my host to his surroundings, and from his surroundings back to my host, asking myself who and what he could be? His head was singularly fine; but it was more the head of a poet than of a philosopher. Broad in the temples, prominent over the eyes, and clothed with a rough profusion of perfectly white hair, it had all the ideality and much of the ruggedness that characterises the head of Louis von Beethoven. There were the same deep lines about the mouth, and the same stern furrows in the brow. There was the same concentration of expression. While I was yet observing him, the door opened, and Jacob brought in the supper. His master then closed his book, rose, and with more courtesy of manner than he had yet shown, invited me to the table.

A dish of ham and eggs, a loaf of brown bread, and a bottle of admirable sherry, were placed before me.

“I have but the homeliest farmhouse fare to offer you, sir,” said my entertainer. “Your appetite, I trust, will make up for the deficiencies of our larder.”

 

I had already fallen upon the viands, and now protested, with the enthusiasm of a starving sportsman, that I had never eaten anything so delicious.

He bowed stiffly, and sat down to his own supper, which consisted, primitively, of a jug of milk and a basin of porridge. We ate in silence, and, when we had done, Jacob removed the tray. I then drew my chair back to the fireside. My host, somewhat to my surprise, did the same, and turning abruptly towards me, said:

“Sir, I have lived here in strict retirement for three-and-twenty years. During that time, I have not seen as many strange faces, and I have not read a single newspaper. You are the first stranger who has crossed my threshold for more than four years. Will you favour me with a few words of information respecting that outer world from which I have parted company so long?”

“Pray interrogate me,” I replied. “I am heartily at your service.”

He bent his head in acknowledgment; leaned forward, with his elbows resting on his knees and his chin supported in the palms of his hands; stared fixedly into the fire; and proceeded to question me.

His inquiries related chiefly to scientific matters, with the later progress of which, as applied to the practical purposes of life, he was almost wholly unacquainted. No student of science myself, I replied as well as my slight information permitted; but the task was far from easy, and I was much relieved when, passing from interrogation to discussion, he began pouring forth his own conclusions upon the facts which I had been attempting to place before him. He talked, and I listened spellbound. He talked till I believe he almost forgot my presence, and only thought aloud. I had never heard anything like it then; I have never heard anything like it since. Familiar with all systems of all philosophies, subtle in analysis, bold in generalisation, he poured forth his thoughts in an uninterrupted stream, and, still leaning forward in the same moody attitude with his eyes fixed upon the fire, wandered from topic to topic, from speculation to speculation, like an inspired dreamer. From practical science to mental philosophy; from electricity in the wire to electricity in the nerve; from Watts to Mesmer, from Mesmer to Reichenbach, from Reichenbach to Swedenborg, Spinoza, Condillac, Descartes, Berkeley, Aristotle, Plato, and the Magi and mystics of the East, were transitions which, however bewildering in their variety and scope, seemed easy and harmonious upon his lips as sequences in music. By-and-by — I forget now by what link of conjecture or illustration — he passed on to that field which lies beyond the boundary line of even conjectural philosophy, and reaches no man knows whither. He spoke of the soul and its aspirations; of the spirit and its powers; of second sight; of prophecy; of those phenomena which, under the names of ghosts, spectres, and supernatural appearances, have been denied by the sceptics and attested by the credulous, of all ages.

“The world,” he said, “grows hourly more and more sceptical of all that lies beyond its own narrow radius; and our men of science foster the fatal tendency. They condemn as fable all that resists experiment. They reject as false all that cannot be brought to the test of the laboratory or the dissecting-room. Against what superstition have they waged so long and obstinate a war, as against the belief in apparitions? And yet what superstition has maintained its hold upon the minds of men so long and so firmly? Show me any fact in physics, in history, in archæology, which is supported by testimony so wide and so various. Attested by all races of men, in all ages, and in all climates, by the soberest sages of antiquity, by the rudest savage of to-day, by the Christian, the Pagan, the Pantheist, the Materialist, this phenomenon is treated as a nursery tale by the philosophers of our century. Circumstantial evidence weighs with them as a feather in the balance. The comparison of causes with effects, however valuable in physical science, is put aside as worthless and unreliable. The evidence of competent witnesses, however conclusive in a court of justice, counts for nothing. He who pauses before he pronounces, is condemned as a trifler. He who believes, is a dreamer or a fool.”

He spoke with bitterness, and, having said thus, relapsed for some minutes into silence. Presently he raised his head from his hands, and added, with an altered voice and manner, “I, sir, paused, investigated, believed, and was not ashamed to state my convictions to the world. I, too, was branded as a visionary, held up to ridicule by my contemporaries, and hooted from that field of science in which I had laboured with honour during all the best years of my life. These things happened just three-and-twenty years ago. Since then, I have lived as you see me living now, and the world has forgotten me, as I have forgotten the world. You have my history.”

“It is a very sad one,” I murmured, scarcely knowing what to answer.

“It is a very common one,” he replied. “I have only suffered for the truth, as many a better and wiser man has suffered before me.”

 

He rose, as if desirous of ending the conversation, and went over to the window.

“It has ceased snowing,” he observed, as he dropped the curtain, and came back to the fireside.

“Ceased!” I exclaimed, starting eagerly to my feet. “Oh, if it were only possible — but no! it is hopeless. Even if I could find my way across the moor, I could not walk twenty miles to-night.”

“Walk twenty miles to-night!” repeated my host. “What are you thinking of?”

“Of my wife,” I replied, impatiently. “Of my young wife, who does not know that I have lost my way, and who is at this moment breaking her heart with suspense and terror.”

“Where is she?”

“At Dwolding, twenty miles away.”

“At Dwolding,” he echoed, thoughtfully. “Yes, the distance, it is true, is twenty miles; but — are you so very anxious to save the next six or eight hours?”

“So very, very anxious, that I would give ten guineas at this moment for a guide and a horse.”

“Your wish can be gratified at a less costly rate,” said he, smiling. “The night mail from the north, which changes horses at Dwolding, passes within five miles of this spot, and will be due at a certain cross-road in about an hour and a quarter. If Jacob were to go with you across the moor, and put you into the old coach-road, you could find your way, I suppose, to where it joins the new one?”

“Easily — gladly.”

He smiled again, rang the bell, gave the old servant his directions, and, taking a bottle of whisky and a wineglass from the cupboard in which he kept his chemicals, said:

“The snow lies deep, and it will be difficult walking to-night on the moor. A glass of usquebaugh before you start?”

I would have declined the spirit, but he pressed it on me, and I drank it. It went down my throat like liquid flame, and almost took my breath away.

 

“It is strong,” he said; “but it will help to keep out the cold. And now you have no moments to spare. Good night!”

I thanked him for his hospitality, and would have shaken hands, but that he had turned away before I could finish my sentence. In another minute I had traversed the hall, Jacob had locked the outer door behind me, and we were out on the wide white moor.

Although the wind had fallen, it was still bitterly cold. Not a star glimmered in the black vault overhead. Not a sound, save the rapid crunching of the snow beneath our feet, disturbed the heavy stillness of the night. Jacob, not too well pleased with his mission, shambled on before in sullen silence, his lantern in his hand, and his shadow at his feet. I followed, with my gun over my shoulder, as little inclined for conversation as himself. My thoughts were full of my late host. His voice yet rang in my ears. His eloquence yet held my imagination captive. I remember to this day, with surprise, how my over-excited brain retained whole sentences and parts of sentences, troops of brilliant images, and fragments of splendid reasoning, in the very words in which he had uttered them. Musing thus over what I had heard, and striving to recall a lost link here and there, I strode on at the heels of my guide, absorbed and unobservant. Presently — at the end, as it seemed to me, of only a few minutes — he came to a sudden halt, and said:

“Yon’s your road. Keep the stone fence to your right hand, and you can’t fail of the way.”

“This, then, is the old coach-road?”

“Ay, ’tis the old coach-road.”

“And how far do I go, before I reach the cross-roads?”

“Nigh upon three mile.”

I pulled out my purse, and he became more communicative.

“The road’s a fair road enough,” said he, “for foot passengers; but ’twas over steep and narrow for the northern traffic. You’ll mind where the parapet’s broken away, close again the sign-post. It’s never been mended since the accident.”

 

“What accident?”

“Eh, the night mail pitched right over into the valley below — a gude fifty feet an’ more — just at the worst bit o’ road in the whole county.”

“Horrible! Were many lives lost?”

“All. Four were found dead, and t’other two died next morning.”

“How long is it since this happened?”

“Just nine year.”

“Near the sign-post, you say? I will bear it in mind. Good night.”

“Gude night, sir, and thankee.” Jacob pocketed his half-crown, made a faint pretence of touching his hat, and trudged back by the way he had come.

I watched the light of his lantern till it quite disappeared, and then turned to pursue my way alone. This was no longer matter of the slightest difficulty, for, despite the dead darkness overhead, the line of stone fence showed distinctly enough against the pale gleam of the snow. How silent it seemed now, with only my footsteps to listen to; how silent and how solitary! A strange disagreeable sense of loneliness stole over me. I walked faster. I hummed a fragment of a tune. I cast up enormous sums in my head, and accumulated them at compound interest. I did my best, in short, to forget the startling speculations to which I had but just been listening, and, to some extent, I succeeded.

Meanwhile the night air seemed to become colder and colder, and though I walked fast I found it impossible to keep myself warm. My feet were like ice. I lost sensation in my hands, and grasped my gun mechanically. I even breathed with difficulty, as though, instead of traversing a quiet north country highway, I were scaling the uppermost heights of some gigantic Alp. This last symptom became presently so distressing, that I was forced to stop for a few minutes, and lean against the stone fence. As I did so, I chanced to look back up the road, and there, to my infinite relief, I saw a distant point of light, like the gleam of an approaching lantern. I at first concluded that Jacob had retraced his steps and followed me; but even as the conjecture presented itself, a second light flashed into sight — a light evidently parallel with the first, and approaching at the same rate of motion. It needed no second thought to show me that these must be the carriage-lamps of some private vehicle, though it seemed strange that any private vehicle should take a road professedly disused and dangerous

There could be no doubt, however, of the fact, for the lamps grew larger and brighter every moment, and I even fancied I could already see the dark outline of the carriage between them. It was coming up very fast, and quite noiselessly, the snow being nearly a foot deep under the wheels.

And now the body of the vehicle became distinctly visible behind the lamps. It looked strangely lofty. A sudden suspicion flashed upon me. Was it possible that I had passed the cross-roads in the dark without observing the sign-post, and could this be the very coach which I had come to meet?

 

No need to ask myself that question a second time, for here it came round the bend of the road, guard and driver, one outside passenger, and four steaming greys, all wrapped in a soft haze of light, through which the lamps blazed out, like a pair of fiery meteors.

I jumped forward, waved my hat, and shouted. The mail came down at full speed, and passed me. For a moment I feared that I had not been seen or heard, but it was only for a moment. The coachman pulled up; the guard, muffled to the eyes in capes and comforters, and apparently sound asleep in the rumble, neither answered my hail nor made the slightest effort to dismount; the outside passenger did not even turn his head. I opened the door for myself, and looked in. There were but three travellers inside, so I stepped in, shut the door, slipped into the vacant corner, and congratulated myself on my good fortune.

The atmosphere of the coach seemed, if possible, colder than that of the outer air, and was pervaded by a singularly damp and disagreeable smell. I looked round at my fellow-passengers. They were all three, men, and all silent. They did not seem to be asleep, but each leaned back in his corner of the vehicle, as if absorbed in his own reflections. I attempted to open a conversation.

“How intensely cold it is to-night,” I said, addressing my opposite neighbour.

He lifted his head, looked at me, but made no reply.

“The winter,” I added, “seems to have begun in earnest.”

Although the corner in which he sat was so dim that I could distinguish none of his features very clearly, I saw that his eyes were still turned full upon me. And yet he answered never a word.

At any other time I should have felt, and perhaps expressed, some annoyance, but at the moment I felt too ill to do either. The icy coldness of the night air had struck a chill to my very marrow, and the strange smell inside the coach was affecting me with an intolerable nausea. I shivered from head to foot, and, turning to my left-hand neighbour, asked if he had any objection to an open window?

He neither spoke nor stirred.

 

I repeated the question somewhat more loudly, but with the same result. Then I lost patience, and let the sash down. As I did so, the leather strap broke in my hand, and I observed that the glass was covered with a thick coat of mildew, the accumulation, apparently, of years. My attention being thus drawn to the condition of the coach, I examined it more narrowly, and saw by the uncertain light of the outer lamps that it was in the last stage of dilapidation. Every part of it was not only out of repair, but in a condition of decay. The sashes splintered at a touch. The leather fittings were crusted over with mould, and literally rotting from the woodwork. The floor was almost breaking away beneath my feet. The whole machine, in short, was foul with damp, and had evidently been dragged from some outhouse in which it had been mouldering away for years, to do another day or two of duty on the road.

I turned to the third passenger, whom I had not yet addressed, and hazarded one more remark.

“This coach,” I said, “is in a deplorable condition. The regular mail, I suppose, is under repair?”

He moved his head slowly, and looked me in the face, without speaking a word. I shall never forget that look while I live. I turned cold at heart under it. I turn cold at heart even now when I recall it. His eyes glowed with a fiery unnatural lustre. His face was livid as the face of a corpse. His bloodless lips were drawn back as if in the agony of death, and showed the gleaming teeth between.

The words that I was about to utter died upon my lips, and a strange horror — a dreadful horror — came upon me. My sight had by this time become used to the gloom of the coach, and I could see with tolerable distinctness. I turned to my opposite neighbour. He, too, was looking at me, with the same startling pallor in his face, and the same stony glitter in his eyes. I passed my hand across my brow. I turned to the passenger on the seat beside my own, and saw — oh Heaven! how shall I describe what I saw? I saw that he was no living man — that none of them were living men, like myself! A pale phosphorescent light — the light of putrefaction — played upon their awful faces; upon their hair, dank with the dews of the grave; upon their clothes, earth-stained and dropping to pieces; upon their hands, which were as the hands of corpses long buried. Only their eyes, their terrible eyes, were living; and those eyes were all turned menacingly upon me!

A shriek of terror, a wild unintelligible cry for help and mercy; burst from my lips as I flung myself against the door, and strove in vain to open it.

 

In that single instant, brief and vivid as a landscape beheld in the flash of summer lightning, I saw the moon shining down through a rift of stormy cloud — the ghastly sign-post rearing its warning finger by the wayside — the broken parapet — the plunging horses — the black gulf below. Then, the coach reeled like a ship at sea. Then, came a mighty crash — a sense of crushing pain — and then, darkness.

It seemed as if years had gone by when I awoke one morning from a deep sleep, and found my wife watching by my bedside I will pass over the scene that ensued, and give you, in half a dozen words, the tale she told me with tears of thanksgiving. I had fallen over a precipice, close against the junction of the old coach-road and the new, and had only been saved from certain death by lighting upon a deep snowdrift that had accumulated at the foot of the rock beneath. In this snowdrift I was discovered at daybreak, by a couple of shepherds, who carried me to the nearest shelter, and brought a surgeon to my aid. The surgeon found me in a state of raving delirium, with a broken arm and a compound fracture of the skull. The letters in my pocket-book showed my name and address; my wife was summoned to nurse me; and, thanks to youth and a fine constitution, I came out of danger at last. The place of my fall, I need scarcely say, was precisely that at which a frightful accident had happened to the north mail nine years before.

I never told my wife the fearful events which I have just related to you. I told the surgeon who attended me; but he treated the whole adventure as a mere dream born of the fever in my brain. We discussed the question over and over again, until we found that we could discuss it with temper no longer, and then we dropped it. Others may form what conclusions they please — I know that twenty years ago I was the fourth inside passenger in that Phantom Coach.

Yoshitaka Amano

I’ve known the work of Yoshitaka Amano for years even without knowing it was his, and so have you. He’s the mastermind behind Final Fantasy but you might also know him for his work in The Sandman, and there’s a splendid exhibition in Milan showcasing his work. I went to see it last week. Here are some impressions.

Amano Corpus Anime

Let’s start with a little context as provided by the introduction to this exhibition, according to which Yoshitaka Amano has carved out a space comparable to Gustav Klimt and Andy Warhol. Klimt merged fine art with the decorative, and Warhol gleefully erased the line between high art and pop culture. Amano? Well, he merges fine art with pop storytelling, and his traditional techniques embrace experimental media. Even if you might think this to be quite a stretch, it’s undeniable that the Shizuoka-born maestro has become one of the most iconic visual storytellers of our time.

So, what really sets Amano apart from other artists? His uncanny ability to walk that tightrope between opposites: Japanese traditions on one side, and the surreal, boundary-pushing experimentation of movements like Art Nouveau and Surrealism on the other.

“I’ve seen too many artists fall into the trap of sticking to a rigid style,” Amano once mused, and he’s going out of his way to dodge that bullet. His relentless pursuit of innovation has kept his art ever-evolving, defying categorization. If Amano’s career were a playlist, it would be full of unexpected genre shifts—one minute, you’re vibing to serene harmonies, and the next, you’re headbanging to experimental beats.

This brings us to Amano Corpus Anime, the exhibition in Milan, which is a grand retrospective that feels less like an exhibition and more like stepping into fifty years of dreams. Over 130 works from his archives in Tokyo have been gathered to showcase Amano’s incredible journey. From the delicate and ethereal illustrations for Vampire Hunter D and The Sandman to unforgettable designs for animations like Kyashan, Yattaman, Tekkaman, and the saddest Pinocchio ever created, the exhibition is a time machine of visual wonders. And, of course, who could forget his fingerprints on the global phenomenon that is Final Fantasy?

The retrospective itself is organized like a journey. It begins with his earliest work in the Tatsunoko Production studio back in 1982 (I wasn’t even born back then) and moves through the decades, spotlighting his evolution from animator to full-fledged fine artist. Three thematic zones anchor the exhibit: Game Master, Free Spirit, and Global Resonance. Each represents a slice of his creative DNA, from the mythic and narrative-driven to the deeply personal and universally expressive.

And here’s the cherry on top: the showcase concludes with his latest creations, including a Puccini trilogy specially crafted for Lucca Comics & Games 2024. Just when you think Amano has done it all. So whether you’re a die-hard Final Fantasy fan, a lover of surrealism, or someone who just appreciates art that’s both timeless and trailblazing, Amano’s work offers something magical, and you can’t miss this exhibition.

Now for the bad news.

The space is not that large and, though it showcases a lot of works, you step from rooms where each work is correctly spotlighted to sequences like the Final Fantasy corridor where there’s no real explanation of whatever the heck is going on and the sequence of works is crammed together in a way that doesn’t really give them justice. Still, it’s highly worth a visit.

As usual, let’s see it room by room.

1. The Early Decades

Born on March 26, 1952 in the Shizuoka Prefecture, Yoshitaka Amano was the youngest of four siblings. His father, Yoshio Amano, was a renowned craftsman specializing in lacquerware—a heritage that perhaps planted the seeds of artistry in young Yoshitaka though he lost him when he was ten. And while the world of lacquerwork wasn’t his calling, he found his first muse closer to home in his brother Keisano Fujimoto and his sister Yaeko. His boundless energy and obsession with drawing manifested very early, alongside an insatiable hunger for creation, and he sketched prolifically on any surface available.

Fast forward to December 1966: a young Amano took a life-changing trip to Tokyo to meet a family friend. Little did he know that this visit would land him at Tatsunoko Production Studio, where his sketch portfolio caught the attention of none other than animation legend Tatsuo Yoshida. At just 15 years old, Amano joined the studio, leaving behind his hometown to dive headfirst into the bustling world of animation. It wasn’t long before his talent began to shine.

His first big project was working as a character designer on Mach Go Go Go! (aka Speed Racer), a show that would later become a global pop culture phenomenon. By 1969, Amano had his hands on classics like Science Ninja Team Gatchaman (Battle of the Planets) and Casshan (Casshern), earning him a reputation as the designer of powerful characters. But it wasn’t just his skill with characters that set him apart—it was his ability to bring an otherworldly flair to his creations. While the bustling “character rooms” of Tatsunoko churned out content, Amano developed a unique signature style that would soon take him beyond the studio walls. He wasn’t just designing; he was crafting stories.

By his twenties, Amano was already a legend. He contributed to countless beloved series, including Time Bokan, Ippatsu Kanta-kun, Tekkaman, Hurricane Polymar, and many more. It’s no surprise that his peers and mentors, such as Mamoru Oshii and Masami Suda, recognized his brilliance. And while Tatsunoko Studio buzzed with talent, Amano stood out for his bold and experimental approach, consistently delivering designs that redefined animation aesthetics.

1.1. The Saddest Pinocchio Ever Created

I have very fond memories of a discussion with a Japanese colleague from Tokyo, a few decades ago, in which he was complaining that we Europeans think Japanese cartoons are sad and full of suffering, while they really aren’t. One was the title that was able to convince him of our point—the 1976 Pinocchio.

Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio, published way back in 1883, is one of the most famous in the world and one of my least favourite, with its moralistic messages and its Masonic undertones, and especially its bourgeois views on the virtues of the poor (spoiler: it is not creating trouble). That being said, the story contains iconographic gems intimately connected to the original illustrations. And this is where things get interesting in connection to Amano.

Collodi’s Pinocchio has been reimagined and brought to life by countless artists over the years, but its earliest iterations were enriched by the iconic work of Enrico Mazzanti. His woodcuts helped carve the mischievous marionette into the public’s imagination, giving Pinocchio his first face and personality.

Fast-forward a few decades, and another master of Italian woodcutting enters the scene: Antonio Rubino. In 1911, Rubino breathed new life into Pinocchio, presenting the tale with an almost avant-garde aesthetic that hinted at the early stirrings of modernism.

Yoshitaka Amano’s take on Pinocchio seems more connected to these two references than to other, more recent interpretations and offers a striking blend of East-meets-West, tradition-meets-experimentation. Amano, with his ethereal and surreal style, provides a Pinocchio that feels as timeless as it is fresh. It’s also the stuff of nightmares, as the illustration below will exemplify.

However, Amano wasn’t content with simply haunting our nightmares and being part of the Japanese animation crowd—he was ready to take his artistic vision to new heights. After the untimely passing of his mentor Tatsuo Yoshida in 1977, Amano began exploring new horizons. His focus shifted toward freelance artistry, and by 1982, he left Tatsunoko to fully embrace the life of an independent artist.

2. The Early Freelance Year

Yoshitaka Amano’s creative journey hit a major turning point in March 1981, when his monthly comic strip Twilight Worlds debuted in S-F Magazine. Breaking free from the aesthetics of Tatsunoko Studio, Amano began cultivating a distinctly personal, international artistic style that would soon become his hallmark.

Between 1982 and 1986, Amano embarked on an intense whirlwind of creativity as an illustrator. He lent his artistic genius to a slew of international publications, with the Japanese fantasy market taking particular notice. Among these collaborations, one of the most iconic was with Michael Moorcock, the legendary author of the Elric of Melniboné series.

In January 1983, Amano’s art graced the pages of Vampire Hunter D by Hideyuki Kikuchi, a groundbreaking series that would cement his reputation as a master illustrator. With over 120 volumes of Kikuchi’s novels featuring Amano’s work, this collaboration wasn’t just a partnership—it was a creative dynasty. The gothic, atmospheric visuals Amano brought to Vampire Hunter D perfectly matched its eerie and epic tone, making it a cultural touchstone. During this period, Amano’s personal life saw the birth of his three children: Kikuchi (1983), Take (1986), and Hina (1990). Their faces sometimes provided inspiration for his art.

One of the defining moments of this era was Amano’s foray into movies. In 1985, he collaborated with Mamoru Oshii to work on Angel’s Egg. This animated movie was a stark departure from conventional storytelling. Instead of focusing on dialogue and action, it leaned heavily on surreal imagery, gothic architecture, and cryptic symbolism.
Despite its almost hermetic, mysterious nature—or perhaps because of it—Angel’s Egg became a cult masterpiece. Critics couldn’t agree on what it all meant, but that only added to its allure. Amano’s haunting, dreamlike designs elevated the film into an avant-garde treasure, marking a pivotal point in his artistic career.

By the late 1980s, Amano had established himself as an artistic juggernaut, redefining fantasy art and animation with his unique vision.

2.1. An Incursion into Fashion

Amano has always had a soft spot for haute couture, particularly the elegance of Italian fashion houses. By the late 1990s, this love had turned professional as he dived into costume design for global campaigns, stage productions, and his own creations. It was a natural extension of his art. After countless imagined outfits and accessories for his characters, we land in January 2020 when Vogue Italia decided to take a bold step to celebrate beauty beyond photography and asked a handpicked group of illustrators to reinterpret high fashion in their unique styles. Amano was on this exclusive roster, tasked with reimagining modern garments with his signature ethereal touch.

For this special issue, themed around the Renaissance, Amano faced a delightful challenge: to illustrate actual garments from the collections of Gucci and Giorgio Armani, all worn by model Lindsey Wixson. The result was nine illustrations featuring Amano’s delicate, flowing lines and attention to detail that elevate the garments into something almost divine. His work captures not just the clothing but the essence of the wearer, making each piece feel like a window into a dreamscape.

3. Final Fantasy

When Hironobu Sakaguchi, the mastermind behind Final Fantasy, first began crafting the iconic series for the Nintendo Famicom, he faced a monumental challenge: creating a visually unique universe that would stand out in a rapidly growing video game industry. Just a year earlier, in 1986, Dragon Quest by Enix had made waves, revolutionizing the RPG genre in Japan. For that title, Akira Toriyama (famed for Dragon Ball and Dr. Slump) played a key role in shaping the look and feel of the characters. His designs were so charming and instantly recognizable that they became inseparable from the game’s appeal.

Sakaguchi, understanding the importance of creating an equally strong visual identity for Final Fantasy, sought out an artistic direction that felt more mature and evocative. His main choices were Yoshitaka Amano and Moebius, and I will never stop wondering how Final Fantasy would have come out had he chosen the other option.

Moebius did this kind of stuff.

The choice historically felt to Yoshitaka Amano. Drawing inspiration from a blend of Western fantasy aesthetics and his own unique visual language, Amano transformed Final Fantasy from a game to an aesthetic experience. Alongside the unforgettable music of Nobuo Uematsu and the innovative programming of Nasir Gebelli, Amano’s art brought Sakaguchi’s vision to life.

Amano’s work on the original Final Fantasy games established many of the series’ enduring visual hallmarks with an intricate character design and ethereal landscapes, creating a distinctive identity that set it apart from competitors. His influence was so profound that, even as the series evolved with 3D models and cutting-edge technology, Amano’s illustrations continued to serve as the soul of Final Fantasy.

From 1987 to today, Amano’s contributions have spanned 16 mainline titles, countless spin-offs, animated adaptations, and a sea of merchandise. His delicate yet powerful designs are cultural artifacts that resonate deeply with fans around the globe, including this one.

4. Videogames beyond Final Fantasy

While the name Yoshitaka Amano is forever intertwined with Final Fantasy, his contributions to the gaming world stretch far beyond this iconic series. Over the years, Amano has collaborated with numerous Japanese production studios, leaving his mark on a diverse array of games that showcase his boundless creativity and versatility.

Amano’s first foray into the video game world was in 1984, when he worked as the character designer for the graphic adventure Angel’s Adventure: Eshtel Audronilla no Ehon. This early project, developed by Alfa Luna, was inspired by the success of Dragon Lair and set the stage for Amano’s growing influence in the industry. His role wasn’t limited to character design—he also crafted packaging and promotional materials, bringing his artistic touch to every aspect of the game’s identity. Later, he teamed up with Kure Software Koubo on First Queen, a game that debuted on the NEC PC-88 and Sharp X68000, platforms that were state-of-the-art at the time.

For Square Enix (then Squaresoft), Amano played a significant role in shaping several beloved titles beyond Final Fantasy. He designed the strikingly atmospheric characters and environments of Front Mission (1994) and Front Mission: Gun Hazard (1996), games set in dystopian futures brimming with intrigue and mecha drama.

 

One standout in Amano’s diverse gaming portfolio is his work on El Dorado Gate, a fascinating episodic RPG developed by Capcom for the Sega Dreamcast. Released exclusively in Japan between October 2000 and October 2001, El Dorado Gate married Amano’s unique visual storytelling with innovative gameplay mechanics, making it a cult classic for RPG enthusiasts. The game’s world-building and character designs, steeped in Amano’s dreamlike aesthetic, left an indelible impression.

In the 21st century, Amano continued to evolve as a creative force in gaming. He crafted the cover art for Rebus of Atlas and lent his visionary style to Lord of Arcana for Square Enix, a project that reunited him with Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi. He also designed exclusive posters for Child of Light by Ubisoft and contributed art to Cuphead by Studio MDHR, proving that his artistic reach knows no genre boundaries.

And let’s not forget his latest gaming collaboration! In 2023, Amano partnered with Epic Games to create the character Crossheart and a series of accessories for the celebrated Fortnite.

5. Sandman: The Dream Hunters

Editor Jenny Lee eventually fell in love with Amano’s artwork, sparking an idea that would bridge the world of British graphic novels and Japanese artistry. In 1998, Yoshitaka Amano was invited to create the celebratory cover for the 10th anniversary of Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman, and Gaiman was instantly captivated by the concept of bringing Amano’s ethereal style into the Sandman universe. In 1999, The Sandman: The Dream Hunters was born. Written by Gaiman and illustrated by Amano, this standalone masterpiece captured the imagination of fans worldwide, earning the prestigious Bram Stoker Award for illustrated narrative. It wasn’t just a graphic novel—it was a fusion of two artistic worlds, combining the mystical philosophy of Gaiman’s writing with the transcendent beauty of Amano’s art.

Amano’s illustrations carry a contemplative, almost meditative quality, perfectly complementing the philosophical depth of Gaiman’s storytelling. The imagery is steeped in Japanese mythology and tradition, drawing heavily from Heian-period aesthetics from the enchanting white fox spirit to Buddhist monks. His use of soft, fluid lines and rich, evocative colours imbues each image with a spiritual quality that transcends the page. This is definitely one of his favourite works of mine.

6. Marvel and DC Comics

By the dawn of the new millennium, Amano’s international acclaim was soaring due to his groundbreaking work on Final Fantasy and the global success of The Sandman: The Dream Hunters. DC Comics entrusted Amano with a series of alternate covers and posters for some of their most iconic characters, from Superman to Batman to Batgirl, Harley Quinn, and Suicide Squad. Amano reimagined them with his signature style—a blend of surreal elegance and mythic energy.

But DC wasn’t the only one eager to collaborate. Amano’s talent also caught the attention of Virgin Comics, where he partnered on projects with legendary director John Woo. Marvel Comics joined the mix too, roping him in for a trilogy of The Punisher written by Greg Rucka, featuring Elektra and Wolverine. It’s almost unfair—these characters were already cool, but Amano’s touch elevated them to a whole new level of almost operatic sophistication.

7. Three Odder Oddities

There would be so much more to show you, but I’ll close with one of the most charming spaces in the exhibition, which is dedicated to three special pieces:

an illustration of David Bowie…

…the Japanese movie poster for The Shape of Water…

… and the illustration for a Magic card.

 

#AdventCalendar 1: The Snow

Hugh Walpole was a prominent British novelist, critic, and dramatist, known for his engaging storytelling. Born on March 13, 1884, in Auckland, New Zealand, he was the son of an Anglican clergyman; he moved to England at the age of five and received his education in Canterbury and Cambridge. Walpole’s literary career began with his first novel, The Wooden Horse (1909), but he gained significant recognition with Mr. Perrin and Mr. Traill (1911), which depicted the lives of two schoolmasters. His experiences during World War I, particularly his work in Russia, influenced his later novels such as The Dark Forest (1916) and The Secret City (1919).

This evening, to read in front of the fire, I give you a short ghost story, The Snow, a short story set in the fictional town of Polchester on a cold and snowy Christmas Eve. As you’ll see, the gripping tale delves into themes of jealousy and revenge, and fits into the popular subgenre of Christmas ghost stories we’ll explore this year. Enjoy.

The second Mrs. Ryder was a young woman not easily frightened, but now she stood in the dusk of the passage leaning back against the wall, her hand on her heart, looking at the grey-faced window beyond which the snow was steadily falling against the lamplight.

The passage where she was led from the study to the dining-room, and the window looked out on to the little paved path that ran at the edge of the Cathedral green. As she stared down the passage she couldn’t be sure whether the woman were there or no. How absurd of her! She knew the woman was not there. But if the woman was not, how was it that she could discern so clearly the old-fashioned grey cloak, the  ntidy grey hair and the sharp outline of the pale cheek and pointed chin? Yes, and more than that, the long sweep of the grey dress, falling in folds to the ground, the flash of a gold ring on the white hand. No. No. NO. This was madness.
There was no one and nothing there. Hallucination . . .

Very faintly a voice seemed to come to her: ‘I warned you. This is for the last time. . . .’

The nonsense! How far now was her imagination to carry her? Tiny sounds about the house, the running of a tap somewhere, a faint voice from the kitchen, these and something more had translated themselves into an imagined voice. ‘The last time . . .’

But her terror was real. She was not normally frightened by anything. She was young and healthy and bold, fond of sport, hunting, shooting, taking any risk. Now she was truly STIFFENED with terror–she could not move, could not advance down the passage as she wanted to and find light, warmth, safety in the dining-room. All the time the snow fell steadily, stealthily, with its own secret purpose, maliciously, beyond the window in the pale glow of the lamplight.

Then unexpectedly there was noise from the hall, opening of doors, a rush of feet, a pause and then in clear beautiful voices the well-known strains of ‘Good King Wenceslas.’ It was the Cathedral choir boys on their regular Christmas round. This was Christmas Eve. They always came just at this hour on Christmas Eve.

With an intense, almost incredible relief she turned back into the hall. At the same moment her husband came out of the study. They stood together smiling at the little group of mufflered, becoated boys who were singing, heart and soul in the job, so that the old house simply rang with their melody.

Reassured by the warmth and human company, she lost her terror. It had been her imagination. Of late she had been none too well. That was why she had been so irritable. Old Doctor Bernard was no good: he didn’t understand her case at all. After Christmas she would go to London and have the very best advice . . .

Had she been well she could not, half an hour ago, have shown such miserable temper over nothing. She knew that it was over nothing and yet that knowledge did not make it any easier for her to restrain herself. After every bout of temper she told herself that there should never be another–and then Herbert said something irritating, one of his silly muddle-headed stupidities, and she was off again!

She could see now as she stood beside him at the bottom of the staircase, that he was still feeling it. She had certainly half an hour ago said some abominably rude personal things–things that she had not at all meant–and he had taken them in his meek, quiet way. Were he not so meek and quiet, did he only pay her back in her own coin, she would never lose her temper. Of that she was sure. But who wouldn’t be irritated by that meekness and by the only reproachful thing that he ever said to her: ‘Elinor understood me better, my dear ‘? To throw the first wife up against the second! Wasn’t that the most tactless thing that a man could possibly do? And Elinor, that worn elderly woman, the very opposite of her own gay, bright, amusing self? That was why Herbert had loved her, because she was gay and bright and young. It was true that Elinor had been devoted, that she had been so utterly wrapped up in Herbert that she lived only for him. People were always recalling her devotion, which was sufficiently rude and tactless of them.

Well, she could not give anyone that kind of old-fashioned sugary devotion; it wasn’t in her, and Herbert knew it by this time.

Nevertheless she loved Herbert in her own way, as he must know, know it so well that he ought to pay no attention to the bursts of temper. She wasn’t well. She would see a doctor in London . . .

The little boys finished their carols, were properly rewarded, and tumbled like feathery birds out into the snow again. They went into the study, the two of them, and stood beside the big open log-fire. She put her hand up and stroked his thin beautiful cheek.

‘I’m so sorry to have been cross just now, Bertie. I didn’t mean half I said, you know.’

But he didn’t, as he usually did, kiss her and tell her that it didn’t matter. Looking straight in front of him, he answered:

‘Well, Alice, I do wish you wouldn’t. It hurts, horribly. It upsets me more than you think. And it’s growing on you. You make me miserable. I don’t know what to do about it. And it’s all about nothing.’

Irritated at not receiving the usual commendation for her sweetness in making it up again, she withdrew a little and answered:

‘Oh, all right. I’ve said I’m sorry. I can’t do any more.’

‘But tell me,’ he insisted, ‘I want to know. What makes you so angry, so suddenly?–and about nothing at all.’

She was about to let her anger rise, her anger at his obtuseness, obstinacy, when some fear checked her, a strange unanalysed fear, as though someone had whispered to her, ‘Look out! This is the
last time!’

‘It’s not altogether my own fault,’ she answered, and left the room.

She stood in the cold hall, wondering where to go. She could feel the snow falling outside the house and shivered. She hated the snow, she hated the winter, this beastly, cold dark English winter that went on and on, only at last to change into a damp, soggy English spring.

It had been snowing all day. In Polchester it was unusual to have so heavy a snowfall. This was the hardest winter that they had known for many years.

When she urged Herbert to winter abroad–which he could quite easily do–he answered her impatiently; he had the strongest affection for this poky dead-and-alive Cathedral town. The Cathedral seemed to be precious to him; he wasn’t happy if he didn’t go and see it every day! She wouldn’t wonder if he didn’t think more of the Cathedral than he did of herself. Elinor had been the same; she had even written a little book about the Cathedral, about the Black Bishop’s Tomb and the stained glass and the rest . . .

What was the Cathedral after all? Only a building!

She was standing in the drawing-room looking out over the dusky ghostly snow to the great hulk of the Cathedral that Herbert said was like a flying ship, but to herself was more like a crouching beast licking its lips over the miserable sinners that it was for ever devouring.

As she looked and shivered, feeling that in spite of herself her temper and misery were rising so that they threatened to choke her, it seemed to her that her bright and cheerful fire-lit drawing-room was suddenly open to the snow. It was exactly as though cracks had appeared everywhere, in the ceiling, the walls, the windows, and that through these cracks the snow was filtering, dribbling in little tracks of wet down the walls, already perhaps making pools of water on the carpet.

This was of course imagination, but it was a fact that the room was most dreadfully cold although a great fire was burning and it was the cosiest room in the house.

Then, turning, she saw the figure standing by the door. This time there could be no mistake. It was a grey shadow, and yet a shadow with form and outline–the untidy grey hair, the pale face like a moon-lit leaf, the long grey clothes, and something obstinate, vindictive, terribly menacing in its pose.

She moved and the figure was gone; there was nothing there and the room was warm again, quite hot in fact. But young Mrs. Ryder, who had never feared anything in all her life save the vanishing of her youth, was trembling so that she had to sit down, and even then her trembling did not cease. Her hand shook on the arm of her chair.

She had created this thing out of her imagination of Elinor’s hatred of her and her own hatred of Elinor. It was true that they had never met, but who knew but that the spiritualists were right, and Elinor’s spirit, jealous of Herbert’s love for her, had been there driving them apart, forcing her to lose her temper and then hating her for losing it? Such things might be! But she had not much time for speculation. She was preoccupied with her fear. It was a definite, positive fear, the kind of fear that one has just before one goes under an operation. Someone or something was threatening her. She clung to her chair as though to leave it were to plunge into disaster. She looked around her everywhere; all the familiar things, the pictures, the books, the little tables, the piano were different now, isolated, strange, hostile, as though
they had been won over by some enemy power.

She longed for Herbert to come and protect her; she felt most kindly to him. She would never lose her temper with him again–and at that same moment some cold voice seemed to whisper in her ear: ‘You had better not. It will be for the last time.’

At length she found courage to rise, cross the room and go up to dress for dinner. In her bedroom courage came to her once more. It was certainly very cold, and the snow, as she could see when she looked between her curtains, was falling more heavily than ever, but she had a warm bath, sat in front of her fire and was sensible again.

For many months this odd sense that she was watched and accompanied by someone hostile to her had been growing. It was the stronger perhaps because of the things that Herbert told her about Elinor; she was the kind of woman, he said, who, once she loved anyone, would never relinquish her grasp; she was utterly faithful. He implied that her tenacious fidelity had been at times a little difficult.

‘She always said,’ he added once, ‘that she would watch over me until I rejoined her in the next world. Poor Elinor!’ he sighed. ‘She had a fine religious faith, stronger than mine, I fear.’

It was always after one of her tantrums that young Mrs. Ryder had been most conscious of this hallucination, this dreadful discomfort of feeling that someone was near you who hated you–but it was only during the last week that she began to fancy that she actually saw anyone, and with every day her sense of this figure had grown stronger.

It was, of course, only nerves, but it was one of those nervous afflictions that became tiresome indeed if you did not rid yourself of it. Mrs. Ryder, secure now in the warmth and intimacy of her bedroom, determined that henceforth everything should be sweetness and light. No more tempers! Those were the things that did her harm.

Even though Herbert were a little trying, was not that the case with every husband in the world? And was it not Christmas time? Peace and Good Will to men! Peace and Good Will to Herbert!

They sat down opposite to one another in the pretty little dining-room hung with Chinese woodcuts, the table gleaming and the amber curtains richly dark in the firelight.

But Herbert was not himself. He was still brooding, she supposed, over their quarrel of the afternoon. Weren’t men children? Incredible the children that they were!

So when the maid was out of the room she went over to him, bent down and kissed his forehead.

‘Darling . . . you’re still cross, I can see you are. You mustn’t be. Really you mustn’t. It’s Christmas time and, if I forgive you, you must forgive me.’

‘You forgive me?’ he asked, looking at her in his most aggravating way. ‘What have you to forgive me for?’

Well, that was really too much. When she had taken all the steps, humbled her pride.

She went back to her seat, but for a while could not answer him because the maid was there. When they were alone again she said, summoning all her patience:

‘Bertie dear, do you really think that there’s anything to be gained by sulking like this? It isn’t worthy of you. It isn’t really.’

He answered her quietly.

‘Sulking? No, that’s not the right word. But I’ve got to keep quiet. If I don’t I shall say something I’m sorry for.’ Then, after a pause, in a low voice, as though to himself: ‘These constant rows are awful.’

Her temper was rising again; another self that had nothing to do with her real self, a stranger to her and yet a very old familiar friend.

‘Don’t be so self-righteous,’ she answered, her voice trembling a little. ‘These quarrels are entirely my own fault, aren’t they?’

‘Elinor and I never quarrelled,’ he said, so softly that she scarcely heard him.

‘No! Because Elinor thought you perfect. She adored you. You’ve often told me. I don’t think you perfect. I’m not perfect either. But we’ve both got faults. I’m not the only one to blame.’

‘We’d better separate,’ he said, suddenly looking up. ‘We don’t get on now. We used to. I don’t know what’s changed everything. But, as things are, we’d better separate.’

She looked at him and knew that she loved him more than ever, but because she loved him so much she wanted to hurt him, and because he had said that he thought he could get on without her she was so angry that she forgot all caution. Her love and her anger helped one another. The more angry she became the more she loved him.

‘I know why you want to separate,’ she said. ‘It’s because you’re in love with someone else. (‘How funny,’ something inside her said. ‘You don’t mean a word of this.’) You’ve treated me as you have, and then you leave me.’

‘I’m not in love with anyone else,’ he answered her steadily, ‘and you know it. But we are so unhappy together that it’s silly to go on . . . silly. . . . The whole thing has failed.’

There was so much unhappiness, so much bitterness, in his voice that she realised that at last she had truly gone too far. She had lost him.

She had not meant this. She was frightened and her fear made her so angry that she went across to him.

‘Very well then . . . I’ll tell everyone . . . what you’ve been. How you’ve treated me.’

‘Not another scene,’ he answered wearily. ‘I can’t stand any more. Let’s wait. Tomorrow is Christmas Day . . .’

He was so unhappy that her anger with herself maddened her. She couldn’t bear his sad, hopeless disappointment with herself, their life together, everything.

In a fury of blind temper she struck him; it was as though she were striking herself. He got up and without a word left the room. There was a pause, and then she heard the hall door close. He had
left the house.

She stood there, slowly coming to her control again. When she lost her temper it was as though she sank under water. When it was all over she came once more to the surface of life, wondering where she’d been and what she had been doing. Now she stood there, bewildered, and then at once she was aware of two things, one that the room was bitterly cold and the other that someone was in the room with her.

This time she did not need to look around her. She did not turn at all, but only stared straight at the curtained windows, seeing them very carefully, as though she were summing them up for some future analysis, with their thick amber folds, gold rod, white lines–and beyond them the snow was falling.

She did not need to turn, but, with a shiver of terror, she was aware that that grey figure who had, all these last weeks, been approaching ever more closely, was almost at her very elbow. She heard quite clearly: ‘I warned you. That was the last time.’

At the same moment Onslow the butler came in. Onslow was broad, fat and rubicund–a good faithful butler with a passion for church music. He was a bachelor and, it was said, disappointed of women. He had an old mother in Liverpool to whom he was greatly attached.

In a flash of consciousness she thought of all these things when he came in. She expected him also to see the grey figure at her side. But he was undisturbed, his ceremonial complacency clothed him
securely.

‘Mr. Fairfax has gone out,’ she said firmly. Oh, surely he must see something, feel something.

‘Yes, Madam!’ Then, smiling rather grandly: ‘It’s snowing hard. Never seen it harder here. Shall I build up the fire in the drawing-room, Madam?’

‘No, thank you. But Mr. Fairfax’s study . . .’

‘Yes, Madam. I only thought that as this room was so warm you might find it chilly in the drawing-room.’

This room warm, when she was shivering from head to foot; but holding herself lest he should see . . . She longed to keep him there, to implore him to remain; but in a moment he was gone, softly closing the door behind him.

Then a mad longing for flight seized her, and she could not move. She was rooted there to the floor, and even as, wildly trying to cry, to scream, to shriek the house down, she found that only a little whisper would come, she felt the cold touch of a hand on hers.

She did not turn her head: her whole personality, all her past life, her poor little courage, her miserable fortitude were summoned to meet this sense of approaching death which was as unmistakable as a certain smell, or the familiar ringing of a gong. She had dreamt in nightmares of approaching death and it had always been like this, a fearful constriction of the heart, a paralysis of the limbs, a choking sense of disaster like an anaesthetic.

‘You were warned,’ something said to her again.

She knew that if she turned she would see Elinor’s face, set, white, remorseless. The woman had always hated her, been vilely jealous of her, protecting her wretched Herbert.

A certain vindictiveness seemed to release her. She found that she could move, her limbs were free.

She passed to the door, ran down the passage, into the hall. Where would she be safe? She thought of the Cathedral, where to-night there was a carol service. She opened the hall door and just as she was, meeting the thick, involving, muffling snow, she ran out.

She started across the green towards the Cathedral door. Her thin black slippers sank in the snow. Snow was everywhere–in her hair, her eyes, her nostrils, her mouth, on her bare neck, between her breasts.

‘Help! Help! Help!’ she wanted to cry, but the snow choked her. Lights whirled about her. The Cathedral rose like a huge black eagle and flew towards her.

She fell forward, and even as she fell a hand, far colder than the snow, caught her neck. She lay struggling in the snow and as she struggled there two hands of an icy fleshless chill closed about her throat.

Her last knowledge was of the hard outline of a ring pressing into her neck. Then she lay still, her face in the snow, and the flakes eagerly, savagely, covered her.

December, 1st: how did that happen?

I swear it was November last week. Well, ok, technically it was, but how did that happen that we turned around and it was already the first day of December? Usually around this time of the year, I do the Advent Calendar on my Patreon and blog (see here for 2023, here for 2022, and here for a general round-up of stuff on the blog) and this means I already have all 24 posts lined up and prepared and ready to fire. This year… well, this year I have nothing. It’s going to be some catch-as-catch-can and I apologize again for being a little absent, especially on the Patreon.

Good news is maybe we’re coming out of the Social Media winter, as Bluesky seems to be really gaining momentum. You find me here.

Other news includes the fact that I’m almost done with the last big round of revision on my novel. This one is mostly around the lore, as I’m going full-in on the concept of blood and liminal magic. But I’ll try to get into detail later in the month. For now, keep an eye out this evening for the first feature of this year’s ghost stories for the Advent Calendar.

Blake and his Time: a Journey into Dreamland

Last weekend I was in Turin to catch some exhibitions and, in addition to the one on Giger I talked about yesterday, we also caught a really neat one on another of my favourite visionaries, William Blake, set in the former Royal residence and hunting lodge called Venaria Reale. The show is articulated into 6 themes and an immersive installation, and features works from both Blake and other contemporary artists, some well-known and some lesser-known, at least to me. Here’s how it goes.

1. Horror and Danger

In the face of big changes and upheavals of the Industrial Revolution, many artists tried to adapt to the profound transformations of the world around them. This led them to embrace the sublime – creating art that could stir up feelings of fear and awe, rather than just being conventionally beautiful. These themes opened new imaginative doors for Romantic artists, who no longer felt confined to tame or pleasant subjects; instead, they could depict unsettling, creepy scenes that resonated on a deep emotional level. In Blake’s work, for example, this is expressed through twisted bodies and tortured expressions – a vivid portrayal of angst and torment. For his contemporaries, themes of imprisonment, madness, horror, danger, and disease became all the rage, along with dramatic images of nature’s wild side. English artists were increasingly drawn to the raw power and threats posed by the natural world, manipulating light, proportions, and space to stir emotions in the viewer.

1.1. William Blake, The Night of Enitharmon’s Joy (around 1795)

Previously titled simply “Hecate”
Color print, ink, tempera, and watercolor on paper
Presented by W. Graham Robertson in 1939

Blake created his own unique mythology in his works, featuring his own original characters who pop up again and again, each representing different spiritual vibes. This particular piece might depict Enitharmon, whose “false religion” stirs up guilt and division (represented by the two figures lurking behind her). But Blake doesn’t stop there – he layers on deeper meanings, hinting at themes of witchcraft and melancholy.

1.2. Two floods and other Biblical Themes

The depiction of fear and Blake’s original approach through metaphysical subjects and original characters are better understood if compared to the approach adopted by some of his contemporaries, who tackle the subject through the depiction of Biblical scenes. One the most popular is the Flood, displayed here in two versions by two different artists.

Francis Danby, The Deluge (around 1840)
Oil on canvas
Tate Collection, acquired in 1953

The Flood – God’s big punishment for humanity’s wickedness via a giant flood – was all the rage as an art theme back then. For artists like Westall and Danby, it was a golden chance to dive into nature’s overwhelming power. They went all out with intense lighting effects, dramatic scaling, and vast open spaces to crank up the emotional drama of the scene. Danby in particular employs a rich colour palette dominated by dark blues and greys, contrasted with bright highlights that draw attention to the figures in peril and enhance the painting’s emotional impact.

William Westall, The Commencement of the Deluge

Oil on canvas, exhibited in 1848. Tate Collection, acquired in 1954

The painting features a dynamic arrangement of figures and landscapes, with Noah and his family depicted in the foreground as they witness the floodwaters rising. The use of diagonal lines in the composition enhances the sense of movement and urgency, drawing the viewer’s eye toward the tumultuous sky.

Another recurrent scene depicted by contemporaries is the destruction of the temple, which is presented here in a work by Samuel Colman from around 1830. Colman had a knack for painting apocalyptic scenes, and the biblical prophecy about the destruction of Jerusalem’s temple was just the thing for him. The ruined church and the falling cross might symbolize the Established Church, which Colman wasn’t exactly a fan of. On the flip side, true faith gets a glowing cameo as a mystical cross soaring above, radiating heavenly light and celestial vibes.

The picture doesn’t really do it justice, so here’s a detail.
The stark contrast between the black cross collapsing in the red background and the white cross soaring into heaven is simply awesome.

“In trembling and horror they beheld him They stood wide apart, driv’n by his hands And his feet which the nether abyss Stamp’d in fury and hot indignation But no light from the fires all was Dark.”
— William Blake, The Book of Los
London 1795

2. Fantastical Creatures

By the end of the 18th century, art was overflowing with supernatural, fantastical, surprising, and monstrous imagery. These bizarre creatures gave artists a chance to unleash their imaginations and satisfy the growing taste for the shocking and terrifying. In a world where Enlightenment ideals and progress were increasingly questioned, the irrational and the otherworldly started to feel way more appealing.

It’s said that Blake’s monsters appeared to him in visions. Meanwhile, other artists turned to apparitions, witches, and monsters from literature and folklore—including Shakespeare’s creations and figures from Greek tragedies. As satirical graphic art blossomed in those years, these fantastical or grotesque creatures gained new sharpness, boldly exposing the vices of contemporary society.

Early in his career, for instance, Nathaniel Dance painted trendy portraits and epic historical scenes. However, his witty side truly came alive through drawings and caricatures, especially after he gave up being a professional artist. The strange creature in this drawing showcases Dance’s playful and imaginative spirit: it’s titled A Dog-Headed Monster in a Cave, but all I see is a cartoon character ready for a new adventure.

Imaginative sea monsters often pop up in John Hamilton Mortimer’s works from the 1770s. In this case, the fish seem to be part human, part monster, and they’re busy stuffing themselves with rock-hard shells. The theme might be inspired by Italian writer Andrea Alciati, who compared the wild nature of the sea to human passions. If left unchecked, these passions, much like the sea, lead to self-destruction. Again, do you find them monstrous? ’cause I think they’re cute.

3. Enchantments?

Enchantments!

Even though many people thought of fairies and spirits as mere superstition or fanciful tales, these magical beings stayed alive and well in the art of the time. Artists like Blake and Henry Fuseli breathed new, vivid life into the world of fairies and spirits with works full of enchanting, feminine figures that appeared seductive and captivating, sparking the imaginations of their audiences.

Fairies of this era often intertwined with the mysterious, fantasy women of the time’s art and literature. They offered an alluring sense of forbidden pleasure to viewers—a mix of danger and desire. These magical beings weren’t just whimsical; they reflected contemporary anxieties about femininity and sexuality. They played with the idea that women’s independence and sensuality could be transformative, for better or worse, affecting not only the person involved but also those around them.

At their core, these fairies could be seen as symbols of untamed freedom—wild, unpredictable, and brimming with potential for creation or destruction, depending on how their influence played out. Whether for good or ill, these mystical figures served as a mirror to the fears and fascinations of society, casting a spell on anyone willing to take a closer look.

Theodor von Holst was a student of Fuseli and, like his teacher, he specialized in literary subjects with a particular flair for the macabre and supernatural. In the painting shown below, he seems to draw inspiration from the legend of Faust. The scene is teeming with grotesque creatures, spirits, and witches, with a striking fairy figure dancing prominently in the centre at the top.

Henry Singleton (October 19, 1766 – September 15, 1839) was an English painter and miniaturist known for his portraiture and historical compositions. Born in London into an artistic family, Singleton was raised by his uncle after his father’s death when he was very young. He began his artistic career at the age of sixteen and attended the Royal Academy Schools. His early works included large biblical compositions, but he later gained recognition for his portraits, which were in high demand throughout his life. In this painting, however, Singleton takes inspiration from Shakespeare’s The Tempest and captures the magical essence of Ariel’s final song:

“On the bat’s back I do fly, after summer merrily.”

4. Romanticing the Past

The past was a treasure trove of inspiration for Blake and the other artists of his time. Amid the struggles and tensions of the long wars with France, images and stories from Britain’s history offered a source of national pride, a way to escape, and a means to convey modern messages. Celtic and Nordic languages, folklore, art, and architecture gained a fresh allure. The figure of the ancient bard, for instance, became a powerful symbol of resistance and defiance for these artists. Shakespeare had a revival during this period, and his works helped the British reimagine a heroic and inspiring past. The English countryside, with its ruins and old churches, took on new layers of meaning.

Some artists, including Blake, even adopted historical artistic techniques and styles in their efforts to reconnect with the spirit of past eras.

Samuel Palmer was a prominent painter, etcher, and writer, born on January 27, 1805, in London and passing away on May 24, 1881, in Redhill, Surrey. He is celebrated as a key figure in the British Romantic movement, particularly known for his visionary landscapes that often reflect a deep spiritual connection to nature. Palmer was the son of a bookseller and showed artistic talent from a young age, exhibiting his works at the Royal Academy by the age of fourteen. His early influences included the works of J.M.W. Turner and later the mystical ideas of William Blake, whom he met through artist John Linnell in 1824. This encounter significantly shaped his artistic direction, leading him to explore themes of spirituality and nature in his work.
In 1826, Palmer moved to Shoreham in Kent, where he produced some of his most significant works. His paintings from this period are characterized by their ethereal quality and often depict pastoral scenes infused with a sense of the mystical: notable works include The Valley Thick with Corn and Repose of the Holy Family, which showcase his unique blend of realism and vision.

Palmer’s style evolved over time; while his earlier works were rich in sepia tones and dreamlike qualities, later pieces reflected a more conventional approach as he sought to appeal to public tastes for financial stability. His shift towards watercolors allowed him to explore brighter palettes and more detailed landscapes. He was also a writer who contributed to discussions on art and aesthetics, associated with a group of artists known as “the Ancients” who were inspired by Blake’s teachings. Despite facing criticism during his lifetime, Palmer’s work gained recognition posthumously and has been influential in the study of Romantic art.

5. The Gothic

Blake’s first real encounter with Gothic art came when he was a young apprentice engraver sketching tombs in Westminster Abbey. Over time, the Gothic style became a central part of his artistic vision, representing a spiritual and vibrant art form—a timeless ideal. But Blake wasn’t alone in thinking this way. The Middle Ages sparked the romantic imaginations of artists and writers like no other era before it.

This fascination took many forms: from detailed studies of Gothic churches to exploring the evocative qualities of ancient ruins and castles, and even adopting more linear and precise artistic styles. What’s more, Gothic could be interpreted in countless ways: for some, it symbolized national tradition; for others, it was a reminder of an oppressive old order. Yet for others still, it expressed political and imaginative freedom—the possibility of change.

6. Satan and the Underworld

Artists looked to the past just as much as they imagined the future. The catastrophes and traumas of the 1790s and 1800s—revolutions, wars, brutal violence, and dreams of liberty—seemed to mark the dawn of a new era. Exactly what this new era would be was anyone’s guess, stirring both the terror of unimaginable horrors and the hope for transformation and redemption.

It no longer seemed far-fetched to believe that biblical prophecies about the end of the world were actually coming true. Artists channeled this looming sense of apocalypse into their work, reflecting their own anxieties about the times. Blake—who spent his final years depicting the torments of hellish, Dante-inspired infernos—didn’t stop at satanic and infernal themes. For him, destiny and revelation became something truly sensational.

This is one of Blake’s great color prints, which he described as having “historical and poetic” subjects. Here, a heroic Satan rises from the ground. He doesn’t show any of the signs of depravity or savagery you might expect. Instead, his evil is distilled into the form of a serpent, coiled tightly around Eve’s body as she lies prostrate on the ground, completely inert after she had consumed the forbidden fruit from the tree of knowledge.

Blake often depicted also scenes from the biblical Book of Job. In this case, he shows Satan inflicting plagues on the devoted Job. However, Satan is portrayed as a monumental presence: his body is idealized and athletic, his wings stretched wide, dominating the space. As an embodiment of a rebellious spirit, Satan’s figure might also reflect echoes of Blake’s own radical opinions.

In Blake’s personal mythology, Los represents creativity and inspiration. Here, he’s shown crouched in a “gloomy sadness,” mimicking the posture of the chained skeleton next to him. Blake originally included this image in his First Book of Urizen (1794), but later printed it as a standalone work. Blake’s fiery and terrifying depiction is wide open to interpretation.

The First Book of Urizen is one of William Blake’s major prophetic works, a foundational text within Blake’s unique mythology, exploring themes of creation, alienation, and the nature of reason. The book is characterized by its intricate illustrations and poetic language, presenting a narrative that serves as a parody of the biblical Book of Genesis. The book introduces Urizen, a character who embodies rationality and represents oppressive structures in society. Urizen is depicted as a “primeval priest” who becomes separated from the other Eternals to establish his own realm, which is defined by rigid laws and religious dogma. This separation leads to the creation of a world that is alienating and enslaving, reflecting Blake’s critique of organized religion and the constraints it imposes on human experience.

The narrative unfolds in a mythic format, detailing the struggles within the divine mind to define itself and the universe. It begins with a description of a void before creation, emphasizing themes of isolation and existential dread:

“Earth was not: nor globes of attraction
The will of the Immortal expanded
Or contracted his all flexible senses.”
(Chapter II, stanza 1)

Urizen’s journey involves creating laws that govern existence but ultimately lead to his downfall. He attempts to establish order through commands that reflect his desire for control but finds himself trapped by his own creations:

“Laws of peace, of love, of unity;
Of pity, compassion, forgiveness.”
(Chapter II, stanza 8)

The structure of The First Book of Urizen consists of several chapters filled with poetic verses accompanied by Blake’s distinctive engravings. The work features a dual-column format, reminiscent of biblical texts, which enhances its thematic depth as it rewrites traditional religious narratives. The illustrations are integral to understanding the text, as they visually represent the complex ideas Blake explores.
Blake employs rich symbolism throughout the book. For instance, Urizen’s four sons—Thiriel, Utha, Grodna, and Fuzon—represent the classical elements: Air, Water, Earth, and Fire. This familial structure underscores the interconnectedness of creation while simultaneously illustrating Urizen’s fragmented nature.

The First Book of Urizen is part of Blake’s broader project to challenge conventional religious beliefs and explore alternative spiritualities. Alongside The Book of Los and The Book of Ahania, it forms an unorthodox rewriting of scriptural texts that reflects Blake’s radical vision during a time of political upheaval in England. Blake’s work has had a lasting impact on literature and art, influencing various movements that seek to explore the relationship between humanity and the divine. His portrayal of Urizen as a figure representing oppressive reason continues to resonate in contemporary discussions about authority and individual freedom.

Next to Blake’s own mythology, Dante was another source of inspiration for hellish scenes and penitent figures.

In the seventh circle of Dante’s Inferno, for instance, Dante and his guide Virgil enter the forest of the suicides. The trees are the trapped souls of those who took their own lives (which was then considered a sin) and Blake jumps at the chance to represent twisted branches and, amongst them, monstrous Harpies feeding on them.

Blake wasn’t the only artist drawn to the Underworld. Dante’s poem was a big hit with artists, who loved diving into its strange, grotesque, and terrifying imagery to let their imaginations run wild.

Theodor Richard Edward von Holst (3 September 1810 – 14 February 1844) was a British painter renowned for his literary themes and connections to the Romantic movement. Born in London to a family of Livonian descent, he displayed artistic talent early on, which was recognized by notable artists such as Henry Fuseli and Sir Thomas Lawrence. Lawrence even purchased some of von Holst’s drawings when he was just ten years old, paving the way for his admission to the Royal Academy Schools in 1824.

Von Holst is best known for illustrating literary works, particularly those of European authors like Dante, Shakespeare, and Mary Shelley. He notably became the first artist to illustrate Shelley’s Frankenstein in its 1831 edition. His works often drew inspiration from German Romantic literature, including the writings of Goethe and E.T.A. Hoffmann, leading him to be regarded as a significant figure in the illustration of German Romantic themes in England.
Despite his considerable talent and imagination, von Holst’s choice of subjects—often dark, supernatural, and melancholic—did not align with contemporary public tastes, resulting in a degree of neglect during his lifetime. He produced around 49 paintings exhibited in major London exhibitions and received praise for his exceptional draughtsmanship and colour sense.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti and other members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood admired von Holst’s work, considering him a bridge between earlier Romantic artists like Fuseli and Blake and the newer generation of Pre-Raphaelites. His paintings often featured dramatic and mythological themes, with titles that reflected their melodramatic nature.

This fantastical image takes its name from Charon, the ferryman who transports condemned souls to Hell. When Holst exhibited this painting in 1837, he included verses from Dante’s Divine Comedy:

“Woe to you, wicked spirits! I hope you never see the sky again…”

Von Holst married Amelia Thomasina Symmes Villard in 1841 but died at the relatively young age of 33 from liver disease. After his death, his works were sold at auction, but he remains an important figure for his contributions to literary painting and illustration during the Romantic period. His grand-nephew was composer Gustav Holst, further linking the family to artistic legacy.

John Martin (19 July 1789 – 17 February 1854) was another influential English painter, engraver, and illustrator known for his dramatic and grandiose depictions of biblical and mythological themes. He played a significant role in the Romantic movement, particularly through his large-scale paintings that captured sublime landscapes and intense emotional scenes.
Born in Haydon Bridge, Northumberland, Martin came from a humble background as the son of a farm labourer. He was one of the few surviving children in a large family, which instilled a sense of resilience in him. At the age of 14, he began an apprenticeship as a heraldic painter, which laid the groundwork for his artistic career. By 15, he was studying under an Italian artist, Boniface Musso, and later worked in various artistic capacities, including painting china and glass.

Martin moved to London in 1806, where he initially struggled to gain recognition. His first significant exhibition at the Royal Academy occurred in 1811 with the oil painting A Landscape Composition, which marked the beginning of his rise to fame. He became well-known for his large biblical paintings that often featured vast landscapes populated by tiny human figures, emphasizing humanity’s insignificance against the backdrop of nature.

Some of his notable works include Belshazzar’s Feast (1821), The Fall of Nineveh (1828), Sadak in Search of the Waters of Oblivion (1823) and The Seventh Plague of Egypt (1823), but my absolute favourite is his Pandemonium. I was very pleased to see another version in this exhibition. The painting depicts a scene from John Milton’s Paradise Lost. Pandemonium is Satan’s palace in Hell, surrounded by lakes of fire and vast, fiery plains. The dramatic setting and apocalyptic imagery owe much to the work of John Martin. Known as the “Mad Martin,” his grand and spectacular visions were hugely popular and influential.

In addition to painting, Martin was also involved in engineering projects related to urban infrastructure, including proposals for London’s sewer system. His visionary ideas anticipated later developments in civil engineering.

Despite his popularity among the general public—Thomas Lawrence even referred to him as “the most popular painter of his day”—Martin faced criticism from prominent art critics like John Ruskin, who dismissed his work as lacking true artistic merit. His dramatic style led to him being nicknamed “Mad Martin,” partly due to confusion with his brother Jonathan, who suffered from mental illness and infamously set fire to York Minster.

Martin continued to paint until late in his life, producing a trilogy of significant works depicting scenes from the Book of Revelation: The Last Judgement, The Great Day of His Wrath, and The Plains of Heaven. These works are considered some of his finest contributions to art.

The exhibition closed with a multimedia installation bringing some or Blake’s paintings to life. Though it might seem a sterile exercise, I rather liked it. It gave a good idea of the movement and dynamism Blake wished to express through his characters.

H.R. Giger: Beyond Alien

Turin mounted a small but very nice exhibition with some fine pieces I had never seen before. The concept is that H.R. Giger, the Swiss visionary behind the xenomorph in Alien, is so much more than that. I was already familiar with the rest of his production, but it was nice to see.

Can’t get to Turin? Speak no Italian? I’ve got you covered.

1. Early Childhood: the Kid with the Skull

H.R. Giger was born on February 5, 1940 as Hansruedi Giger in Chur, a small town in Switzerland’s Grisons region. Son of a pharmacist, he described his childhood as peaceful and happy. Yet, being born in the middle of World War II left him with an unease he could never shake. As he once put it, “What I remember most was the collective fear of that time… and as a kid, you couldn’t understand it. That was the worst part—feeling something was wrong without knowing what.”

Young Hansruedi spent his days in his family’s pharmacy, fascinated by colorful, sometimes blood-filled bottles and peculiar medical tools from the time. His curiosity about the morbid quickly grew stronger—so much so that his father gave him the gift of a human skull he in turn had received from a supplier. He was hooked, and at age 5, he could be found carrying the skull around like a pup on a leash.

Giger was also captivated by the mummies at the Rätisches Museum, which he visited for the first time with his sister. While other kids sat dutifully in church, Giger would hang out by the mummy of an Egyptian princess, both horrified and mesmerized.

From an early age, beauty and horror were intertwined for Giger. The allure of the strange and dark captured him entirely, influencing his art and giving him endless inspiration.

However, the same father who gave him the gift of a human skull wasn’t too thrilled about his artistic inclinations and pushed him towards a “real” job. After some tough negotiations, Giger enrolled as a technical draftsman and later attended the School of Applied Arts in Zurich. Though he never officially worked as a draftsman, the precision and industrial style he developed there would forever influence his unique aesthetic.

At art school, Giger honed his skills in drawing robotic and mechanical details with intense precision. He also discovered Sigmund Freud, began keeping a dream journal, and channeled his nightmares into art. In the world of independent art, his name started to rise, especially in the underground counterculture scene, where his work found a home on album covers.

After finishing his studies, he expanded his toolkit with ink and other drawing materials. Eventually, in the early ‘70s, he embraced acrylics and airbrush, which became his trademark.

2. Influences

Although H.R. Giger’s art defies all categories and conventions, a few artists managed to influence and shape his work. These include early inspirations like Salvador Dalí and Ernst Fuchs, whom he had the chance to meet, and Jean Cocteau. But he was also inspired by some “classic weirdos” like Hieronymus Bosch, Arcimboldo, and Piranesi.

To young Giger, the greatest painter in the world was Ernst Fuchs, founder of the Vienna School of Fantastic Realism. Giger’s fascination with surrealism was truly sparked when he saw a work by Salvador Dalí for the first time, or even better, when he watched Dalí’s version of Beauty and the Beast by Jean Cocteau.

Among his many influences, one of the most life-changing was meeting Li Tobler, a beautiful Swiss actress he encountered in 1966. They were inseparable and moved in together, forming a powerful bond that would be both romantic and artistically inspiring.

On May 19, 1975, after years of battling depression, Li took her own life with a gun. This tragic event left Giger devastated, profoundly impacting both his life and his art. She was only 27, and her death marked a dark period in his work. The pieces he created that year are some of his most haunting and macabre.

The face of Li Tobler in the works Li I and Li II captures the essence of Giger’s aesthetics and philosophy. In both pieces, the head of the subject is severed, surrounded by elements that clearly reference the classical image of Medusa—think Caravaggio’s haunting Shield with the Head of Medusa. But unlike Medusa’s screaming, monstrous face, Li’s features are calm, serene, yet intense, as if she’s shrouded in a ghostly mist, reminiscent of corpses not long after death.

Li is both alive and dead, detached from her body—if she ever had one. Her face is covered in tubes, mysterious machinery, and surrounded by insectoid figures. Key symbols include skulls and a serpent, which winds across her forehead in both paintings. In ancient Egyptian culture, beloved by Giger, the serpent symbolizes rebirth and healing but also transformation and immortality. Here, it seems almost to foreshadow the tragic fate awaiting Li.

Li I and Li II remain two of Giger’s most iconic works. In the alien female forms in his later work, you can always spot elements echoing the features of his lost partner.

3. Giger and Cinema

“I do whatever I want: sculpture, painting, design, interior architecture, industrial design, and I also write. This kind of multidisciplinarity has been very useful in my film experience.
Films fascinate me, I am fascinated by them because I believe they have surpassed painting as an artistic medium in this century.”
– H.R. Giger

Giger was essentially saying, “I dabble in everything, and I love movies because they’re like the ultimate form of art now.” It captures his multifaceted approach and his belief.

While Giger is universally known as the mastermind behind the visuals of the Alien franchise, his journey into the world of cinema began long before his encounter with director Ridley Scott.

In 1967, Giger met writer Sergius Golowin and filmmaker Fredi Murer. He joined a filmmaking contest and even created a documentary about his paintings. In 1968, Murer hired him to make models for a short film called Swissmade, Giger’s first experience crafting monstrous alien creatures for the screen.

In the early ’70s, Giger’s exhibitions often featured documentary films shot with his friend J.J. Wittmer. A notable example is Giger’s Necronomicon in 1975, which was partially filmed during a collective exhibition where his partner Li Tobler was also exhibiting.

When filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky—known for El Topo (1970) and The Holy Mountain (1973)—set out to make a film adaptation of Frank Herbert‘s Dune, he dreamed big. He wanted stars like Mick Jagger, Orson Welles, and Salvador Dalí, and he was determined to bring Giger on board. Fascinated by Giger’s “sick art,” Jodorowsky wanted his designs for the Harkonnen world.

Giger designed Giedi Prime, the Harkonnen home world, for what was meant to be Jodorowsky’s masterpiece. Later, on Dune, Giger met Dan O’Bannon, the screenwriter who would soon come to him with a new project: Alien. The two formed a strong bond, based on a shared passion for military horror and sci-fi aesthetics.

In the fall of 1977, after publishing Necronomicon, a compilation of his works, Giger sent a copy to O’Bannon, who showed it to Ridley Scott. Scott instantly knew Giger was the right artist to bring Alien’s universe to life. In February 1978, 20th Century Fox and Giger sealed the deal, and he produced around thirty airbrushed paintings that outlined every stage of the alien’s evolution, as well as the planet and spaceship settings. The rest, as they say, is history.

On August ’77, I get a call from O’Bannon. He asks me if I’d like to do something for a film called Alien. I say yes, why not. But I think I have to handle the question of payment better this time: I’ve never seen a penny from Jodorowsky. He has never even called to say: “I’m sorry, but the film is longer being made”.

With his creation of the inhuman Xenomorph, Giger stunned the world, setting a new standard for sci-fi and horror visuals. In 1980, his undeniable talent was officially recognized when he won an Academy Award for Best Visual Effects.

The connection between H.R. Giger and cinema continued in the following years with various projects, though they didn’t all take off. For example, he created seventy drawings for The Tourist for Universal, concepts for The Mirror for 20th Century Fox, and even designs for a film adaptation of Momo, Michael Ende’s children’s book, for Rialto Film.

During the production of Aliens, the second chapter of the Xenomorph saga directed by James Cameron, Giger wasn’t invited and, instead, he got involved in creating a demonic creature resembling a Gorgon called the “Great Beast” for the film Poltergeist II by Brian Gibson. Alongside the “Great Beast,” Giger was asked to imagine a whole series of characters and nightmare visions meant to evoke a sense of dread and eerie silence in the film.

Giger contributed to Poltergeist II, providing about twenty sketches, ideas, and advice for a movie that did well at the box office. Although Giger’s designs for Poltergeist II were incredibly creative and atmospheric, they didn’t quite make it to the screen as he’d envisioned. In fact, Giger later said he found the final creature a “terrible distortion” of his original artwork, feeling his vision had been flattened and completely altered.

This disappointment for his Gorgon was only made worse when he discovered Aliens had been produced without his involvement—a real shock at the time. However, he later acknowledged that he admired the “Alien Queen” created by James Cameron and Stan Winston, even if he wasn’t part of its design.

In 1990, he began yet another abandoned project, Ridley Scott’s The Train—a year of frustration for Giger. But the next year, he returned to familiar territory with Alien III. In the mid-90s, he also worked on Species (1995), a sci-fi horror film by R. Donaldson based on D. Feldman’s script. Giger’s designs brought an eerie beauty and a ghostly train to life.

Giger’s skills were diverse, spanning graphic design, illustration, sculpture, interior design, and painting. His dark, unsettling aesthetic was sought by directors like Cronenberg and Lynch, who shared his love for haunting, oppressive visuals.

In a 1979 Starlog interview, he was asked, “What’s the future for H.R. Giger? Will you keep working in film?” Giger, with his signature intensity, replied, “Some people think cinema is a low art. Dalí focused on theater, opera, and ballet. He even made a dream sequence for Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1945). But this way of thinking is outdated. We need to shake things up and move beyond the old school!”

“To say that Giger is the artist of Alien is like saying that Michelangelo is only the set designer of the film The Agony and the Ecstasy.”
— Clive Barker

4. The Biomechanoid

Starting in 1967-68, Giger gave life to a new subject: a strangely unsettling yet empathetic human mass, the Biomechanoids. With these works, Giger took his art from the grotesque to pure horror. The Biomechanoids look like tomorrow’s humans, viewed through the lens of a pessimistic utopia where science fiction ascends to a higher level, though not purified in any classical sense.

Giger’s future humans might as well be labeled mutants. Their anatomy shows as much mutation as evolution. They wear gas masks, antennas, artillery parts, or medical devices and are entirely fused or inescapably trapped within fantastic machinery.

In 1968, Giger created his Gebarmachine or Birth Machine using ink on wood. This piece marks the end of an early phase in Giger’s career and is the height of his raw style, full of dark humor from that period. In it, we see the cross-section of an automatic firearm (Giger was quite the gun collector, with over 60 in his possession) aimed upward. In the barrel, small, identical humans are lined up, almost like they’re part of an assembly line. According to Giger, these tiny beings are fired into a brutalized, polluted world, equipped with diving helmets and tiny machine guns as protection.

Giger once mentioned he had a very difficult birth, not only requiring forceps but also leaving him with some hazy memory of it (which isn’t scientifically possible, or so I’m told). Perhaps that’s why one of his recurring nightmares involved being in a huge room with only one way out. In the dream, he would start to panic, trying to escape through a narrow tunnel that got tighter and tighter, only to get stuck at the end by something as small as a paper clip. The real terror struck when he realized he couldn’t go back because his hands were tied.

5. A Reflection on Cities and Spaces

Beyond his extraordinary technical skills, one of Giger’s greatest strengths was his ability to stage the drama of a post-human daily life. In his works, organic forms invade and overwhelm, sneaking into urban settings—even when the cityscape should be the main star.

The acrylics he dedicated to New York make this clear. Here, Giger portrays the tiny scale of an electronic circuit, a biomechanical path, a system that seems to function all on its own, against the rigid, crystalline geometry of New York skyscrapers. Organic forms latch onto the harsh, angular skyline, sprawling across the bustling landscape of apartments, cubicles, and residential cells.

From microscopic to gargantuan, from the teeming underground life to the neo-gothic glow of forgotten megacities lost in the haze of a dull fate, Giger once again blends biology with technology, landscape with character—just like in his Biomechanical Landscapes.

In Giger’s paintings, the background often merges with the subjects, engulfing and feeding off them. Sometimes, the subjects themselves form the backdrop. This is what we see in his Biomechanical Landscapes series.

Titanium bones and exo-endoskeletons, flesh and elastic membranes, tubes and veins emerge indifferently, forming machine-bodies, nerve corridors, tortured cyborgs, and serially reproduced sexual organs.

The structures in Giger’s works resemble parts of enormous machines that integrate living beings. Giger isn’t as interested in what these machines do as he is in their sheer existence and endless possibilities. Like multiplying cells, the metal of everyday objects works its way under our skin, changing us, enriching us, and forever altering our bodies and senses.

The Mystery of San Gottardo, a set of pieces I wasn’t familiar with, revolves around the Saint Gotthard Pass, a mountain crossing in the Swiss Alps that has always served as a crucial link between northern and southern Europe. This pass, rich with historical, mystical, and cultural significance, inspired Giger deeply. Fascinated by ancient myths, legends, and the eerie atmosphere of the Gotthard region, he set out to create an evocative project full of mysterious symbols and haunting landscapes.

Giger began working on this project in the early ‘60s, and although he continued for decades, The Mystery of San Gottardo only saw the light as a book in 1998. The story centers on a man and his love for nature, featuring a character named Armbeinda—a sentient creature combining an arm and a leg.

The idea for this creature was born from a 1963 sketch titled The Begger, which depicts a leg and an arm holding a hat, a motif Giger repeated in several notebooks. This race of biomechanoids is created by a military organization, and the project explores the grotesque idea of what might happen if arms and legs, usually at our service, developed minds of their own and were “liberated.”

6. Going Cosmic

The Surrealist movement, born in France after World War I, aimed to explore and express the real workings of the mind beyond the control of reason and free from any aesthetic or moral influence. One of Surrealism’s cornerstones is that the unconscious holds the deepest and truest roots of reality. H.R. Giger drew inspiration from surrealist greats like Salvador Dalí, Hans Bellmer, and Max Ernst. While Surrealism is best known for artists like Dalí, Ernst, and Magritte, it focused on exploring the unconscious, dreams, and alternative realities. Giger absorbed these themes, adding a dark, technological aesthetic influenced by biomechanics.

In an interview, Giger himself said, “The style that influenced me the most was Art Nouveau, for the elegance of its shapes and drawings. My biomechanoids are influenced by this style, which is architectural and combines machines with a streamlined concept of progress.”

Giger’s fascination with biomechanics comes from blending anatomical, technological, and visionary elements. His work often critiqued the dehumanization brought about by rampant technology. Giger reinterpreted modern society, exploring the fusion of organic and mechanical forms, creating worlds that seemed both alive and artificial. His forms evoke a sense of alienation and discomfort, reflecting a modern interpretation of existence while embodying the fears and anxieties of the 20th and 21st centuries.

Giger believed that with the advent of new technologies, humans would evolve into a hybrid, half-living, half-mechanical species—a concept that fascinated him. In his words: “New forms, new possibilities—and fear, too. I believe that as we approach the end of the second millennium, humanity is going through a moment of reflection and reevaluation, of both its evolution and a return to the past.”

One of Giger’s deepest cultural influences was H.P. Lovecraft, whose work provided a foundation for Giger’s Necronomicon. Published in 1977, the Necronomicon is essentially a collection of Giger’s most famous works and pays tribute to Lovecraft with its title. Howard Phillips Lovecraft—writer, poet, literary critic, and essayist—was recognized as a major influence in horror, standing alongside Edgar Allan Poe. Considered by many as a forerunner of modern science fiction and the father of Cosmicism, Lovecraft’s philosophy emphasized humanity’s insignificance within the vast, indifferent universe—an idea that resonated deeply with Giger. Lovecraft often mentioned the Necronomicon, a fictional book of magic written by the “mad Arab” Abdul Alhazred. According to Lovecraft, it was a mysterious text torn to pieces by an invisible force—a concept that Giger found inspiring.

7. Giger and Music

Another field where H.R. Giger lent his artistic touch was music. Since 1969, Giger created various album covers—the first being for The Shiver. However, his big break in the music world came in 1973 when Emerson, Lake & Palmer commissioned him to create the cover for what would become one of his most iconic works, Brain Salad Surgery, now a widely reproduced image and a masterpiece exhibited in Prague in 2005. The cover consists of two parts: the outer sleeve shows a female face, while the inner sleeve reveals mechanical parts. Giger’s decision to feature a woman’s face contrasted starkly with the imagery typically associated with hard rock, marking a bold statement that redefined album art.

Giger’s connection to music is further illustrated by another genre classic, the 1981 cover for KooKoo, the debut album by Debbie Harry, the iconic Blondie singer. For the cover of Debbie Harry’s album KooKoo, Giger immortalized the captivating singer with a face that’s almost catatonic—not blonde, colourful, or lively as she was known as the frontwoman of Blondie, but pallid with dark hair, and her face pierced with large needles. The idea of the needles, giving the work a slightly funereal air, came to Giger after receiving acupuncture treatment from his friend and doctor Paul Tobler, brother of his late partner Li Tobler. With the four needles, Giger symbolized the four elements of nature. This eerie yet captivating image was an unusual cover for a pop album: it sparked controversy and banned posters in public spaces due to its shocking visuals.

As Jimmy Page, founder of Led Zeppelin, noted, the sensuality of this image is subtle and understated, adding a new layer to the public’s perception of Debbie Harry, who was previously seen as the Marilyn Monroe of Rock.

Over the years, Giger collaborated with a diverse array of musicians, from punk to metal. One of his most famous partnerships was with Thomas Fischer, founder of Hellhammer, Celtic Frost, and Triptykon, who admired Giger’s work. Fischer saw in Giger a kindred spirit, someone who shared a fascination for darker themes, and their collaboration continued for years. One piece, The Spell, held special meaning for Giger. Created in 1977, this artwork embodied his vision of the fusion of flesh and metal and became a defining image of the Metal scene. Fischer eventually used it for To Mega Therion, which, thanks to Giger’s artwork, became one of the iconic records in the history of Metal.

In 2010, Fischer, working with Triptykon, asked Giger to use Vlad Tepes, a 1978 artwork depicting the face of Dracula, for their album Eparistera Daimones. Giger was thrilled to see his art applied in the music world again. Giger even said, “When I made this drawing, I had the idea of creating a separate world.”

Ten years after his passing, a world without H.R. Giger feels like a world missing something truly otherworldly.

Picasso the Foreigner

If you remember from the last time I talked about him, I’m not overly fond of Picasso as a man. I can’t get over his attitude towards women and I think it’s high time to rethink his appropriation of African art. The Picasso Museum itself agrees with me. That being said, this recent exhibition at Palazzo Reale in Milan makes up for any fault of the previous one at the Museum of Cultures as it adopt a particular angle: that of Picasso’s experience as an unwanted immigrant.

“The foreigner learns the art of adapting more painfully, if more searchingly, than the one who feels entitled to belong.”
— Georg Simmel 1908

The relevance of such an exhibition is well-encapsulated in the introduction proposed by our major, Beppe Sala.

1. General Framing: an Anarchist in Paris

After three failed attempts between 1900 and 1904, Picasso finally managed to settle down in Paris. With the help of some Catalan friends, he found a place to live among them in Montmartre, a neighbourhood bustling with outsiders such as artists, actors, circus performers, and foreigners.

French society at the time was going through a rough patch, with anarchist attacks rattling everyone. Between 1894 and 1901, as the new century dawned, the country was already grappling with the chaos brought on by rapid industrialization and an ageing population. The wave of violence hit when you thought it couldn’t get more intense. The assassination of President Sadi Carnot by the Italian anarchist Sante Geronimo Caserio was like the cherry on top, stirring up political and social tension – as if the Dreyfus Affair wasn’t already headline-worthy enough.

In this charged atmosphere, some folks started focusing on a “new problem”: immigration. In 1898, writer Maurice Barrès started pointing fingers, saying foreigners were “parasites” poisoning France. Paris was like a dark, confusing maze for young Pablo Ruiz Picasso, who barely knew the language, let alone the rules of the game.

1.1. First traumas in Paris: the Universal Exposition and the death of Casagemas

Alongside his friend Carlos Casagemas, Picasso arrives in Paris in October 1900 like a comet, just shy of his nineteenth birthday, ready to take the city by storm. Paris was buzzing with excitement; the World’s Fair of 1900 had just wrapped up after eight months and fifty million visitors. Picasso, still a young artist, had the honor of having one of his paintings displayed in the Spanish pavilion. The work was titled Last Moments. and it depicted a priest at the bedside of a dying woman, but it didn’t survive.

Paris was the epitome of a modern metropolis, complete with moving sidewalks, electric lights, and a shiny new metro line. Picasso and Casagemas set up camp with two French models, Odette and Germaine, in a small studio on the hill of Montmartre, surrounded by bars, cafes, narrow streets, and little squares. They were utterly enchanted by the public displays of sensuality that seemed to cast a spell over them.

In December, the duo heads back to Barcelona. But this encounter with the great city of Paris takes a tragic turn: Casagemas, heartbroken over unrequited love for Germaine, returns to Paris alone just a few weeks later. Once back in Montmartre, he confronts Germaine with a gun, then turns it on himself.

A few months later, Picasso begins painting his friend’s haunting final image on his deathbed, capturing Casagemas’s tragic end in a series of deeply emotional works.

1.2. Second Trip to Paris: the Gallery Vollard

Invited by the Catalan art dealer Pere Manach to exhibit at Ambroise Vollard’s gallery, Picasso returns from Barcelona on May 2, 1901, and moves in with Manach in Montmartre. He dives right into work, completing a whopping sixty-four paintings in just seven weeks, featuring a cast of rather unsettling characters: hunched old women, strung-out morphine addicts, heavily made-up elderly courtesans, and exhausted mothers dragging their scruffy children along.

On June 17, art critic Gustave Coquiot sings his praises, calling Picasso a “very young Spanish artist” and predicting that soon the world would be celebrating the works of Pablo Ruiz Picasso. But the very next day, things take a turn: Commissioner André Rouquier files the first police report on Picasso, labeling him as an anarchist who should be kept under special surveillance.

Despite Coquiot’s glowing review, the police officer relies mostly on the gossip of a nosy concierge, the rumors from a band of informants unleashed in Montmartre, and the themes of Picasso’s paintings as “evidence” against him. Their final conclusion? Picasso “shares the views of his compatriot host and should therefore be considered an anarchist.”

And so, Picasso’s good fortune of being welcomed into the Catalan community in Paris turns into a curse, one that would shadow him for over forty years.

1.3. The third trip

The third journey of Picasso to Paris (October 1902 – January 1903) proved to be his roughest and direst. Although helped by some of his Catalan friends, Picasso wandered the Left Bank, shifting from hostel to hostel, unable to pay for his lodgings. He sold drawings and paintings depicting the Parisian underworld of misery and marginalization. Some of the exhibitions at the Berthe Weill gallery suggested “the tormented unhappiness in the work of this young man,” according to art critic Charles Morice.

Picasso received the support of an eccentric Catalan poet and bohemian, Max Jacob, who even offered him a place to sleep in his cramped flat. He taught him French and introduced him to French literature, especially the poems of Verlaine and Rimbaud, providing him a bed in his tiny room. Picasso spent a few intense months in Paris, then decided to return to Barcelona.

1.4. The Fourth Trip: the Floating Washhouse

After his last trip to Paris, Picasso starts distancing himself from the Catalan community. He settles down at 13 Rue Ravignan, in a building that Max Jacob nicknames the Bateau-Lavoir (the “Floating Washhouse”), a true symbol of bohemian life on Montmartre hill. It’s one of the most ramshackle and rundown buildings in the city—a quick-and-dirty construction of stone, wood, and plaster, practically sliding down the hill. There’s only one source of drinking water for about thirty apartments, which are sweltering in summer and freezing in winter, and which artists convert into studios. The Bateau-Lavoir is one of those shabby slums where the city stuffs marginalized immigrants, and it’s prone to regular fires.

After Max Jacob, Picasso meets another poet, Guillaume Apollinaire, who had settled in Paris a couple of years earlier. Together, they start exploring Picasso’s new adoptive city. Like Max (who was Breton, Jewish, and gay), Apollinaire is an outsider too. He’s a foreigner in France, officially stateless, born in Rome to an unknown father and a Polish aristocrat mother.

With his new partner, the French model Fernande Olivier, who helps him integrate, Picasso lives and works at the Bateau-Lavoir for the next five years.

For an entire year, from December 1904 to December 1905, Picasso focuses on a single theme: circus performers who, like him, live in Montmartre, Paris’s neighborhood of outsiders. Les Saltimbanques (or Family of Saltimbanques, National Gallery, Washington DC) is the undisputed masterpiece of his series dedicated to acrobats. The figures radiate strength in a bleak, deserted, silent setting, representing the world of “villages without churches” described by Apollinaire in his poem Les Saltimbanques. Later on, the painting inspired another cosmopolitan poet, Rainer Maria Rilke:

“But who are they, tell me,

these Travelers,

Even more transient than we are ourselves”

(Fifth Duino Elegy)

2. The Gosol Summer and the Start of Cubism

During the summer of 1906, Picasso spends a couple of months in Gósol, a remote Pyrenean village that you could only reach by mule, along a 28-kilometer ancient trail. He stays at the inn of Pep Fontdevila, a 93-year-old innkeeper and the local kingpin of smugglers, in this mountain village where the police barely dared to show up. Since the Middle Ages, the villagers have crafted their own underground, cross-border economy, thanks to their skills, mobility, and pragmatism.

Living among them, Picasso finds a new spark, working tirelessly and thriving. Inspired by a Romanesque wooden statue of the Virgin Mary in the village church, he begins to transform his creative approach. Gradually, he starts erasing details, expressions, and anecdotal elements, moving towards a more simplified, stylized, and archetypal form.

In this “land of free people,” as he called it, Picasso carves out aesthetic paths that allow him to create his own brand of modernity. In short, the summer in Gósol marks the beginning of the heroic years of his Cubist period (1907–1914).

3. Return as a leader

In 1906, after experiencing the thrill of freedom with the smugglers in the Pyrenees, Picasso returns to Paris and, encouraged by Georges Braque, dives into a new and undoubtedly the grandest creative phase of his life. This phase will make him the leader of the Cubist avant-garde. Over seven years of intense, boundary-pushing work, Picasso and his fellow artists shake up traditional conventions and produce an impressive, almost overwhelming body of work.

The Parisian establishment looks at Cubism with suspicion, but German collectors and critics in Paris love it. They enthusiastically promote the new trend across the vast empires of northeastern Europe. New exhibitions, new collections—Picasso becomes famous and wealthy.

On February 27, 1907, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler opens a tiny art gallery in Rue Vignon, Paris. Although his family (being German Jews) had planned for him to become a banker, at just 23, he decides to follow his passion for young painters “who create the visual universe of humanity” and dives into a new adventure as a gallery owner.

Kahnweiler is one of the few early supporters of the new avant-garde. Right from the start, he meticulously catalogs every piece sold, publishes essays and studies, and connects with galleries, art critics, and collectors, especially those within the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Prussia, German-speaking Switzerland, and the Russian Empire. He builds an exceptional network for “his artists,” a unique feat in art history.

The export of Cubist art organized by Kahnweiler—with Roger Fry and Clive Bell in London; Thannhauser in Munich; Flechtheim in Berlin, Düsseldorf, Frankfurt, Cologne, and Vienna; Stieglitz and Bremer in New York; plus Amsterdam, Budapest, Prague, and Moscow—becomes one of the most remarkable expressions of the first wave of globalization, spanning from 1870 to 1914.

When World War I breaks out, however, a wave of anti-German frenzy hits France, and the Paris government confiscates all the Cubist works Picasso had with his German art dealer, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler. This happens in December 1914, and we’re talking about 700 of Picasso’s works disappearing for nearly a decade—a blow that feels like a “real amputation” for the artist. Jealous French gallery owners, eager to ruin Kahnweiler, push for his confiscated artworks to be sold off at auction between June 1921 and May 1923. Picasso becomes a casualty of the rampant xenophobia.

4. World War I

“Braque and Derain have left for the war,” Picasso writes on August 8, 1914. Even though Spain is a neutral country in the conflict, Picasso is hit by the conflict of France, now at war with what are being rudiculyzed as the “Krauts.”

The war years shatter the network of contacts Picasso had patiently built since settling in Paris in 1904. His friendships and business connections suffer heavily, and as a foreigner who isn’t fighting and a leading figure of the avant-garde, he becomes an easy target for French nationalists who label him a “traitor,” accusing him and his “Cubism” of causing France’s aesthetic and moral decline. The international ties he’d carefully woven with art dealers, collectors, and critics before the war unravel as national interests take precedence.

4.1. Russians Relationships and the Ballet

Between 1917 and 1924, Picasso works as a set designer with Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes and the high-society parties hosted by art patron Étienne de Beaumont. Diaghilev had seen Picasso’s paintings in Moscow, thanks to collectors Shchukin and Morozov. Meanwhile, Étienne de Beaumont is the poster child for the aristocracy who, after the 1914-1918 period, throw themselves into philanthropy or support artists to compensate for the failings of official institutions, which are terrified of the avant-garde.

Some say that, during these years, Picasso “betrayed” himself, abandoning his aesthetic quest and his old friends. After the trauma of the Kahnweiler seizure, Picasso reinvents himself, operating in a new sphere outside of France’s official structures, navigating a European transnational space (that of the Ballets Russes), and placing himself within a global story (the ancient Greco-Roman themes loved by Étienne de Beaumont).

As nationalism rises, borders are redrawn, and accusations of betrayal fly against anyone who clouds the notion of French purity, Picasso, the savvy strategist, uses his cosmopolitan flair to break free from the isolation that had plagued him since 1914.

Classic, Cubist, Surrealist, political… Summing up Picasso’s variety of styles, especially between the two world wars, isn’t easy. From theater set design to sculpture, drawing, engraving, poetry, and political cartoons, Picasso’s creativity knows no bounds. “Picasso is like a perpetual motion machine,” a critic once wrote. “You look for him here, and he’s already over there, never taking the same path twice.”

Truth be told, these were challenging years for him in ways we can relate, as they were marked by the rise of fascism, which would plunge Europe into World War II. A foreigner in France, labeled a “degenerate artist” by Nazi Germany, and an enemy of Francoist Spain, Picasso became a person non grata—an elusive artist whose creativity was influenced by the turbulent times. As a foreigner, he had to report to the authorities every couple of years, redoing his fingerprints at the police station, which kept him under surveillance.

In this atmosphere, the Spanish Civil War hits and in just a few days, he created Guernica, a masterpiece that would become the world’s most famous artwork and the most powerful protest against the killing of innocent civilians. “The Old World has committed suicide,” commented the writer-anthropologist Michel Leiris in a stark observation.

5. The Surrealists

In the early 1920s, young Surrealist poets, disheartened by the carnage of the Great War, turn to Picasso, whom André Breton calls “the only true genius of our time, an artist like none other, perhaps not even in Antiquity.” Starting in 1923, Picasso, now discovered, admired, celebrated, and embraced by Louis Aragon, André Breton, and Paul Éluard, is drawn into this subversive galaxy filled with legendary names, all followers of Dadaism. This connection lets him return to his roots, to the world of poets.

In the past, Picasso’s Cubist works had been fervently admired by avant-garde artists and intellectuals from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Russian Empire, and Prussian Empire. For over a decade, Picasso becomes the hero and inspiration of the Surrealists, a reluctant guiding spirit. He creates his so-called “magic paintings,” filled with oversized, whimsical anthropomorphic forms where the “polyphonic law of opposites” echoes, and inner demons reign.

Even Dalí, Miró, and Giacometti soon join the chorus of passionate admirers of Picasso.

6. Boisgeloup

In June 1930, with his income skyrocketing, Picasso buys an 18th-century chateau in Normandy, at Boisgeloup. The spacious property allows him to expand his creative repertoire, making large sculptures, engravings, and working with iron. As xenophobia rages on, shown by the riots of April 4, 1934, this “new geographical solution” gives him a sense of independence and security.

Meanwhile, at the prefecture, the “foreigners’ service” perfects an increasingly efficient control system, using a Central Criminal Registry with over four million records and two million files to keep tabs on those often accused of “stealing French jobs.” On July 12, 1932, the director of public security responds to an inquiry from the Minister of the Interior, saying, “We believe Picasso has considerable means. He pays 70,000 francs in rent for his Rue La Boétie apartment and has four servants. Recently, he acquired a large estate in Gisers [sic] […] Investigations at both the Ministry of Justice (naturalization service) and other agencies have not determined if he has changed his citizenship.”

7. After the War and the Hybrid Identity: the Minotaur

In the 1920s, with almost three million workers missing due to war casualties and injuries, foreign labor becomes a necessity and an urgent priority for France. Over a decade, the number of foreign residents doubles, reaching three million by 1931 (7% of the population). But in the 1930s, amid the economic crisis, a wave of intense xenophobia sweeps the country. On July 13, 1931, the police commissioner who issues Picasso’s foreigner ID card stamps it in big black letters with “SPANISH.” By 1938, they add his fingerprints.

So, how does Picasso react to this police surveillance?

Badly.

During the Surrealist years, he starts drawing and reimagining the mythological Minotaur—a figure that is both fragile and powerful, his double, his alter ego. “Picasso’s Minotaur is Picasso,” Kahnweiler says. It’s no coincidence that during another period of crisis, Picasso transforms the mighty Minotaur into a vulnerable figure, gently led by a little girl. With his series Blind Minotaur Led by a Little Girl with Flowers (1934), Picasso finds a subtle way to express his own vulnerability.

7.1. Garcia Lorca’s Spectre

Uncertain about the outcome of his naturalization application, Picasso lives through some rough years, even fearing he might meet the same fate as Federico García Lorca, who was brutally killed by Franco’s militias on August 19, 1936. He decides to bunker down in his Paris studio on Rue des Grands-Augustins, trying to block out the chaos around him. Fueled by his obsessive work, he revisits past themes and genres, pushing them to their absolute limits.

The titles of his paintings are chillingly precise, marked with dates and locations, revealing a meticulous, almost obsessive attention to detail. His works from this period are dark, reflecting a preoccupation with the everyday struggle.

In 1943, he creates the sculpture L’Homme au mouton (The Man with the Sheep), combining the pagan theme of Hermes carrying the ram with the Christian Good Shepherd. This piece is a response to Arno Breker (Hitler’s favorite artist), who had just exhibited his monumental nudes at the Musée de l’Orangerie. In contrast to the triumphant bodies of Nazi iconography, Picasso chooses to portray a humble, fragile man carrying the lost sheep on his shoulders, aligning himself with the weak, the ill, the marginalized, the so-called “degenerates.”

8. The triumph in the States

November 9, 1930: “Picasso is currently the idol of modern art collectors,” claims The New York Times. Starting in 1911 (following his first New York show at Alfred Stieglitz’s gallery), major American collectors begin competing for Picasso’s works, as do the directors of top museums in major cities, like Alfred Barr at the MoMA.

In 1936, Barr publishes the exhibition catalog for Cubism and Abstract Art, which includes the first-ever diagram tracing the “pedigree of modern art” from 1895 to 1936, marking Picasso as a key influence on European modern art. Over time, MoMA builds an impressive collection of Picasso’s works, including Les Demoiselles d’Avignon in 1939—a painting the Louvre had turned down. Barr declares, “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon remains one of the most astounding testaments to Picasso. Few modern works so forcefully showcase the genius’s raw energy.”

Meanwhile, French museums, governed by the “good taste” of the Académie des Beaux-Arts, hold only two Picasso paintings (both donations, neither a masterpiece). It’s hardly worth pointing out the stark contrast between Picasso’s reputation in France and the rest of the world.

9. Never a Citizen

Fearing for his safety in France as the Nazi invasion looms, Picasso decides to apply for naturalization. The application sent to the Ministry of Justice in April 1940 is brief, typed, and signed with his signature in bold black ink—his typical masterful, exuberant, and dynamic flourish, like an optimistic artist who seems certain of a positive outcome.

Senator Paul Cuttoli and Professor Henri Laugier, who support his case, are hopeful, especially when the police commissioner grants initial approval, a sign that the application, “particularly urged on by the Cabinet,” is moving along smoothly. But on May 25, 1940, the Renseignements Généraux (General Intelligence Service) files a scathing four-page report that halts the process. Based on an old 1901 police report, it states that “the foreigner in question lacks the credentials for naturalization and should be considered a national security risk.”

So, what happened between April 26, when the commissioner gave his approval, and May 25, when the Renseignements Généraux issued their report? We now know that a xenophobic, Pétain-supporting, amateur painter named Émile Chevalier—a petty police official—was the one who smugly derailed Picasso’s hopes for protection.

10. The French Communist Party

On October 4, 1944, Picasso officially joins the French Communist Party. The next day, L’Humanité announces the news on its front page with a big, bold headline and a dramatic flair. Picasso later says, “I was in such a hurry to have a homeland again! I was always an exile—now I am one no longer.” He sees the party as a protective shield, a launching pad, a safeguard—and he’s not wrong.

Though tensions soon arise with the more orthodox members of the party, Picasso manages to keep his freedom intact. He’s approached by Communist mayors from various French towns and happily donates works to museums across the country, making him a key figure in the modernization of France.

Picasso steps into a new political role: the invisible artist becomes a generous donor, the outcast becomes a patron, the renegade becomes a benefactor, the outsider becomes a guardian figure. In 1953, controversy flares up when, at Stalin’s funeral, Picasso produces an ironic portrait of Stalin. Regimes are never big on irony. But the matter is smoothed over by Maurice Thorez, the General Secretary of the French Communist Party and a friend of Picasso, who understands that Picasso’s symbolic global influence is invaluable to the party. Picasso is neither punished nor scolded.

11. The Glorious Thirty

After the Liberation and the fall of Nazism, General de Gaulle comes to power, marking the beginning of a new era for France, later known as “les Trente Glorieuses”—the thirty glorious years of economic boom. For the French Communist Party, or “the party of the executed” (named for the heavy toll paid during the Resistance), a new phase also begins, with several of its leaders joining the new government.

The Communist Party strengthens the MOI (Main d’Œuvre Immigrée, the immigrant workers’ union formed in 1921), aiming to mobilize waves of political refugees—Spaniards, Italians, German and Polish Jews—who represent a valuable revolutionary force to channel into the Third International.

Picasso is known for his political views, and he’s respected in French working-class communities as well as in the country’s national contemporary art museums. The Ministry of the Interior approves local councils’ decisions to grant him honorary citizenship. Thanks to the network he has patiently built over the years, Picasso solidifies his public image.

In the summer of 1946, the superintendent of the Grimaldi Castle in Antibes welcomes Picasso for an artist residency, offering him a spacious studio on the second floor—the vast space he’d always dreamed of. Picasso also discovers Vallauris, where he learns the eleven traditional techniques for firing and glazing clay. Settling in this small village of ceramicists, he becomes a master of ceramics himself.

In 1955, at seventy-five, he decides to move to Provence, leaving the capital behind for good. Picasso chooses the South over the North, the countryside over Paris, artisans over the Academy of Fine Arts. Here, he reconnects with the historical and cultural richness of the Mediterranean world to which he has always belonged.

In his seventies and eighties, he collaborates with young local artists and artisans. While many retreat into narrow worlds with age, Picasso, now in his later years, expands his interests even further. He embarks on a grand, all-encompassing project that spans spaces, eras, and continents. He envisions a magnificent work as a composer, librettist, and conductor—a masterpiece filled with his iconic characters: bullfighters, musketeers, animals, and women, twisting conventions and inventing his own unique sense of time and space.

While continuing his dialogue with the great masters of the past, Picasso “the Communist” buys a villa in Cannes, a castle in Vauvenargues, and a farmhouse in Mougins, setting up his own vast personal territory. He lives in all these homes in the South of France, a remarkable collection of properties where he accumulates documents, personal mementos, and the countless treasures of his private collection.

When he hears that General de Gaulle wishes to grant him French citizenship and the Legion of Honor, Picasso declines—French citizenship no longer interests him.

With the “Dation Law” (1968) and the opening of the Musée National Picasso in the heart of Paris in 1985, France attempts to erase decades of exclusion—the dark years when the greatest artist of the 20th century was categorized and branded as an outsider. At the time of his death, on April 8, 1973, Pablo Picasso is the most famous foreigner in France.

Munch’s Inner Scream

I have no idea why, but the English versions of the panels for this exhibition in Milan translate the title as “Munch’s Inner Fire“, while literally the title has no shame in referring to Munch’s most famous work, the infamous Scream. Anyway, aside from giving me a chance to admire some of this artist’s lesser-known works, the exhibition left me with a mutated opinion on some of the artist’s inner workings of the mind, especially when it comes to his relationship with passions, women and sex.

Nothing is small, nothing is large. we carry worlds inside us. The small is part of the large and the large of the small. A drop of blood is an entire world with its own sun and planets. The sea is but a drop of water from a tiny part of the body. God is in us and we are in god. The primeval light is everywhere and it falls wherever there is life. everything is in motion and light…
— The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil

The show is loosely chronological, starting with a timeline, and… guys, if you place the timeline in a corridor, entrance to the right and exit to the left, the timeline can’t be written from left to right, unless you really want people dancing up and down and tripping over each other. Just sayin’.

1. Earlier portraits and approach

Edvard Munch (1863-1944) took painting seriously, and not necessarily in the way you think. He was a professional, a powerhouse when it came to work ethic, and his approach was equally emotional and intellectual, a discovery that shouldn’t come as a surprise and we already saw was the leitmotiv of the splendid exhibition around Van Gogh and his books. Over his long life, he managed to create thousands of prints and paintings, filled page after page with notes, stories, letters, and even wrote a play or two. Driven by a deep urge to express his inner feelings, he thoroughly analyzed both the usage of shape and colours, eventually questioning whether we paint what we see or what we think we saw and diving head-first into the rising field of psychoanalysis. Munch’s career kicked off just as some big changes were happening in the study of perception, in fact: by the late 1800s, scientists, psychologists, philosophers, and artists were deep in discussion about how what we see relates to what’s in our minds, and how what’s in our heads influence what we see. (Spoiler: a lot.)

Munch became fascinated by these “invisible forces” that shape our experience, and this curiosity would deeply influence his work, making him one of the most insightful artists of his time. His works explore big universal themes like birth, death, love, and the mysteries of life itself, spanning from the wild ride of romantic love, the struggles of physical and mental illness, and the hollow feeling that loss leaves behind.

The roots of this approach are well encapsulated by an early painting, an 1882 portrait of Laura Munch.
Laura was the fourth of the five Munch siblings, and the exhibition tells us she was a talented artist herself, though I couldn’t find one single work attributed to her. She began struggling with psychological challenges as a teen, and she’d battle mental illness for her whole life. The portrait was painted when Munch was in his 20s, and shows off his early academic training in the careful attention to her hair and the texture of the lace — classic elements in exercises like this. Flat areas of colour hint that Munch was starting to break free and experiment a bit with a more relaxed style, and his attention to Laura’s slightly uneven eyes, together with her tightly closed lips, capture her brother’s attention to represent her complex psychology.

Munch believed that the mind, inner visions, and consciously recalling memories actually shape — or even replace — how we see reality. He summed it up with: “I don’t paint nature; I use it as inspiration. I tap into the rich experience it offers. I don’t paint what I see but what I’ve seen.” His early academic art training soon morphed into creative techniques designed to express memories and emotions that go beyond what the eye can capture.

After a brief stint as an engineering student and later in academic drawing in 1880, Munch quickly fell under the influence of Christian Krohg, a politically radical writer and painter, and got involved with the Kristiania Boheme, an artistic and literary group that, according to Munch himself, helped “mature” his ideas about the importance of inner experience over mere physical reality. He would represent the group in a few sketches, such as the one below.

Hans Jæger, a writer, philosopher, and anarchist activist, was at the heart of the Kristiania Boheme movement, and he brought in people like the naturalist painter Christian Krohg, the painter Oda Lasson Krohg, and writer Jappe Nilssen. They were a mixed group, about twenty men and women, who criticized the restrictive values of the middle class, gender and class biases, and organized religion while promoting free sexuality. They came together as a kind of anarchist political group, creating texts and manifestos to challenge the establishment, and Munch was right there with them, becoming a pioneer of modern, progressive ideas, which he wove into the relationships portrayed in his work. We can see their influence in his paintings and prints from that era, full of unsettling, intense expressions, and everyday scenes such as The Day After.

We’ve all been there, darling.

In Berlin, Munch met another set of key intellectuals, including the Polish writer Stanislaw Przybyszewski and Swedish playwright August Strindberg. They shared Munch’s fascination with the unconscious and the complexities of gender. His art often touched on the mystical and was linked to the tragic and mysterious Scandinavian vibe — think Henrik Ibsen (and more on that later). For Munch, love was an obsession, sexuality a torment, and life often tangled with death.

1.1. Munch and Ibsen’s Ghosts

Henrik Ibsen was a pivotal figure in the world of theatre, known as the father of modern realism and one of the most influential playwrights of the 19th century. Born on March 20, 1828, in Skien, Norway, Ibsen’s early life was marked by his family’s financial struggles, which shaped his perspective and later influenced his writing. He began his career in theatre as a director and playwright in Norway before moving to Italy and Germany, where he spent nearly three decades crafting many of his most famous works.

Ibsen’s works often delve into social issues, including women’s rights, mental health, and moral dilemmas, using realistic dialogue and intricate character development to challenge the audience’s perceptions of morality and society. His plays frequently depict the struggles of individuals against oppressive societal norms. Take A Doll’s House for instance, written in 1879: it tells the story of a woman, Nora Helmer, who challenges societal norms regarding marriage and gender roles by leaving her husband and children in pursuit of her own identity. Ghosts, written in 1881, was even more controversial, if possible, and addresses issues such as heredity, morality, and societal hypocrisy.

Ibsen died on May 23, 1906, and in the same year Max Reinhardt, director of the Berlin theatre, asked Munch to create “emotional sketches” for a production of Ghosts. Munch had long been deeply influenced by Ibsen’s work, as you might expect, and saw a part of himself in the story of Osvald Alving, the artist in Ghosts who’s forced to live with a hereditary illness. Munch used expressive colours and painted tilted ceilings and slanted floors to convey a sense of claustrophobia, adding an ominous black screen as a symbol of death. Reinhardt loved how these elements added depth to the bourgeois setting, and I can’t blame him.

2. Deeper into Psychoanalysis: the Frieze of Life

Munch was well aware of what he was doing. In a note written in 1893, just after returning from Berlin, Munch explains his working method: “I only painted what I remembered and added nothing else. I tried to capture the simplicity and emptiness I saw in many scenes. I painted impressions from childhood, the colours I remember from back then. I painted colours and lines that I’d seen in an emotional state, ones that could bring that same feeling back to life.”

So, we might say that each of Munch’s paintings is like a scrapbook of memories — of things he experienced or imagined, all filtered through emotions: the colours he used weren’t naturalistic but more expressive, aiming to evoke mood rather than realism, and that’s one of the ways his work intersects with the ideas of psychoanalysis, particularly as it was shaping up in Freud’s writings around that time. Freud’s theories about the mind’s “manifest content” — the images and memories that rise to the surface like dreams — help us look at Munch’s paintings as layers of hidden emotions. In Munch’s art, we see techniques like “displacement,” where a painful scene like Death in the Sickroom makes grief almost invisible; “condensation,” where The Kiss represents the clash of two bodies as a single entity; and “symbolization,” where the haunting face in The Scream seems almost like a mummy, embodying a deep sadness through a distorted image.

“I realized that my paintings, with all their ups and downs, had taken on new meanings when seen together — they became a symphony. That’s why I decided to paint a series of friezes,” Munch wrote after setting up an exhibition in Berlin in 1893. This was the first time he considered showing some of his works in sequence. He started with a project called Study for an Evocative Series, including pieces like The Voice (1893), The Kiss (1893), Vampire (1893-94), Madonna (1893-94), Melancholy (1891-93), and The Scream (1893).

Reflecting on this choice, Munch wrote in his diaries, “I brought all my paintings together and discovered that many images shared a similar theme. Placing them side by side was like creating a melody — each piece transformed into something greater than it was alone.” This reflection marked the beginning of what Munch would later call The Frieze of Life, a collection of works around themes like Love and Seduction, Death and Rebirth, all united by similar colours and a plain white background. Munch never finalized this series, though, as he kept adding to it over time, reorganizing and refining it. His goal was to create a pathway through life’s experiences with a structure that captured the highs and lows of emotion.

2.1. Death and Rebirth

His painting Death in the Sickroom, created around 1893, is one of the most poignant reflections of personal loss and the emotional turmoil surrounding death, particularly significant as it memorializes the death of Munch’s beloved sister Sophie, who succumbed to tuberculosis in 1877. The painting captures a moment of profound sorrow, depicting Munch’s family gathered around a person in her final moments.

The scene is set in a sparsely furnished room, where the sick sits in a chair, her back turned to the viewer. The figures around her— whom we can think of as Munch himself, his siblings, and their father—are portrayed at the ages they were at the time of the event, and each family member exhibits a distinct reaction to the grief, highlighting their isolation despite being together in this moment of shared sorrow. For instance, the absence of physical contact among the family members—except for a hand resting on Sophie’s chair—illustrates their emotional distance and isolation in grief.

Though memories of his family members’ deaths haunted the artist, Munch often reflected on the cycles of death and regeneration in his writings, observing as bodies break down and transform into new life forms and energy continually reshapes matter.

Death and Spring from 1915 is a significant work in this discourse, as it reflects his ongoing exploration of death, rebirth, and the complex relationship between life and mortality, particularly through colours. He shows a body lying in a domestic setting, with a window in the background that reveals the bright green of springtime rebirth — an ironic and contrasting image, yet somehow full of promise. Beside the woman’s gaunt face, a large fern sprawls out, either resting on a pillow or sprouting from her head in a surreal way.

The Sick Child is another poignant series of paintings, created between 1885 and 1926, again reflecting on the illness and death of youth. Munch created six major painted versions of the scene, alongside various lithographs and studies. The paintings typically depict the child lying on her deathbed, often accompanied by a grieving woman assumed to be Sophie’s aunt, Karen, a pivotal figure of Munch’s childhood who moved into the house and acted as the sibling’s second mother after their biological mother’s death. In these works, the girl projecting a memory of Sophie is portrayed with a gaunt face and a haunted expression, propped up by pillows, looking towards an ominous curtain. The emotional weight of the scene is heightened by the contrast between her frail appearance and the dark, oppressive atmosphere surrounding her.

“Illness was a constant presence throughout my childhood and youth. Tuberculosis turned my white handkerchief into a proud red banner of blood. One by one, all my closest family members passed away.”

Starting in the 1880s with The Sick Child, Munch’s works began exploring his memories through painting and writing, a habit he would keep for the rest of his life. As a child, he faced significant losses: his mother died of tuberculosis when he was just five, and later his older sister Sophie. His father passed away soon after, and even when Munch was in France, his younger brother Peter Andreas died at only 30. By the 1890s, Munch was expressing his family’s grief through some of his most touching motifs.

While sentimental portrayals of illness were common in Nordic countries, Munch’s images had a twist: they were charged with the agony of watching someone die and the struggle that he believed the sick endured. His art often shows hallucinations, shadows stretching behind figures, and swirling strokes that evoke dissolving bodies — capturing how patients might experience the world around them.

2.2. Love and Seduction

In 1890, Munch wrote the Manifesto of Saint Cloud, a poetic text that’s thought to have guided his artistic choices. He wrote: “A strong, bare arm; a powerful, tanned neck; a young woman resting her head on the soft curve of her breast. She closes her eyes and listens with open, trembling lips to the words he whispers into her long, wavy hair. I want to capture this scene as I see it now, wrapped in a blue haze. These two people, at this moment, are no longer themselves but just one of the countless sexual links binding one generation to the next.”

Many of his erotic depictions revolve around the concept of bodies merging into a singular unity, and Munch believed people should understand the sacredness and grandeur of the erotic moments, “tip their hats as if entering a church.” He planned to create many such works — not just domestic scenes but real people in flesh and blood, who breathe, feel, suffer, and love. In an era of both public and private promiscuity, Munch was determined to make visible what he called the “grandeur of sexuality” — a bold and controversial choice. Although some of his images can come across as a bit misogynistic or often depict men and women as locked in a battle of the sexes, Munch’s work also shows empathy. He portrays people of all genders who are, in their own way, lured by seduction and devastated by the collapse of love.

In the 1890s, Munch began organizing his imagery of erotic desire, sexual awakening, and loneliness into a series called Love, which he developed over the next few decades.

Painted in 1895, Woman, Sphinx is also known as Woman in Three Stages, and it’s significant to understand his vision during this stage of his career. This work explores the themes of femininity, the passage of time, and the complexity of women’s identities through a symbolic representation of womanhood. The first woman, depicted in white attire, symbolizes youth as innocence and purity, and she stands between nature and the horizon, but her flowing blonde hair creates a sort of wave, connecting her to the other stages. Maturity is represented by a red-haired woman, confidently displaying her sensuality and fertility through her position, her nudity and strokes of red paint trickling between her legs. The last identity is raven-haired, shadowy and somber, and her dark clothing and ashen complexion evoke themes of loss and grief. They are usually described as three stages of maturity, but I beg to disagree: all three women are young, arguably the same age, and in my opinion they show sides of a woman that might very well coexist in the same age and in the same individual. A fourth figure, dressed in what looks like a kimono, stands on the right and it’s usually identified as a man. His eyes are lowered, either in contemplation or consternation we do not know.

Similar themes are explored in Linde’s Frieze (above), also known as The Dance on the Beach: we have the refreshing presence of a blonde woman, we have the red-haired and red-dressed temptress accompanied by a man who doesn’t look well, and we have an unamused raven-haired youth staring straight at the spectator.

The most famous exploration of these themes, however, has to be with the series of paintings depicting a kiss. The widespread interpretation we have of these series however, and in particular the connection of the woman to the mythological figure of a vampire, isn’t Munch’s. We owe it to the playwright August Strindberg, Munch’s friend from his Berlin days, who had a rather misogynistic take on the kiss imagery and described his friend’s painting as “the fusion of two beings, where the smaller one, like a carp, is on the verge of devouring the larger one, like a pest or vampire.” Strindberg’s view was miles away from Munch’s own thoughts on intimacy, as seen in Munch’s journal: “She clung to my body. She rested her head on my chest. We stayed like this for a long time. A warm, delicate feeling filled me… We kissed for a long time. The studio was utterly silent.”

Regardless of that, Edvard Munch’s series titled The Vampire is one of his most iconic and evocative works, created in various versions between 1893 and 1895. The central motif depicts a woman with flowing red hair embracing a man whose head rests on her lap, and Munch doesn’t do anything to make the woman’s grip not suffocating in a sort of tender way, and the man borderlines desperation. What’s happening here? Munch originally titled the painting Love and Pain, reflecting the duality of affection and suffering inherent in romantic relationships, and we have some similarities in poses and themes if you compare it to pieces like Consolation.
It all started in 1893 in his Berlin studio, where Munch made a sketch of two models, a man and a female. He instructed the man, “Kneel on the ground. Rest your head on her lap.” A completed version of this theme was exhibited that same year. Two years later, Stanislaw Przybyszewski suggested renaming it Vampire, and Munch gave up. He would later comment, “It was the era of Ibsen, and if people loved indulging in dark symbolism and calling a romantic scene ‘vampire,’ who was I to say no?”

3. Munch’s Own Problems

Even if it’s true that Munch didn’t quite agree with his friend’s misogynist view of paintings like The Kiss, we would be disingenuous if we didn’t consider that Munch didn’t have a particularly serene relationship with women in the first place, and the exhibition does that by telling us of two women: Eva Mudocci and Tulla Larsen.

3.1. Eva Mudocci

Born Evangeline Hope Muddock, Eva Mudocci (1872–1953) was a notable English violinist and a significant figure in Edvard Munch’s life. Their relationship, which began in 1903, was marked by intimacy and artistic collaboration, influencing both their lives and works.

Mudocci was born in Brixton, London, to a musical family; her father was a journalist and her mother a violinist. She began performing publicly at a young age and gained acclaim as a child prodigy. Throughout her career, she toured Europe with pianist Bella Edwards, forming a musical duo that was well-regarded in artistic circles. She met Munch in Paris through composer Frederick Delius, and their relationship is believed to have developed into a romantic affair that lasted until around 1908 or 1909, although they maintained contact until 1927. Munch was captivated by Mudocci’s beauty and talent, often depicting her in his artworks. According to Mudocci’s herself, Munch struggled to paint a portrait of her before creating a print titled The Brooch. “His ambition,” she explained, “was to make the most perfect portrait. But whenever he began a canvas, he destroyed it because he was dissatisfied with it.” The lithographs he eventually made were sent up to our room in the Sans Souci hotel in Berlin, along with a note from Munch that read, “Here is the stone that has fallen from my heart.” The brooch was a gift from Jens Thiis, an art historian who was one of Munch’s earliest supporters.

In December 1908, Mudocci gave birth to twins, Isobel and Kai, in Denmark. Although there were speculations regarding Munch being the father, it is now believed that the actual father was Danish writer Louis Levy. Mudocci’s relationship with Munch and her role as a mother was complex; she struggled with motherhood and found in Munch someone she could relate to when it came to anxieties.

Munch also portrayed Mudocci in an image that was almost a caricature of himself and whose title referenced the biblical figure of Salome, daughter of Herodias, who famously demanded the head of John the Baptist on a platter. Mudocci wasn’t too thrilled with being represented as a femme fatale — a seductive woman who led men to their doom, which was a popular trope of the late 19th century. She admitted the title caused “the only discord between us.” The two remained friends for many, many years.

3.2. Tulla Larsen

The same cannot be said of Tulla Larsen, the only woman Munch ever thought about marrying.

Educated and artistic, Mathilde “Tulla” Larsen came from a well-off neighbourhood in Kristiania (Oslo) and met Munch for the first time in 1898. They often travelled together, including an infamous and ill-fated trip to Italy in 1899 and their relationship, though initially happy, soured when Munch began to shy away from Tulla’s desire for a deeper, more physical attachment. “This is the time for my work. And I dedicate myself to it with all my soul,” Munch wrote. In the final months, his own fragile health and his idiotic idea of bathing nude in the Northern Sea (more on that later) made him distance himself further from her. He told Tulla, “We have to live like brother and sister. You need to see my love for you as more like a brother’s love.” But as time passed, this became impossible. Their relationship ended dramatically in the summer of 1902 during a fight, when a gun went off and Munch lost two fingers. No one’s quite sure how the shot was fired.

The bitter memory of Tulla lingered with Munch for years, especially after she married another artist. Munch’s feelings of jealousy and growing paranoia about their relationship pushed him into a spiral of depression and alcoholism. Between 1908 and 1909, he sought treatment at a private clinic in Copenhagen run by Dr. Daniel Jacobson. In his artwork, Munch repeatedly depicted the moment of his injury and its aftermath with caricatures and symbolic imagery through the depiction of Marat’s death. In his art, Munch transformed Tulla, with her red hair, into a seductive yet dangerous femme fatale, a beautiful woman who was also a sly temptress and “murderer,” while he portrayed himself as a sacrificial victim.

Such scenes appears distorted, as if viewed under intense stress where peripheral vision fades and details become sharper. Munch’s fascination with different ways of seeing — whether heightened by music or pressed by fear — comes through in his art as he explores telescopic perspectives by suggesting the loss of peripheral vision through a swirling, tunnel-like space that zooms in on Tulla Larsen at the centre. The writings of Hermann von Helmholtz, a German physicist and doctor, transformed the understanding of vision, showing how emotions and memory affect what we see. With his keen attention to his own subjective experiences and scientific interests, Munch magnified his memory of his last encounter with Larsen, turning it into a visual tunnel and framing it as a murder scene.

He even painted a double portrait with the single aim of cutting it in half. Yes, he didn’t cut a painting he already did. He painted one specifically to cut it.

4. Did you say “Swimming Naked”?

Yes, that’s what I said. Munch had a childhood plagued by illness and death, as we have seen, and both his father and brother were physicians. He himself suffered from various lung ailments throughout his life. Obsessed with the fragility of the human body, he spent much of his adult life seeking relief in spas and sanatoriums, places that were becoming popular as health consciousness spread across German-speaking and Nordic countries. Which is good.

What’s not good is that it all went south.

Recurring epidemics such as the Spanish Flu and a sense of urban “degeneration” in northern Europe led to the rise of vitalism, a mix of pseudo-scientific bullshit and philosophical theories inspired by renewal and health. Thinkers like Friedrich Nietzsche and biologist Ernst Haeckel, both German, promoted ideas that encouraged nudity, outdoor exercise, and sunbathing as paths to physical regeneration. Which, again, it doesn’t sound so bad. At the same time, unfortunately, rose Lebensreform, the “life reform” movement, advocating for vegetarian diets and physical exercise. Swimming naked in the icy waters of northern Europe was prescribed by doctors and natural healers to treat weakness and other conditions.

Munch adopted these lifestyle practices at his home in Åsgårdstrand, especially from 1902 to 1908, and drew artistic inspiration from these experiences, such as scenes of naked men which I won’t oppose, but his health began to decline. He eventually caught a cold. And died.

The exhibition ends with a singular piece, his Self-Portrait in Hell.

The work was painted in 1895, a pivotal year for the artist as he was navigating personal crises, the tumultuous relationship with Tulla Larsen and financial difficulties. This period marked a transition in his artistic journey as he sought new ways to express his experiences. Self-Portrait in Hell serves as both a reflection of his struggles during this time and a broader commentary on the human condition: Munch portrays himself as a naked figure standing against a turbulent, abstract background filled with intense colours that evoke flames and smoke.

Notes from South Africa (3): Wine and Vineyards

The South African wine industry ranks as the eighth largest wine producer in the world and the sixth largest exporter, contributing approximately 3.9% of the world’s wine production in 2023. It was also the main reason for our visit, as wine is my friend‘s line of work. South Africa currently has about 87,848 hectares covered in vineyards, and they mostly concentrate in the Western Cape region which has a Mediterranean climate. Last year, the total harvest was approximately 933.8 million litres, with about 83.9% allocated for wine production. Just to give you an idea, a standard Olympic swimming pool holds about 2.5 million litres, so 933.8 million litres would fill around 374 of them and that would be quite the swim. Lined up, the bottles would stretch approximately 34,550 kilometres end-to-end. That’s almost the circumference of Earth (40,075 km).

Bottles of what?

Thanks for asking.

Before the trip, I only knew two of what they call The Big Six (following The Big Five of the natural kingdom, I guess): the Shiraz, one of my favourite varieties of red and Pinotage, South Africa’s signature grape and, as far as I understand it, a cross between Pinot Noir and Cinsaut. The other four are Cabernet Sauvignon, the most widely planted red grape in South Africa with 10.4% of total vineyard coverage, the highly versatile Chenin Blanc, one of the most planted white varieties with 18.4% of total vineyard coverage, the Chardonnay and the Sauvignon Blanc. Other notable varieties include Merlot and Grenache.

Geographically, we went to two of the most popular areas: Stellenbosch and Franschhoek.

Franschhoek

In Franschhoek you can move around with a charming wine tram, and the area is renowned for Chardonnay, Sauvignon Blanc, and sparkling wines made using the Méthode Cap Classique. Established in 1688 by French Huguenots fleeing religious persecution, Franschhoek retains a strong French influence, evident in the names of its wine estates. The valley has a long-standing winemaking tradition, but it was only classified as an official district under South Africa’s Wine of Origin scheme in 2010, previously being part of the Paarl district.

Franschhoek is often regarded as the cradle of Semillon, a grape from the Bordeaux region, but the most interesting part to experts is probably the wines produced with the Méthode Cap Classique, which is a method of producing sparkling wines with secondary fermentation in the bottle exactly like it’s done with the Méthode Champenoise, the one that gives us Champagne. The process begins with the production of a base wine from selected grape varieties, typically including Chardonnay, Pinot Noir, and sometimes Pinot Meunier. The base wine is bottled with a mixture of sugar and yeast (known as liqueur de tirage), and yeast avidly feed on the sugar, fermenting it and… well, eventually dying. Something I’ll eventually have to put into a horror short story. The dead yeast cells are called lees, and the wine is aged basking in necromancy. It’s like Champagne but if you call it Champagne the French get nervous.

On the tram we were on the Navy Line, which includes a portion on a bus and a portion on the actual tram. The bus touches:

Le Pommier, which owes its name to the fact that it once was part of a 300-year-old apple orchard;Bartinney, a relatively recent stunning property situated on the slopes of Botmaskop alongside the Helshoogte Pass, spanning 28 hectares and with a focus on sustainability;Camberley, established in 1990 by Gael and John Nel, who transitioned from farming plums to cultivating grapes;Zorgvliet, originally owners of Le Pommier too before granting it to one Casper Wilders in 1692;Allée Bleue, next to the Groot Drakenstein Terminal.

The tram touches:

Vrede en Lust; situated at the foot of the Simonsberg Mountain and established in 1688, making it one of the oldest wine farms in South Africa;Plaisir, established in 1693 by Huguenot Charles Marais;Boschendal, one of South Africa’s oldest and most celebrated wine estates.

Be careful that the bus will only leave you for one hour at each winery, while the tram is more flexible. If you do the math, you can do five tastings by stopping only an hour in each spot, but I encourage you to take at least two hours in one place, to have lunch. You’ll have to select three or four of them, and no, when you purchase the experience, you’re purchasing it for a specific line. There’s five of them. Some wineries are only touched by specific lines. Study your itinerary before you purchase the tickets.

What about the Huguenots?

The Huguenots fled to South Africa primarily to escape religious persecution in France. This exodus was prompted mainly by the revocation of the Edict of Nantes on October 22, 1685, which had previously granted French Protestants (Huguenots) the right to practice their faith. The revocation led to the outlawing of Protestantism and resulted in severe persecution, including violence and forced conversion to Catholicism. Many Huguenots initially fled to neighbouring countries like the Netherlands, England, and Germany, but around 180 Huguenots organized a mass emigration towards South Africa between 1688 and 1689, encouraged by the Dutch East India Company (VOC) to bolster its population and agricultural capacity at the Cape. Upon arrival, many Huguenots settled in an area that became known as Franschhoek, meaning “French corner.” This area was designated for them as they were granted farms along fertile riverbanks, where they could cultivate crops and establish a new life.

Stellenbosch

In Stellenbosch we visited two wineries: Simonsig and Waterford, with a stop at Tokara to have lunch.

Simonsig is situated at the foot of a mountain with the same name, 50 km east of Cape Town, and it was established in 1968 by Frans Malan. The estate is significant because the man was a trailblazer in the South African wine industry, being the first winemaker to plant Chardonnay in the country and, as far as I understand it, the first, in 1971, to produce a Méthode Cap Classique under the less appealing name of Kaapse Vonkel. The estate is family-owned to this day and it strikes the visitor as less fake than the ones along the wine tram, with actual people working in the actual vineyards.

Waterford is another recent estate, established in 1998, and it’s popular because of its building designed by architect Alex Walker with a Mediterranean flair. The estate’s layout includes a central courtyard with a fountain, surrounded by large plane trees and a porch like the one you would find in a monastery.

One of the popular experiences offered is the wine and chocolate pairing, where visitors can enjoy selected wines alongside handcrafted chocolates created by chocolatier Richard von Geusau, but my pick was a particular experience in which they offered three sets of wines in two different versions, one aged 2 years and one aged 4 years. It was interesting to taste the difference.

Tokara is possibly the most stunning of the three venues, situated along the scenic Helshoogte Road which connects Stellenbosch and Franschhoek. The estate’s vineyards extend from 350 to 550 meters above sea level and the gentle slopes can be seen from the stunning places dedicated to the deli and the tastings.

The entrance to Tokara’s winery and restaurant doubles as an eclectic art gallery, showcasing a variety of artworks created by local artists such as the “too much wine yesterday” lady, and the “I’ve got something on my stomach” sculpture.

Too much wine yesterday…

 

I’ve got something on my stomach…Is it all about colonialism?

That’s the first impression when you take these tours. Although many of these wineries are from the 90s, they have French and Dutch names and were established by white people. This isn’t the whole story, and if you want to dive deeper I suggest you read this article about 12 Black-Owned Wineries and Wines in and Around Cape Town. As of today, only 60 of the 2.800 wine farmers are Black, and less than 2% own the land their working on. The first significant step in trying to change that was taken in 1993, during the Convention for a Democratic South Africa that led to the official end of apartheid and three years after Nelson Mandela was freed from his unjust imprisonment, and it was constituted by the Provision of Land and Assistance Act to facilitate the redistribution of land by providing financial assistance and support for land acquisition by previously disadvantaged individuals. The most significant act, however, was the Restitution of Land Rights Act in 1994, designed to restore land rights to individuals or communities dispossessed of their property after 1913. The African National Congress (ANC) promised to transfer around 60 million acres through these initiatives. As of today, only 34 million acres of land have been transferred to Black farmers since the end of apartheid. However, while perusing the wineries suggested through the article, you might find people complaining that these tenants got their land for free. This is what the assholes are referring to.

I don’t have the time nor the knowledge to give you an overview of all the Black-Owned wineries mentioned in the article, but I would like to mention at least one because I had the chance to meet her in person while doing our tasting at Simonsig (and yes, I fangirled): Ntsiki Biyeli, founder and owner of the Aslina winery, is the first Black female winemaker in South Africa. She received a scholarship from South African Airways to study viticulture and oenology at Stellenbosch University in 1998, after many attempts and facing many challenges, and eventually graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Agriculture in 2003. She joined Stellekaya Wines in 2004 as their winemaker, and her first red wine won a gold medal at the Michelangelo International Wine Awards. In 2017, she launched her own brand and called it Aslina Wines, after her grandmother. This venture was self-funded, and she aimed to create wines that resonate with local consumers by using familiar flavour references and descriptors rather than traditional European references. She is actively involved with the Pinotage Youth Development Academy, which trains young people in the Cape Winelands for careers in the wine industry, and she received the Diversity and Transformation Award at the 2021 Wine Harvest Commemorative Event for her efforts in promoting inclusivity within the industry. She rocks.

Milano Bookcity: percorso su Gaming e Game Thinking

Dall’11 al 17 Novembre si terrà Milano Bookcity, un evento diffuso sul territorio che vede enti pubblici, privati e indipendenti contribuire con eventi dedicati al mondo della cultura. Ecco una piccola selezione di eventi relativi ai temi del gioco, del videogioco e del game thinking, se vi capita di passare da queste parti. E se invece non passate da queste parti, magari troverete all’interno di questi eventi qualche spunto di lettura. Le altre selezioni sono consultabili sul blog tramite il relativo hashtag.

11 NovembreDesigning educational toys & spaces

Quando: 11 Novembre, ore 18:00
Dove: Foyer dell’ADI Design Museum, piazza Compasso d’Oro 1
Chi: Irene Guerriero, Anty Pansera, Rasu Watanabe

L’autrice del libro “Designing Educational toys &spaces” incontra il pubblico presso ADI Design Museum, in dialogo con Anty Pansera, storico e critico del design.

Libro di riferimento: Designing educational toys & spaces, Irene Guerrieri, Franco Angeli

Come si progetta per i bambini? Questo volume tenta di rispondere a tale domanda attraverso i progetti di Cas Holman, Rosan Bosch e Rasu Watanabe, basati sul concetto di una nuova educazione, più libera e autonoma. Un approccio all’argomento in termini globali – date le loro diverse provenienze geografiche –, che non trascura altre figure storiche iconiche, sia in ambito progettuale sia pedagogico. Una lettura accompagnata da immagini coinvolgenti, destinata a progettisti, educatori e chiunque abbia a che fare con il fantastico mondo dei bambini in termini di giochi e spazi.

Pagina dell’evento qui.

13 NovembreICOM Italia pop-up library: i musei nel loro divenire

Quando: 13 Novembre, ore 16:00
Dove: Sala Biagi a Palazzo Lombardia, Piazza Città di Lombardia 1
Chi: Valeria Arrabito, Erica Bernardi, Giuliana Ericani, Alberto Garlandini, Daniele Jalla, Michele Lanziger, Adele Maresca Compagna, Maria Vittoria Marini Clarelli, Pietro Petraroia, Salvatore Sutera

L’evento offrirà ai partecipanti la possibilità di scoprire il mondo dei musei attraverso il racconto della storia, dei temi e dei protagonisti del comitato italiano dell’International Council of Museums. ICOM Italia è la più importante e rappresentativa associazione che riunisce musei e professionisti museali per la salvaguardia e valorizzazione del patrimonio culturale. Attraverso la costante azione di sensibilizzazione, promuove il ruolo attivo dei musei nella società contemporanea. Le due nuove pubblicazioni verranno presentate per la prima volta presso la Biblioteca Marzio Tremaglia, dove ha sede il Centro Nazionale di Documentazione di ICOM Italia. I volumi saranno una risorsa preziosa per tutti coloro che svolgono attività di ricerca nel campo del patrimonio culturale ma anche per gli appassionati, e chiunque desideri scoprire il mondo dei musei dal punto di vista degli addetti ai lavori. Sarà possibile prenotare l’accesso all’evento tramite il sito web di ICOM Italia.

Libri di riferimento:
– ICOM Italia dalle origini ad oggi (1947-2024), La storia, i temi, i protagonisti, Adele Maresca Compagna, Gangemi
– Il centro di documentazione di ICOM Italia, I musei nel loro divenire, Erica Bernardi, Gangemi

Pagina dell’evento qui.

14 NovembreIl mondo dei videogiochi è inclusivo?

Quando: 14 Novembre, ore 19:30
Dove: Appartamento del Teatro Franco Parenti, Via Pier Lombardo 14
Chi: Francesco Alteri, Pietro Iacullo, Fabrizia Malgieri, Fiorenzo Pilla, Tiziana Pirola, Lorena Rao

L’industria dei videogiochi è un settore di enorme importanza economica, spesso sottovalutato dai media generalisti ed in generale poco conosciuto fuori dalla cerchia degli appassionati. È però un settore che coinvolge molte persone e che più di altri ha sofferto e soffre tuttora di impostazioni e consuetudini patriarcali. In questo momento di dibattito si cercherà di fornire uno sguardo ampio, attento e obiettivo sul settore.

Libri di riferimento:
– B-Human, Francesco Alteri, Pietro Iacullo, Ledizioni
– Videogioco: femminile, plurale, Fabrizia Malgieri, Fiorenzo Pilla, Tiziana Pirola, Lorena Rao, Ledizioni

Pagina dell’evento qui.

17 NovembreL’intelligenza artificiale nei settori creativi: catastrofica o utile?

Quando: 17 Novembre, ore 12:30
Dove: Centro Internazionale di Brera, via Marco Formentini 10
Chi: Simone Aliprandi, Francesco Alteri, Gianluigi Bonanomi, Paolo Dalprato, Fiorenzo Pilla

In un’epoca in cui le IA e le loro implicazioni permeano ogni aspetto della vita quotidiana, è necessario interrogarsi su quale sia, e quale potrà essere in futuro, l’effetto delle Intelligenze Artificiali, in generale, e di ChatGPT, in particolare, sulla società
contemporanea. Questo tipo di riflessione non può che prendere le mosse da un quesito fondamentale: “Le intelligenze artificiali, possono davvero essere considerate intelligenti?”. Interrogarsi su questo punto permette affrontare le questioni più pressanti che circondano l’adozione di queste rivoluzionarie tecnologie provando a fornire risposta a domande cruciali come: “È possibile fidarsi delle IA?” e “Come funzionano davvero?”. Attraverso un’analisi approfondita e un confronto equilibrato, gli autori discutono dell’impatto di ChatGPT su settori come l’occupazione, l’istruzione, la comunicazione e la salute mentale, facendo luce sui benefici e le sfide derivanti dall’implementazione di queste tecnologie, in una visione completa e imparziale del futuro nelle interazioni uomo-macchina.

Libri di riferimento:
– ChatGPT. Come stai?, Gianluigi Bonanomi, Ledizioni
– Game GPT. Ridefinire il futuro del Gaming: l’impatto dei Large Language Models, Francesco Alteri, Fabrizia Malgieri, Fiorenzo Pilla, Francesco Toniolo, Ledizioni
– Il design nell’era della creatività artificiale, Simone Aliprandi, Ledizioni

Pagina dell’evento qui.

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