Sketches made alongside Darwin on the Beagle voyage:

Hieronymous Bosch's butt music from Hell gets interpreted, proves callipygous.

Background, as it were, is here.

Update: Also, Bosch piñatas.

Apropos of nothing at all: Minerva Expelling the Vices from the Garden of Virtues.



Andrea Mantegna, 1502, housed in the Louvre.

The letter X is made to vex. What did children's alphabet literature do before x-rays and xylophones were going concerns? Xanthippe was apparently a popular choice:



Or:

X is a letter that seldom is used,
But its shape will remind us how sinners abused
Their Saviour and God, when, with brute, cruel force,
They compelled Him to bleed and die on the cross!

And, an entire alphabet mocking the Cubists.

Via Languagehat.

A survey of proto-paleoart: Leibniz puts in an appearance.

What to do next time you're bored on a plane? Take 15th-Century Flemish-style self portraits in the lavatory, of course!

Just because: Glacier Dragon!

Hence.

I just pre-ordered Moro Rogers' upcoming graphic novel, and so should you.

Moro Rogers indulges my batrachophilia. I am pleased and grateful!

Fun new art blog project from Moro Rogers: An Animal a Day.

Soviet illustrations for The Hobbit. Not quite my cup of tea, but interesting.

Bringing the aesthetic delights of the 1040-EZ to every cash transaction: some design firm has really ugly ideas for our money. And I'm using ugly in its most literal sense. Not even going to touch the implicit politics here. If we want to revamp our already rather unattractive cash, what's wrong with old-fashioned engravings of picturesque minorities and alpine scenery?

Merry Christmas to all!

Detail from Nativity icon, 11^th century, Tokalı Kilise, Cappadocia, Turkey.

"Pentiti!"

"No!"

Pentiti!"

"No! No!"

Now there's dissoluto punito for you! Blame to the Palm Beach Opera (who have some equally trashy, bodice-ripping illustrations for Otello and Carmen); credit to Jack.

Incidentally, if you happen to need an online opera libretto, this is the place.

Painting the Polar Landscape: a collection of Arctic and Antarctic paintings from the 19th and early 20th Centuries.

To see the 21st Century holding its own, check out Tony Foster's work (more, scroll down).

Life Imitates Art, Art Imitates Jokes at its Expense

Curators of modern art have such complicated problems, the poor things. Give me a good rousing performance of 4'33" any day.

Speaking of art: on the other hand, there's this.

Odious' birthday is coming up!

If you're among our northern New Mexico readers and enjoy landscape art, you really ought to stop by the Gerald Peters gallery in Santa Fe and check out the exhibition of Tony Foster paintings. I'm generally a bit lukewarm on most landscape painting, but Foster's stuff gives me the same "I've got to go there" emotional response I normally seek in photographs. He paints on location, often at very obscure and remote locations indeed, sometimes working for a week on a six-foot piece at 15,000 feet and that sort of thing. I love his use of white space, especially in his Himalayan work. And there are some nuances that you can only see in the original, such as a Himalayan snowstorm painting where he actually scraped streaks across the finished work to achieve the effect of a violent flurry.

He's also done a lot of painting in central Idaho, particularly on the Salmon, which made it pretty much inevitable that I own his book (thanks to Mrs. P's sweetness and generosity).

Definitely worth a stop if you're in town. Runs through November 15.

A true savant in action: this guy draws most of Rome from memory after one helicopter flight.

Via Mountain Photographer.

Moro Rogers is working on illustrations for C.S. Lewis' The Great Divorce, here and here. Looking forward to more!