"All this he saw, for one moment breathless and intense, vivid on the morning sky; and still, as he looked, he lived; and still, as he lived, he wondered."
The Capital City of Warsaw in Polonia sits on the River Vistula, and it's perhaps unsurprising to see a mermaid on its coat of arms. What catches the attention is that this mermaid is brandishing a blade and carrying a shield, and her story is...
The Diocesano Museum in Milan is one of the most interesting realities on the territory, both for its permanent collection and for its habit of organizing temporary exhibitions around one single piece, usually borrowed from a prestigious museum in another city. The depth you require...
Tuonetar is the Queen of the Underworld in Finnish mythology, and I promised you we'd talk about her when we saw her daughter Kalma, who's tasked to prevent the dead from escaping their tombs. She brews one kick-ass beer, and she's today's profile on my...
Giuseppe De Nittis is a greatly underrated painter. or at least he has been for quite some time, and he's now considered one of the greatest Italian artists of the 19th century. One of the reasons that saw him shunned by intellectuals had to not...
Venilia was a minor deity in Roman times, associated with the winds and the sea, and mentioned by both Virgil and Ovid. Part of a two-entities group associated with Neptune, Salacia and Vénilia, she expressed one of two aspects, domains or modes of action of...
Kalma's name, the Finnish goddess associated with death and decay, possibly means "The Stench of Corpses," which is enough of a declaratory statement in itself. Narratives revolving around her, often find her lingering in graveyards and cemeteries so much that the Finnish word for graveyard,...
I can bear a little Picasso if I could stand Rodin last season, but it might be irksome to some of us, attending an exhibition on Picasso that’s particularly related to his “primitivism” period: the man was an asshole to women, and his fetishized approach...
Ved-ava was a water deity revered among various Finno-Ugric people who made a living from fishing, so you shouldn't be surprised that she's also linked with fertility. What's slightly more surprising (or not) is her connection with sacrifices of various genres, sometimes even human. She's today's...
The amazing Tatiana Fajardo posted this painting back on Xitter (go and follow her if you don't) and I just couldn't let it go. The author is Alexander Davis Cooper, a British 19th-century painter born in 1820, and the painting is part of the Atkinson Art...
The asphodelus is a perennial plant with tall, white clusters of flowers that resemble a pinecone, and Homer’s Odyssey indicates it as a plant connected to Hades and the afterlife. When the Romans thought the Greek vision of the afterlife was a tad too bleak...
