Edgar Allan Poe, The Penguin Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe; from ‘The Island of the Fay'

a prayer on a foggy day

Sedlec Ossuary, Czech Republic Photo by Robert Vawter

Auguste Rodin (1840–1917), The Gates of Hell, modeled 1880–1917, bronze cast after the artist's death from the original plaster model. Musée Rodin, Paris. Commissioned in 1880 for a proposed Museum of Decorative Arts in Paris, the monument remained unfinished throughout Rodin's lifetime. Conceived after Dante Alighieri's Inferno, the composition ultimately expanded beyond its literary source, incorporating references to Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal and developing into an independent sculptural program. More than 180 figures are organized within a continuous, high-relief field that rejects Renaissance compositional hierarchy in favor of an unstable, expressive surface. Many of Rodin's most celebrated sculptures—including The Thinker, The Kiss, The Three Shades, and Ugolino and His Sons—originated as figures first modeled for this monumental portal before being enlarged and exhibited as autonomous works.

Kay Nielsen

Otomi village, Mexico, 1950. John Gutmann

Franz von Stuck. The Vision of Saint Hubert. 1890.

West Country Folklore by Tav

A medieval funeral procession 

Rerum.Novis

great storms carry my sadness

Edvard Munch, Self-portraits

from “Deep South” by Sally Mann (1976)

Marian Szulc - Interior, ca. 1956

Memento Mori on the Maiden’s Tomb in St Mary’s Churchyard, Perivale

The antlers of a Schomburgk's deer, a now-extinct species from Thailand By: Unknown photographer From: Brehms Tierleben - Allgemeine kunde des Tierreichs 1911