Slobbering Darkness

I learn something new every day…

Robert Demachy • The Struggle, 1904

Lobby card for Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979) dir. Werner Herzog

Me at least twice a week

“Death and The Maiden” by Pierre-Eugène-Emile Hébert (1828-1893)

~ Sally

J. J. Grandville, Torn Between an Angel and a Devil, 19th century

Richard Schofield / Flickr

"Waltz (ghost and cat)" by Tetsuhiro Wakabayashi

Art by Zdzisław Beksiński.

With Death and the Maiden Camillo Verno presents the viewer with a classic vanitasor momento mori portrait. Painted circa 1895, the young woman, quite possibly the artist’s wife and model, is embraced from behind by a leering skeleton, clearly symbolic of the shortness and fragility of human life and the inevitability of death.  Death and the Maiden was a common motif in Renaissance art and finds its roots in the Danse Macabre, an artistic genre of allegory of the Late Middle Ages on the universality of death. No matter one’s station in life, the Danse Macabre unites us all. The German artist Hans Baldung famously depicted the subject of Death and the Maiden several times in his career. The theme was revived in the arts during the Romantic era, and variants of the subject occur in well-known self- portraits by such contemporary artists of Verno as Hans Thoma and Arnold Böcklin.  <Sotheby's>

— Lourdes Vázquez, Bestiary: Selected Poems, 1986-1997, (2004)

(Artwork by Darren Hopes)

-- Stephen King

“Onward noble steed”