Paintings

In a previous exploration of the wonders and oddities of classical visual art, we paused to observe a phenomenon as bewildering as it is fascinating: Renaissance babies looked like forty-year-old men with outstanding debts, crowned with prematurely tired expressions and receding hairlines that defied all infantile logic.

In the wetlands of Denmark, where willows lean over the whispering waters of the river, the tragedy of a young woman named Ophelia unfolds. Her story begins in Elsinore Castle, where her father, the king's counselor, Polonius, instructs her in virtue and obedience. Ophelia, a young woman of serene beauty and sensitive soul, is in love with Hamlet, the tormented prince of Denmark.

In 1841, the English painter John Martin unveiled one of his most ambitious creations: Pandemonium, a monumental depiction of the capital of Hell imagined by the poet John Milton in his celebrated work Paradise Lost. In the painting, Satan gazes proudly upon the gigantic palace he has just erected to rule over his followers, while thousands of demons gather at his feet, surrounded by lava, dark mountains, and a sky torn apart by lightning.

There is a house on the outskirts of Madrid that kept fourteen nightmares painted directly onto its plaster walls. It was bought by a seventy-two-year-old man, deaf, widowed, and marked by an illness that had nearly killed him. His name was Francisco de Goya, and what he painted there was not made for a king, a church, or a collector. He made it for himself.