Active volcanoes are great places to visit, but the danger of a potential eruption is always there. When some of them erupted with artists as viewers, it led to spectacular paintings. Those demonstrations of the power of nature...

Taras Shevchenko was an outstanding Ukrainian artist and poet. Born to peasant family, he became a Ukrainian liberty idol and national, artistic hero. His artworks reflect critical problems of a 19th-century Ukrainian society. Yet today, his ideas are...

Goya was not a happy man when he painted Saturn Devouring His Son, some time between 1819 and 1823. By the time he created this painting, illness had made him deaf and his wife was dying, enough for any...

This petite (9.46 x 12.50 cm) oil on canvas by J.M.W. Turner contains big things: big landscapes, big stories and big skies. It is an imagined scene from 1st century Rome: the departure of Ovid into his famous...

An artist impossible to classify, a revolutionary one, both realistic and mannerist, perceived as the heir of Raphael and a precursor of Picasso. Somewhere in between the master of beautiful forms and the master of no-form, Ingres at...

Théodore Géricault completed The Raft of the Medusa when he was 27, and the work has become an icon of French Romanticism. It is a direct precursor of Delacroix’s Massacre at Chios and Liberty Leading the People. In...

Last week the Städel Museum in Frankfurt posted on Instagram a painting from their collection with a funny quote: “Having a bad day? Always remember: someone painted a life-sized portrait of Goethe with two left feet.” The someone was actually...