Marco Antonio Raimondi (c. 1480 – c. 1534)

Masks, by Stefano Della Bella

Inferno Station: Dante and Virgil in the Underworld, by Filippo Napolitano

Maerten van Heemskerck: Garden of the Casa Calli

Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1526? - 1593): Self-Portrait

Souvenir sheets in commemoration of Emperor Rudolph II

• Items from the collections of Rudolph.
• Emperor Rudolph II (sovereign 1576-1611).
• Emperor Rudolph's Court Painter, Giuseppe Arcimboldi (self-portrait). 

source: http://heindorffhus.motivsamler.dk/worldheritage/index.html

Personal Note: I particularly like the way Arcimboldo is depicted in the last sheet as the effigy of some sort of Magus that could have sprang out from one of his own paintings.

Bestiary: Fantastic Tribes by Hartmann Schedel (1440 - 1514)

A Satyr plays violin, by Jacobo de' Barbari

Bestiary: Monsters from Sebastian Munster's (1489 - 1552) Comographia

Memento Mori: the Danse Macabre of Stefano della Bella (1610 - 1664)

Short artist bio: Stefano della Bella was one of the most talented and prolific printmakers of the seventeenth century. Unlike most etchers of his time, who had careers as painters, della Bella devoted himself almost exclusively to printmaking, although he is also famed for the spirited drawings he made in preparation for his prints. Despite their higher degree of finish, his etchings retain much of the fluidity and dynamism of his drawings. Late in his career, he even experimented with a way of duplicating in his prints the tonal washes of his drawings. Della Bella's etchings are especially admired for their rich textures and atmospheric effects and for a wide range of subject matter depicted in a direct and engaging way. Soldiers, beggars, satyr families, animals, gardens, ruins, splendid festivals, and scenes of everyday life are among the artist's themes. He also produced a set of mythological playing cards intended for the instruction of the young Louis XIII and a series of inventive ornamental cartouches. Della Bella was supported by the Medici for many years, primarily in Florence, but also in Rome, where his patron Don Lorenzo sponsored a period of study in the mid-1630s. In 1639, the etcher traveled to France with the ambassador of the grand duke of Tuscany and remained there for over a decade.

It was probably during his last years in France that della Bella began an updated and abbreviated version of the Dance of Death. This typically Northern and medieval subject usually showed Death in a variety of situations, carrying away victims of every age and walk of life. It appears that, while in France, the Florentine printmaker etched four oval scenes of Death's conquest, including Death Carrying a Child, three of which take place in cemeteries and the fourth on the battlefield. A horizontal version of Death triumphing in war probably also dates to these years. At the end of his life, della Bella took up the theme again, creating three more episodes in the oval format—two of these were left incomplete at his death. In the early prints particularly, Death is as energetic as he is ruthless—here he rushes into the cemetery bearing a screaming and struggling child. The setting is the Cemetery of the Innocents in Paris, a site with which della Bella was undoubtedly familiar, since many publishers and print dealers had their shops on the ground floor of the charnel houses.
(source: http://www.metmuseum.org/)

Landscapes & Dreamscapes: Pictures from Villa di Pratolino, Italy - The Colossal 'Appenino' by Gianbologna

The Poetry Room: Alien, by 'A.E' (George William Russell, 1867 - 1935)

DARK glowed the vales of amethyst

Beneath an opal shroud:

The moon bud opened through the mist

Its white-fire leaves of cloud.

Through rapt at gaze with eyes of light

Looked forth the seraph seers,

The vast and wandering dream of night Rolled on above our tears.

Bestiary: Griffin, from Hans Burgkmair the elder's Triumphal March for Emperor Maximilian I

An orgy of ornament:Emperor Maximilian's Triumphal Car, by A. Durer

Inferno Station: The Harrowings of Hell - Andrea Mantegna (1468)

Kunstkammer: a cabinet of wonders painted by Domenico Remps (1620 - 1699)

"The Kunstkammer was regarded as a microcosm or theater of the world, and a memory theater. The Kunstkammer conveyed symbolically the patron's control of the world through its indoor, microscopic reproduction." (Francesca Fiorani - source: Wikipedia)

Dream Anatomies: Five grotesque heads by Leonardo da Vinci

Memento Mori: Skeleton engraving by Christoffel van Sichem II (1581 - 1658)

 

Poetry Room: "Kraken" by Alfred Lord Tennyson

Below the thunders of the upper deep,
Far far beneath in the abysmal sea,
His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep
The Kraken sleepeth: faintest sunlights flee
About his shadowy sides: above him swell
Huge sponges of millennial growth and height;
And far away into the sickly light,
From many a wondrous grot and secret cell
Unnumber'd and enormous polypi
Winnow with giant fins the slumbering green.
There hath he lain for ages and will lie
Battening upon huge seaworms in his sleep,
Until the latter fire shall heat the deep;
Then once by men and angels to be seen,
In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die.

Memento Mori: Two allegorical drawings by Jacopo Ligozzi (1547 - 1627)

Allegory of Envy

Death exterminating mankind

Poetry Room: The World by Henry Vaughan (1621 - 1695)

The World

BY HENRY VAUGHAN

I saw Eternity the other night,

Like a great ring of pure and endless light,

       All calm, as it was bright;

And round beneath it, Time in hours, days, years,

       Driv’n by the spheres

Like a vast shadow mov’d; in which the world

       And all her train were hurl’d.

The doting lover in his quaintest strain

       Did there complain;

Near him, his lute, his fancy, and his flights,

       Wit’s sour delights,

With gloves, and knots, the silly snares of pleasure,

       Yet his dear treasure

All scatter’d lay, while he his eyes did pour

       Upon a flow’r.

The darksome statesman hung with weights and woe,

Like a thick midnight-fog mov’d there so slow,

       He did not stay, nor go;

Condemning thoughts (like sad eclipses) scowl

       Upon his soul,

And clouds of crying witnesses without

       Pursued him with one shout.

Yet digg’d the mole, and lest his ways be found,

       Work’d under ground,

Where he did clutch his prey; but one did see

       That policy;

Churches and altars fed him; perjuries

       Were gnats and flies;

It rain’d about him blood and tears, but he

       Drank them as free.

The fearful miser on a heap of rust

Sate pining all his life there, did scarce trust

       His own hands with the dust,

Yet would not place one piece above, but lives

       In fear of thieves;

Thousands there were as frantic as himself,

       And hugg’d each one his pelf;

The downright epicure plac’d heav’n in sense,

       And scorn’d pretence,

While others, slipp’d into a wide excess,

       Said little less;

The weaker sort slight, trivial wares enslave,

       Who think them brave;

And poor despised Truth sate counting by

       Their victory.

Yet some, who all this while did weep and sing,

And sing, and weep, soar’d up into the ring;

       But most would use no wing.

O fools (said I) thus to prefer dark night

       Before true light,

To live in grots and caves, and hate the day

       Because it shews the way,

The way, which from this dead and dark abode

       Leads up to God,

A way where you might tread the sun, and be

       More bright than he.

But as I did their madness so discuss

       One whisper’d thus,

“This ring the Bridegroom did for none provide,

       But for his bride.”

(painting by Fabrizio Clerici)

Bestiary: Sea-monsters from Ulisse Aldrovandi`s Monstrorum historia (Bologna 1642)