The Devil Sends Cooks (13 of 41)

Paul Gustave Doré - Milton's Paradise Lost, 1866

The Devil Sends Cooks (12 of 41)

Paul Gustave Doré - Milton's Paradise Lost, 1866

The Devil Sends Cooks (11 of 41)

Paul Gustave Doré - Milton's Paradise Lost, 1866

The Devil Sends Cooks (10 of 41)

Paul Gustave Doré - Milton's Paradise Lost, 1866

The Devil Sends Cooks (9 of 41)

Paul Gustave Doré - Milton's Paradise Lost, 1866

The Devil Sends Cooks (8 of 41)

Paul Gustave Doré - Milton's Paradise Lost, 1866

The Devil Sends Cooks (7 of 41)

Paul Gustave Doré - Milton's Paradise Lost, 1866

The Devil Sends Cooks (6 of 41)

Paul Gustave Doré - Milton's Paradise Lost, 1866

The Devil Sends Cooks (5 of 41)

Paul Gustave Doré - Milton's Paradise Lost, 1866

The Devil Sends Cooks (4 of 41)

Paul Gustave Doré - Milton's Paradise Lost, 1866

The Devil Sends Cooks (3 of 41)

Paul Gustave Doré - Milton's Paradise Lost, 1866

The Devil Sends Cooks (2 of 41)

Paul Gustave Doré - Milton's Paradise Lost, 1866

The Devil Sends Cooks (1 of 41)

Paul Gustave Doré - Milton's Paradise Lost, 1866

Dead Girl Floating

Paul Gustave Doré - The Body of Elaine on Its Way to King Arthur's Palace, 1868

From The Mouths Of Graves

Paul Gustave Doré - 'Farinata degli Uberti addresses Dante', The Divine Comedy (The Inferno, Canto X), 1857

A Children's Apocalypse

Jake and Dinos Chapman - Zygotic Acceleration, 1995


'The meaning of 'taboo', as we see it, diverges in two contrary directions. To use it means on the one hand, 'sacred', 'consecrated', and on the other 'uncanny', 'dangerous', 'forbidden', 'unclean'.

From Totem and Taboo by Sigmund Freud.

A Message From The Heavens

Maurizio Catellan - The Ninth Hour, 1999

Room To Move

Rachel Whiteread's plaster cast of the interior space of a room was first shown in 1990.

Rachel Whiteread - Ghost, 1990

Dirty Deeds! Re-done Dirt Cheap!

Chapmans' Dead Guys ("The Little Artists)

Jake and Dinos Chapman - Great Deeds Against the Dead, 1994

Francisco Goya - Great Deeds! Against the Dead!, 1810s

Just When You Thought It Was Safe To Go Back Into The Museum

'Damien Hirst’s The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, 1991 (see below), was first shown in the Saatchi Gallery and later nominated for the Turner Prize. The work features a tiger shark in a glass tank of formaldehyde.

It was sold for nearly £7million in January 2005.'

Image courtesy of the Walker Art Gallery ("The Little Artists").

Damien Hirst - The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, 1991

The Man Who Measured The World

William Blake - Isaac Newton, 1795


'Tact is the knack of making a point without making an enemy.'

Isaac Newton

Marzipan Gals, Won't You Come Out Tonight?: Part Seven

William-Adolphe Bouguereau - Biblis, 1884

Marzipan Gals, Won't You Come Out Tonight?: Part Six

Alexandre Cabanel - The Birth of Venus, 1863

Marzipan Gals, Won't You Come Out Tonight?: Part Five

Jean-Baptiste Regnault - Cupid and Psyche (1828)

Marzipan Gals, Won't You Come Out Tonight?: Part Four

Pompeo Batoni - Diana and Cupid, 1761

Marzipan Gals, Won't You Come Out Tonight?: Part Three

Jean-Baptiste Marie Pierre - The Abduction of Europa, 1750

Marzipan Gals, Won't You Come Out Tonight?: Part Two

Jacopo Amigoni - Venus Disarming Cupid, 1730s or 1740s

Marzipan Gals, Won't You Come Out Tonight?: Part One

Caesar van Boetius - The Abduction of Europa, 1650

Boucher, Mon Cher: Part Seven

François Boucher - Vulcan Presenting Venus with Arms for Aeneas (1756)

Boucher, Mon Cher: Part Six

François Boucher - Venus, 1754

Boucher, Mon Cher: Part Five

François Boucher - The Rising of the Sun, 1753

Boucher, Mon Cher: Part Four

François Boucher - The Setting of the Sun, 1752

Boucher, Mon Cher: Part Three

François Boucher - An Autumn Pastoral, 1749

Boucher, Mon Cher: Part Two

François Boucher - A Summer Pastoral, 1749

Boucher, Mon Cher: Part One

François Boucher - Sleeping Venus, c. 1734

The Bling Is The Thing

Damien Hirst - For the Love of God, 2007


'Sometimes when you're drunk you can see better.'

Damien Hirst

Go Mad Like It's 1899

Fight Club (soap), d. David Fincher, 1999

'Whoever has provoked men to rage against him has always gained a party in his favor, too.'

'Whoever despises himself nonetheless respects himself as one who despises.'

'There is more wisdom in your body than in your deepest philosophy.'

'The irrationality of a thing is no argument against its existence, rather a condition of it.'

'Of all that is written, I love only what a person has written with his own blood.'

Friedrich Nietzsche

Les Poupées Noir

Hans Bellmer - Poupées, 1935


'This demise of feeling and emotion has paved the way for all our most real and tender pleasures - in the excitements of pain and mutilation; in sex as the perfect arena...for all the veronicas of our own perversions; in our moral freedom to pursue our own psychopathology as a game; and in our apparently limitless powers for conceptualization - what our children have to fear is not the cars in the highway but own pleasure in calculating the most elegant parameters of their deaths.'

From Crash by J.G. Ballard, 1985.

To Hell And Back Again

Charles Burns - Self Portrait


'This world is older than any of you know, and contrary to popular mythology, it did not begin as a paradise. For untold eons, demons walked the Earth, made it their home, their Hell. In time, they lost their purchase on this reality, and the way was made for mortal animals. For Man. What remains of the Old Ones are vestiges: certain magics, certain creatures.The books tell that the last demon to leave this reality fed off a human, mixed their blood. He was a human form possessed - infected - by the demon's soul. He bit another and another...and so they walk the Earth, feeding. Killing some, mixing their blood with others to make more of their kind. Waiting for the animals to die out and the Old Ones to return.'

Rupert Giles (Anthony Stewart Head), Buffy the Vampire Slayer

The Emperor's Old Clothes

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres - Napoleon on his Imperial throne, 1806


Napoleon was passionately attached to the theatre and (to a lesser extent) the opera, but there was scarcely any other aspect of Parisian life in which he interfered more. From Milan in 1805, Napoleon told Fouché that he thought a new play about Henri IV was 'too close to the present day' even at two centuries' distance (clearly he viewed the assassination of Henri somewhat subjectively, in the light of various recent plots against himself). He added, 'I think that you should prevent it, without showing your intervention.' In particular he objected to the words, in the heroic King's mouth, 'je tremble' on the ground that 'a sovereign may be afraid, but he must never say so.

From Seven Ages of Paris by Alistair Horne.

King Of The Cocksuckers

Al Swearengen (Ian McShane) - Deadwood, 2004-6


'Swearengen's swarthy brute-ness and intelligent charm clearly relates him to some famous literary figures, most obviously Wuthering Heights' Heathcliff but also Oliver Twist's Bill Sikes. In casting McShane, Deadwood acknowledges this heritage physically: compare him, for example, with Robert Newton or Oliver Reed playing Sikes in Oliver Twist (Lean, 1948) and Oliver! (Reed, 1968). However, these figures, while not exactly one-dimensional, do not have the complexity of Swearengen. As David Ellison argues, it is important to acknowledge that Swearengen represents a "fusion of characteristics that Dickens could only distribute across characters. In other words, Swearengen is Sikes in all of his brute menace but he is also Fagin - a super-adaptive, improvisational opportunist with a dab line in self-parody." In this way, one of the major achievements of Deadwood lies in Milch's discovery of McShane's ability to nuance a British kind of villainy: one that references but also transcends (Americanizes?) the binary tic of Victorian psychology that opposes, say, Heathcliff against Edgar, Jekyll/Hyde, Picture/Dorian, Jack the Ripper/Prince Albert. [The] fortuitous casting of McShane Swearengen (the real Al was born in Iowa) allowed David Milch to articulate and realize a depth to Swearengen that not only enhanced the vividness of a real historical character but was also to overcome one of the pervasive oddities of nineteenth-century British literary characterization....Al Swearengen, as played by McShane, is a philosophic intervention into the nature of characterization itself.'

From Al Swearengen, Philosopher King by Jason Jacobs.

My Body Lies Under The Scalpel: Part Eight

View of Beyond Belief (exhibition) - Damien Hirst, 2007

My Body Lies Under The Scalpel: Part Seven

Ron Mueck - Dead Dad, 1996-7

My Body Lies Under The Scalpel: Part Six

Thomas Eakins - The Gross Clinic, 1875