Gothic Image of the Month

Gothic Image of the Month ....

A picture selected at random from my ever-growing collection gathered from the magical world
of the Internet, or various books and learned tomes. It could be wonderful; could be crap.
Whatever comes up next. That's what makes it interesting.

May 2008 - the
tomb of the
Rossi family,
Lucca
Cemetery,
Italy, by
Alfredo Angelo
(1912)

Collect the whole set! - You'll be lucky, I've got about 1500 clattering around.

Previous months

January
2008 - New
York
Cemetery

February 2008 -
Cover for 'The
Other Statue' by
Edward Gorey
(1968)

March 2008
- Diamanda
Galás Posing
(c.2000)

Back to high art this month for one of the classic Gothic images. This hideous
vision is one of the 'Black Paintings', horrible meditations on human frailty and
cruelty daubed by the great Goya on the walls of his house during his internal
exile in Madrid in the 1820s as he struggled with deafness and isolation, falling
into a self-defined landscape of grim hopelessness. In fact, the painting has no
title: the mythological name is a rationalisation of what is really just an
inexplicable image of need, desperation, hatred, and insanity. According to
Richard Davenport-Hines, it 'indicates one direction of Gothic excess after the
French Revolution had forced the Gothic imagination beyond the gentilities of
Ann Radcliffe and the camp of Horace Walpole'. Fred Licht, who
Davenport-Hines quotes, goes further: in Saturn, 'Chaos is the origin and end of
life. Madness is rendered in the distraught vocabulary of madness'.
In contrast to some of Goya's other images, I can't think of instances in which
this has fed into wider visual culture. It seems too mad, too extreme, too violent
to do anything constructive with; it also makes you feel very sorry for Goya, if
this was the kind of thing going on in his head.

April 2008 - 'Dusk and
Her Embrace', by
BlueBlack (Natalie Shau),
2004