beauty is terror

je peux résister à tout, sauf à la tentation There is nothing wrong with the love of Beauty. But Beauty - unless she is wed to something more meaningful - is always superficial.

[petaltexturedskies]

renée vivien

[shisasan]

Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux 1865-67; detail, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

[illustratus]

Gothic Church Ruin by Carl Blechen

[dionyrtal]

"I Live!" by Dion Anja, from Motion Sickness

You can support my writing by purchasing a copy!

[srednod]

Unknown painter, Academic nude, study, 19th century

[metamorphesque]

― Patricia Highsmith, The Price of Salt

[lostgirlhood]

winter in art [autumn]

claude monet / vasily ivanovich surikov / jakub schikaneder / edmund dulac / loré pemberton / gustave caillebotte / richard savoie / mikhail markelovich guzhavin

[english-idylls]

Detail of Saint Catherine of Alexandria by Caravaggio (1598-99). 

[diioonysus]

sharon tate and richard beymer (1963)

[petaltexturedskies]

sylvia plath, from a letter to ann davidow-woodman c. december 1960

[deermouth]

[diioonysus]

First ever fashion shoot was done by Lady Clementina Hawarden and her three daughters Isabella Grace, Clementina, and Florence Elizabeth in their London house that acted as a studio.

[weltenwellen]

Franz Kafka, Letters to Felice‎

[kafkasdiariies]

Dante and Virgil in Hell (detail), c. 1879, Gustave Courtois

[soracities]

Emily Dickinson, from “No crowd that has occurred” (Poem #515), Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson

[Text ID: “August–Absorbed–Numb”]

[showings]

“I’ll join my nothingness to yours.”

— Sophocles, tr. Robert Bagg | Elektra

[ancientsstudies]

The Course of Empire is a series of five paintings created by Thomas Cole and The series of paintings depicts the growth and fall of an imaginary city.

The first painting,The Savage, depicts the ideal state of the natural world. It is a healthy world, unchanged by humanity.

The second painting The Arcadian or Pastoral State, shows humanity at peace with the land.

The third painting, The Consummation of Empire, shifts the viewpoint to the opposite shore, approximately the site of the clearing in the first painting.  The look of the painting suggests the height of Ancient Rome. The decadence seen in every detail of this cityscape foreshadows the inevitable fall of this mighty civilization.

In the fourth painting, Destruction, it seems that a fleet of enemy warriors has overthrown the city's defenses, sailed up the river, and is busy ransacking the city and killing its inhabitants.

The fifth painting, Desolation, shows the results decades later. This gloomy picture suggests how all empires could be after their fall. It is a harsh possible future in which humanity has been destroyed by its own hand.

Wikipedia.