Twelve stories about the darkest side of art history, sorted by subject: grief, hell, ghosts, witches, plague, madness, violence and fear. Every list already published on this site lives here, one click away from the rest.
Grief and Death
Millais painted Ophelia drowning in flowers in 1852. Gericault painted the survivors of a real shipwreck in 1819. Twelve of the saddest paintings ever made, from van der Weyden's 15th century Descent from the Cross to Van Gogh's final year, are gathered in The Saddest Paintings in Art History.
Hell and the Devil
Bosch, Giotto, Signorelli and a 25 year old Bouguereau all painted hell as an actual place, mapped level by level in Hell in Painting: 12 Famous Visions. The devil who runs it, from medieval goat gods to Vrubel's fallen angel, gets his own gallery in Famous Devil Paintings.
Bouguereau painted that hell scene decades before Birth of Venus made him famous. William Adolphe Bouguereau, The Complete Story covers both halves of his career.
Ghosts and Nightmares
Fuseli painted an incubus crouched on a sleeping woman's chest in 1781, one of the most copied images in art history. It anchors Famous Ghost Paintings and reappears at the center of Nightmares in Painting: 12 Works That Haunt.
Before the Royal Academy came calling, Fuseli trained as a Zurich minister and fled the city after exposing a corrupt magistrate in a pamphlet. Henry Fuseli: The Complete Story starts there, long before The Nightmare.
Witches and the Occult
Durer engraved a witch riding backward on a goat. Goya painted a witches' sabbath in 1798. Waterhouse painted Circe and a magic circle drawn in fire. Twelve paintings of witchcraft are collected in Witches in Art.
Plague and Mortality
Bruegel's Triumph of Death and Holbein's Dance of Death set the tone for how European painters pictured mass death, covered in Plague in Art: 12 Paintings. The same warning shrinks to a tabletop of skulls and hourglasses in Famous Vanitas Paintings, and turns into a public procession of skeletons in Skeletons and the Danse Macabre.
Madness
Goya painted an asylum lit by a single barred window. Van Gogh painted his final year from inside one. Twelve works about how painters saw mental illness are gathered in Madness in Painting: 12 Works.
Violence and Execution
Caravaggio painted Salome receiving the severed head of Saint John the Baptist. Goya painted Spanish prisoners facing French rifles in 1808. Twelve depictions of judicial death are gathered in Famous Execution Paintings. He turned that violence on himself too, painting his own face onto the severed head in Why Did Caravaggio Paint Himself as Goliath.
Goya's prisoners still had a cell before they had a firing squad. The waiting itself, the cells and the chains, gets its own set of paintings in prisons in art: 12 paintings about confinement.
Fear Itself
Bosch, Goya, Fuseli, Bruegel and Munch's Scream close out the darkest list of all, in Creepy Paintings: 12 of Art History's Most Terrifying.
Two more rooms in this dark museum deserve a visit. The first holds nightmares: our page on famous dream paintings covers what happens when sleep turns hostile, starting with Fuseli’s demon squatting on a sleeping woman’s chest. The second holds death itself as a character. In the angel of death in painting, the reaper stops being an idea and gets a face, wings, and sometimes a horse. And for the object that ties the whole macabre tradition together, there is the skull. Our page on memento mori in painting follows it from Caravaggio and Frans Hals to a joke Van Gogh played as a student, a skeleton smoking a cigarette, and on to Damien Hirst covering a real skull with diamonds in 2007. Four centuries of painters telling you the same thing: you will die, so look closely while you can. One more room holds everything too strange to file elsewhere: Weird Paintings: 12 of the Strangest gathers the works that resist easy explanation.
Four centuries of drapery and plaster added to cover finished paintings are cataloged in Censored Art: Fig Leaves, Loincloths and Locked Cabinets. The Night Watch alone survived three separate attacks, part of the list in Paintings That Were Slashed or Attacked. Twelve works that got their painters sued or summoned by the Inquisition make up The Most Controversial Paintings. A dozen more paintings earned their painters lawsuits, duels or public condemnation, the list assembled in Paintings That Caused a Scandal. The fallen strap that nearly ended John Singer Sargent's Paris career gets the full account in Madame X by Sargent: The Scandal and the Fallen Strap.
Twelve lists in total, running from a manuscript illustrated around 1150 to a Symbolist canvas the Met bought in 2011.