This list gathers twelve famous paintings of fire, from Piero di Cosimo's forest fire of about 1505 to Salvador Dalí's burning giraffe of 1937. Along the way, fire burns a parliament, a fleet, an ironworks and a whole city, and it sends one painter to court over a few gold sparks.
Fire is the rare subject that lights its own picture. The brightest color sits inside the scene, so every face, wall and wave around the flames either catches the glow or falls into shadow.
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Only a few of these painters stood in front of the fire they painted. Most worked afterward, from memory, from witnesses or from ancient texts. Before photography, their canvases were the only way for people who had missed a burning city or an eruption to see one.
That is also how the twelve were chosen. In each one, the fire carries the picture, as an event someone lived through or as the sign of something larger: a myth, a war, an industry, the end of the world.
The list counts down from twelve to one. It starts with a small Surrealist panel of 1937 and ends with Turner's view of the Houses of Parliament in flames.
12. Salvador Dali, The Burning Giraffe (1937)
The animal that gives Salvador Dalí's The Burning Giraffe its name is easy to miss. It stands far off on the horizon, small and quiet, with flames running up its back, while two women in the foreground pay it no attention.
Dalí made the panel in 1937, in the second year of the Spanish Civil War, the conflict that was tearing his own country apart.
At the time he still belonged to the Surrealists, the Paris group of artists who painted dreams and the unconscious. The group would break with him two years later.
Dalí said what the giraffe meant to him. He called it a masculine cosmic monster of the apocalypse and described the whole picture as a premonition of the war he saw coming. The small burning shape on the horizon was his warning.
Yet his effort went into the two women in front, and they are stranger still. He built them like furniture: small drawers slide open from one woman's chest and from her thigh, as if her body were a cabinet.
Both figures look ready to collapse. Thin crutches prop them from behind, the way builders shore up a wall that is about to fall.
That imbalance is the oddest thing about the panel, which is only 35 centimeters tall. The catastrophe Dalí claimed to foresee fills a few centimeters of its horizon, while the drawers and crutches take over the whole foreground.
At a Glance
Artist: Salvador Dalí (Spanish, 1904 to 1989), a leading Surrealist painter
Painted: 1937
Medium: Oil on wood panel
Size: 35 × 27 cm (13.8 × 10.6 in)
Where to see it: Kunstmuseum Basel, Switzerland (Emanuel Hoffmann Foundation, permanent loan)
11. Ivan Aivazovsky, Battle of Chesme at Night (1848)
On the night of July 6 to 7, 1770, the Ottoman navy lay at anchor in the bay of Chesme, off the coast of what is now Turkey, its ships packed so close that a fire could jump from hull to hull. In Battle of Chesme at Night, the Russian sea painter Ivan Aivazovsky sets half the sky above that bay ablaze.
He finished the canvas in 1848, and the night he shows is not quite the one that happened. He had a good reason to change it.