load on p. 1, at bottom of the page The Web-Site The site is intended to provided a visual accompaniment to the course. For a small group of artists long associated with the genre, a series of images open the door to some of the constant themes, patterns and problems of the fantastic. Authors appear in brief excerpts that capture a particular mood or moment of the text involved. Browsers are encouraged to explore the universe of all of these artists in greater detail by consulting serious bibliographies and critical studies in the library. load on Bosch page. The work of the Flemish painter Hieronymus (Jerome) Bosch has long been closely identified with a demonic strain of the fantastic. In Bosch's great triptych masterpiece, The Garden of Delights (Madrid, The Prado) scenes of edenic beauty stand side by side with the teeming suffering of "The Musician's Hell" from which these selections have been taken. Bosch combines the frightening strangeness of his stagings with the utter conviction of the dreamer that the vision must be real, can't be real. The presence of hybrid creatures, the topos of the world turned upside down, the looming sense of a brutal awakening are among Bosch's favorite devices in his fantastic visions. All are nonetheless spiced with Bosch's cruelly intelligent humor. index p. of Brueghel The two works shown here, Tower of Babel and The Triumph of Death find their inspiration, like other of Brueghel's works, in the Bible and in the religious supernatural. The Tower of Babel presents us with a creation that establishes space as an important parameter of the fantastic. Whether immense, as in this colossal creation, or claustrophobic, as in the stifling and atrocious world of The Triumph of Death, fantastic space can be understood as the locus in which other-worldly event occur. index p. of Arcimboldo Giuseppe Arcimboldo, exponent of a baroque "terribilita," enjoyed great success as the court painter of Ferdinand I and his successors. His discomfiting portraits, constructed entirely out of natural materials (as here, in three of his "Four Seasons series), occasion uncomfortable reactions in viewers, who have to wonder what it is they are seeing. Arcimboldo experienced a major revival at the hands of the surrealists, for whom the juxtaposition of the familiar and the odd constituted a fundamental technique. index p. of Friedrich The landscapes of Friedrich combine realism and visionary transport in ways unique to him. The greatest German master of landscape painting of the 19th century speaks with conviction in his work of the power of nature and the awe it inspires. In his memorable canvasses, elemental nature dwarfs the human actor (Winter Landscape with Church), provokes an eerie sense of altered perception (Mist, Trees in Moonlight) or leads the solitary viewer into an encounter with the sublime (Traveler Looking Over Sea of Fog). In common with his spiritual heir, Odilon Redon, Friedrich believed that the artist must close his eyes to see... index p. of Fuseli The Nightmare has long stood as the pre-eminent masterpiece of fantastic painting. Created in 1781, on the threshold of the era when The Fantastic itself emerged as a specific genre, The Nightmare enjoyed a huge success among a British generation already hungry for the strong sensations of Gothic literature. It was reproduced again and again in engravings and popular prints over an entire generation. The erotic charge of the painting, its association of the demonic, the sexual and the oneiric, and its brazen acknowledgment of voyeuristic pleasure would become the grist for the mill of psychoanalysis. index p. for Grandville Jean-Ignace Gérard, known as Grandville, is acknowledged as one of the most inventive and prolific book-illustrators of the first half of the nineteenth century in France. Grandville illustrated dozens of works, produced literally thousands of drawings in his brief lifetime, and remains perhaps best -known for the three books most marked by his acute gift for fantastic design: The Animated Flowers; The Public and Private Lives of the Animals, and his incontestable masterpiece: Another World. All the images on these pages devoted to Grandville come from that work, the strange tale of an otherworldly voyage that takes place on Earth. Among the disquieting metamorphoses depicted here, the series of ballerina-marionettes, the war of the decks of cards (which Lewis Carroll apparently knew) and the men transformed by scoptophilic lust into phallic eyeballs, are among the most striking. index page for Goya Goya ranks among the very greatest of Fantastic painters. In several series of astounding engravings which recall the master of the grotesque, Jacques Callot., Goya plumbed depths of human cruelty, stupidity and suffering in distorted images so solidly anchored in the real world that, in the words of André Barret, the "social fantastic was born." In "the sleep of reason produces monsters" he created an image of the nightmare/waking antithesis so expressive that it has become almost emblematic of the Fantastic. And in the fourteen dark paintings of his final, pained years, he portrayed a world of solitude, cruelty and dread. The gruesome image of Saturn devouring his Children takes from ancient mythology an image of fearsome violence well-suited to the horrors of the era in which the painter lived. index page for Grünewald Mathias Grünewald belongs to the family of Bosch, Brueghel and Schongauer. His paintings are born of the mystery of the supernatural, and exhibit teeming life and hideous, demonic creations, as we see in these details from The Temptation of Saint Anthony. One of the nine panels Grünewald executed for the altar piece of Issenheim, this painting reprises a favorite subject of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the hermit saint assailed by the entire arsenal of infernal monsters representing every weakness, every ugly human failing. It is a subject rich in implications for the fantastic, staging the drama of the double, the riddle of the hallucinatory or altered state of mind, and, not least, the problems of evil and of guilt. The theme would be revived in the nineteenth century, the golden age of the Fantastic, most notably by Flaubert. It would then tempt, in its turn, numerous book illustrators. index page for Bresdin Bresdin's prints rank with the greatest achievements in nineteenth century etching-indeed, he produced only one painting, but over one hundred-fifty engravings. Drawn to subjects that combine the biblical supernatural with the mysteries of nature and of death, he produced images of such brilliant, minute detail that "they could stand any degree of magnification without needing it" (Harold Joachim). The fantastic landscape of the "Comédie de la Mort" has much in common with Bosch or with the theme of the temptation of the hermit, even as it suggests an animistic vision of nature in which, as Baudelaire claimed in "Correspondances," "living pillars emit garbled words." index page for Moreau The visionary universe of Gustave Moreau was recognized by the surrealists as an inexhaustible font of the truth of the dream world. Moreau frequented used mythical or biblical subjects as a springboard for the transcription of exalted stagings of the struggle between the sacred and the profane, the dream and the waking. Moreau's is a world of mystery made palpable through excess in ornement, an extravagant and brilliant use of color, and a never absent sensuality. Their effect on viewers leaves an impression frequently encountered in the Fantastic of an enigma whose solution rests just beyond the visible horizon. index page for Redon Odilon Redon is the master of the unreal, of dreamscapes in black and visions in brilliant pastel colors achieved by no other painter of his time. Redon was a literary painter: his tastes were formed by masters of the Fantastic.With his prints he created brooding accompaniments for works by Poe, a hommage to Goya, and a peerless series of interpretations of Flaubert's Temptation of St Anthony. With his later discovery of color and his preferred medium of pastels, Redon moved into a different realm of visions, in which the beauty of the color seems inscribed in the very silence of the dream. index page for Hernandez José Hernandez accounts for much of the macabre and fearful imagery in his work by recalling that he lived opposite a cemetery, and spent much of his imaginative life as a teenager "travelling in that forbidden region" (Dan Harlap). Few contemporary exponents of the Fantastic are as disturbing as Hernandez, I whose work the organic visibly decays as the inorganic comes to life. Another, and no less important aspect of his work are the passages and doorways that stand as mute invitations to the exploration of elsewhere. Where does that paved road lead? index page for Dali Surrealism imparted a new impetus to the Fantastic; indeed, most surrealists start from a fantastic premise in which dreams and waking, the conscious and the subconscious, nature and the supernatural are not distinct but rather continuous states or categories. Of the many surrealists, Dali, with his taste for provocation, and his realistic style in the depiction of strange and pointedly bizarre visions, seems to capture an essential feature of the fusion of surrealism and the Fantastic. index page for Escher M. C. Escher, captain of the fourth and the fifth dimensions, master of the woodcut as medium of a voyage into "fearful symmetry." The notion of a fantatsic space reaches its apogee in Escher's compelling evocations of impossible geometries, dizzying perspectives and place that we can't get to from here. When up is down, and inside is out, where is here? Escher's fantastic engravings seem the perfect spatial accompaniment to the enigmas of Borges, his worlds within worlds, his times out of time.