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City of Saints and Madmen

Jeff VanderMeer’s wonderful and award-winning fantasy tales of the sinister city of Ambergris are now back in print in the US from a major publisher. This is good to see, not only because the book is well worth your attention but also because I helped design the interior, providing title pages for the stories and designing and illustrating the whole of the ‘King Squid’ section. Fantasy is a meagre description for this book, it’s far more inventive and intelligent than the mass of works that labour under that description in the shops. Ditch your doorstop dragon sagas and give yourself a treat!

Filippo Morghen’s Voyage to the Moon

It’s a shame there isn’t more of this imaginative work from Filippo Morghen (1730–1777). In a series of etchings from around 1766 he presents the moon as a tropical world inhabited by the 18th century conception of New World savages. I especially like the hunter on his winged serpent (above) and the elaborate trap set to behead a wary beast (below). The explanatory text is from this print collection which also has large copies of the pictures.

Filippo Morghen was a member of a large family of artists. His brother Giovanni was a painter and printmaker and his son, Rafaello, was a printmaker who specialized in reproductive prints after Raphael and Leonardo. Filippo himself was a designer and printmaker. In addition to the present series on the theme of a voyage to the moon, Morghen is known for a series of plates detailing antiquities from Herculaneum and for views of the environs of Naples.

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Skaters

The art of Karl Friedrich Schinkel, 1781–1841

Cathedral Towering over a Town (1813).

Karl Friedrich Schinkel was a German painter and Neo-Classical architect. These paintings, produced early in his career, strongly resemble those of his contemporary Caspar David Friedrich, using landscape as a metaphor and with a similar attention to the quality of natural light. Apparently Schinkel thought too much of the resemblance; after seeing Friedrich’s Monk by the Sea he decided he could never equal Friedrich’s mastery and so concentrated solely on architecture. The picture below of the Queen of the Night is a design for Mozart’s The Magic Flute. Mercury Rev used the painting on the cover of their Secret for a Song single.

Morning (1813).

Medieval City on a River (1815).

The Queen of the Night (1816).

The Banks of the Spree near Stralau (1817).

Vintage magazine art I

Magazineart.org has a great selection of covers from the golden age of illustrated American magazines. Not complete by any means but there’s some great art and design there, and the covers of Science and Invention are especially fun. Interesting to see that the technique of having a figure or object partly obscure the magazine title isn’t a recent invention at all.

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