10 classic paintings that will make you cringe

In the world of images, there have been different ways of treating terror, horror (which are not the same) and the darkest concepts that can be configured in a human mind. The fear of death and the mystery of the unknown has led the artists of universal history to represent these images with pure genius.

In this post I would like to travel back in time and observe some of the most genuine works in the history of painting. Compositions that marked a before and after and that they did not leave anyone indifferent.

Dante and Virgil in Hell it is a rather curious representation. What might appear to us to be a homosexual scene is in reality a violent struggle between two souls in the presence of the devil himself. Hyperrealism stands out in the treatment of the volumes of his characters, the proportions and anatomical structures. William-Adolphe Bouguereau created this image around 1850.

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This image (the area that most caught my attention) belongs to a fragment of a triptych called The Garden of Earthly Delightsby El Bosco. Although the complete work also represents heaven and the earthly world, it must be said that the hell that the giant Hieronymus Bosch presents to us is truly sick, violent. A character with the head of a bird of prey sitting on a toilet stands out, and with a cauldron on his head. It is thought that it could be Satan devouring the condemned and defecating them in a cesspool in which other characters vomit filth or excrete gold, the latter perhaps as an allusion to greed. Under the cloak of Satan a naked woman is forced to look at herself in a convex mirror placed on the buttocks of a demon, alluding to the sin of pride.

Saturn devouring a son It is one of the mythical paintings of Francisco de Goya. The author presents us with a father with a look injected with madness. He mutilates the adult body of his son in a bloodbath and on a void shrouded in shadow. It has been one of the most questioned works. Cannibalism could be a reflection of the melancholy and lust for destruction that are constantly present in his series of black paintings.

Horror, Satanism and eroticism could be the words that best define the author Johann Heinrich Füssli, a Swiss painter who set a trend during the XNUMXth century. This work is titled The nightmare, and was inspired by Giulio Romano's Dream of Hecuba. A sleeping maiden appears in the scene, she is possessed by an incubus, a type of demon that appears in erotic dreams. Although today it would not cause excessive fear, the truth is that at the time it caused quite intense reactions in its audience. Especially because of the horse's face that appears in the background, contemplating the scene with a ghostly air.

He's the theme of Judith beheading Holofernes It is one of the Old Testament episodes that has been most frequently represented in the history of art, however, it is from the hand of Artemisia Gentileschi where it acquires greater power and expressiveness. The biblical heroine, together with her maid, goes into the enemy camp, seduces and then beheads Holofernes, the enemy general. In the work the most violent act is shown and without any type of censorship or taboo. The blood splatters being what stands out the most the realistic treatment of the own blood.

The smiling spider It is one of those paintings that arouses some concern without really knowing why. His lost gaze is striking, we really don't know where that face looks, we only know that it smiles in a mysterious way. The author, Odilon Redon, was characterized by seeking the equivalent between the emotion caused by an experience materialized in an object, in an image. His works have always been oriented to the concepts of occultism and mystery. With this author, symbols become the most powerful instrument of communication and vehicle to transcend the material, reaching dimensions of other material worlds, rare and foreign to the human being.

The author of this work (Anatomical parts), Théodore Géricault, received human remains from the morgue on request to be able to paint them. It is a rather gore painting that has aroused the attention and curiosity of the public, precisely because of the fear of death itself. As we are terrified that our body will one day be the object of decomposition and forgetting itself, we try not to talk about the subject of death, that is when it becomes a taboo subject. We can't talk about it, but at the same time it's almost like a necessity.

Massacre of the innocents, is a painting by Peter Paul Rubens that stands out for being extremely violent to the point of hurting our sensibilities. In this image an atrocious scene is depicted. Dozens of babies are snatched from their mothers' arms and thrown to the ground. The anatomical and compositional treatment is amazing and the goal more than achieved. It is almost impossible not to feel helpless or terrified when contemplating the composition.

This work called Two old men eating soupIt also belongs to the series of black paintings by Francisco de Goya. Two old men appear in the scene, which we are not very clear about whether they are men or women. The one on the left has a white kerchief and appears to have no teeth. The one on the right is chilling: He has a totally cadaverous face, his eyes are two black slits and the texture of his face looks totally like a skull.

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They are statements by the mythical artist Edvard Munch, of Norwegian origin. In his work The Scream He presents us with an androgynous figure (we cannot say if he is a man or a woman) and with an attitude of deep fear, even desperate wrapped in a sea of ​​cold and warm tones, a kind of chromatic and light chaos seems to surround everything.