Elihu Vedder (1836 - 1923)

Soul in Bondage, 1891-92

Elihu Vedder (1836 - 1923) was an American symbolist painter, book illustrator, and poet, born in New York City. He is best known for his fifty-five illustrations for Edward FitzGerald's translation of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. He was involved in the bohemian 'Pfaff's' coffee house group, and painted some of his most memorable paintings notable for their visionary nature, romantic imagery and often Oriental influences. Paintings of this time include 'The Roc's Egg', 'The Fisherman and the Genii' and one of his most famous works, 'Lair of the Sea Serpent.' Ηe was influenced by the Pre-Raphaelites, and was a friend of Simeon Solomon. He was also influenced by the work of English and Irish mystics such as William Blake and William Butler Yeats. He was commissioned him to design glassware, mosaics and statuettes for the company. He decorated the hallway of the Reading Room of the Washington Library of Congress, and his mural paintings can still be seen there.

The Cumaean Sibyl,1876

The Fates gathering in the stars, 1887

The Sphinx of the seashore, 1879

Medusa, 1867

TheVenetian model, 1878

The last man

The morning Glory, 1899

Model posing, 1881

The Questioner of the Sphinx, 1863

Some illustrations for Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám 1883-84:

Ed Repka

Edward J. Repka (born October 22, 1970) is an American artist best known for creating album covers for metal bands as well as shirt designs, including those featuring Megadeth's mascot Vic Rattlehead. Repka's portfolio also includes Dark Angel's logo and model designs for the Hellraiser films. He works for the National Entertainment Collectibles Association as their lead painter and head of art direction. Repka's artwork based on the original Universal Studios film The Wolf Man was used as the cover art for the first issue of horror magazine HorrorHound.

List of works

3 Inches of Blood - Advance & Vanquish
Aggression (Spanish band) - Moshpirit
After All - Dawn of the Enforcer
Abiotx - Straight to Hell
Atheist - Piece of Time
Austrian Death Machine - Total Brutal
Austrian Death Machine - Double Brutal
The Black Zombie Procession - Mess with the Best, Die Like the Rest
Besieged - Victims Beyond All Help
Circle Jerks - VI
Condition Critical - Operational Hazard
Deal With it - End Time Prophecies
Death - Scream Bloody Gore
Death - Leprosy
Death - Spiritual Healing
Defiance - Product of Society
Defiance - Beyond Recognition
Dismantle - Satanic Force
Eliminator - Breaking the Wheel
Elm Street - Barbed Wire Metal
Evil Survives - Judas Priest Live
Evil Survives - Powerkiller
Exeloume - Fairytale of Perversion
Evildead - Annihilation of Civilization
Evildead - The Underworld
Faith Or Fear - Instruments of Death
Fallen Man - Mercenary
Frade Negro - Black Souls in the Abyss (Brazilian Band)
Guillotine - Blood Money
Hexen - State of Insurgency
Hirax - El Rostro de la Muerte
Holy Grail - Improper Burial
Hyades - And the Worst Is Yet to Come
Hyades - The Roots of Trash
Infinite Translation - Impulsive Attack
Infinite Translation - Masked Reality
Killjoy - Compelled by Fear
Ludichrist - Immaculate Deception
Mad Maze - Frames of Alienation
Massacre - From Beyond
Massacre - Inhuman Condition
Megadeth - "Holy Wars... The Punishment Due"
Megadeth - Peace Sells... But Who's Buying?
Megadeth - "Hangar 18"
Megadeth - Rust in Peace
Megadeth - Rusted Pieces
Merciless Death - Evil In The Night
Municipal Waste - Hazardous Mutation
Miss Djax - Inferno
Napalm - Cruel Tranquility
Necro - The Pre-Fix for Death
NOFX - S&M Airlines
Nuclear Assault - Game Over
Pitiful Reign - Visual Violence
Possessed - Beyond the Gates
Ravage - The End of Tomorrow
Sanctuary - Refuge Denied
S.O.B. - Gate of Doom
Solstice - Solstice
Steelwing - Lord of the Wasteland
Suicidal Angels - Dead Again
Suicidal Angels - Bloodbath
Suicide Watch - Global Warning
Toxic Holocaust - Hell on Earth
Toxik - World Circus
Toxik - Think This
Ultra-Violence - Privilege to Overcome
Uncle Slam - Will Work for Food
Uncle Slam - When God Dies
Untimely Demise - City of Steel
Untimely Demise - Full Speed Metal
Various Artists - Butchering The Beatles - A Headbashing Tribute
Various Artists - Thrash or be Thrashed - An International Tribute to Thrash
Venom - Here Lies
Vio-lence - Eternal Nightmare
Violent Playground - Thrashin Blues
Whiplash - Unborn Again
Wrathchild America - Climbin' the Walls
Wild - Calles de Fuego (Spanish band)
Wild - La Nueva Orden
Zero Down - Good Times... At the Gates of Hell

Mummified Birds in lake Natron-Tanzania

"Across the Ravaged Land" is an album by the photographer Nick Brand about the animals in Africa that are in danger to extinction. The most stunning series of photos are those from lake Natron in Tanzania. The extreme temperature (60 degrees Centigrade) salinity and alcalitity of the lake is lethal for any bird falls into the waters. The bodoies wer covered with crystalized minerals and became hard like carved in stone keeping all the details of their body. Some such petrified birds were collected and photographed like being alive. The result was so macabre and shocking. You can visit his site to have a view about this album, not only about the macabre exhibits of lake Natron.

Cadaver tombs

A cadaver tomb or transi (or "memento mori tomb", Latin for "reminder of death") is a type of gisant (recumbent effigy tomb) featuring an effigy in the macabre form of a decomposing corpse. The topos was particularly characteristic of the later Middle Ages. A depiction of a rotting cadaver in art (as opposed to a skeleton) is called a transi. However, the term 'cadaver tomb' can really be applied to other varieties of monuments, e.g. with skeletons or with the deceased completely wrapped in a shroud. In the "double-decker" tombs, in Erwin Panofsky's phrase, a carved stone bier displays on the top level the recumbent effigy or gisant of a person as they were before death or soon after their death, where they may be life-sized and sometimes represented kneeling in prayer, and as a rotting cadaver on the bottom level, often shrouded and sometimes complete with worms and other flesh-eating wildlife. The iconography is regionally distinct: the depiction of vermin on these cadavers is more commonly found on the continent, and especially in the German regions. The dissemination of cadaver imagery in the late-medieval Danse Macabre may also have influenced the iconography of cadaver monuments.

Cadaver tombs were a departure, in monumental architecture, from the usual practice of showing an effigy of the person as they were in life. An early example is the famous effigy on the multi-layered wall-tomb of Cardinal Jean de La Grange (died 1402) in Avignon. The term can also be used for a monument that shows only the cadaver without the live person. The sculpture is intended as a didactic example of how transient earthly glory is, since it depicts what we all finally become. Kathleen Cohen's study of five French ecclesiastics who commissioned transi tombs determined that common to all of them was a successful worldliness that seemed almost to demand them shocking display of transient mortality. A classic example is the "Transi de René de Chalons" by Ligier Richier, in the church of Saint Etienne in Bar-le-Duc, France. These cadaver tombs, with their demanding sculptural program, were made only for high-ranking nobles, usually royalty or bishops or abbots, because one had to be rich to afford to have one made, and powerful enough to be allotted space for one in a church. Some tombs for royalty were double tombs, for both a king and queen. The French kings Louis XII, Francis I and Henry II were doubly portrayed, in effigy and as naked cadavers, in their double double-decker tombs in the Basilica of Saint-Denis outside Paris. Yet there are also other varieties, such as cadaver imagery on incised slabs and monumental brasses (including the so-called 'shroud brasses'), of which many can still be found in England.