Love and death, and painting.

For some reason, I was thinking recently about the paintings that I’ve looooved for years, the paintings that grabbed my attention as a youth and really stuck with me – sometimes to the point of making a special pilgrimage to see them in person. The leading ones are the three below… and I only just realized, upon collecting these images, what a seriously gruesome group of paintings this makes. Am I really that morbid? Yikes.

David Holding the Head of Goliath, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, oil on canvas, 1610, 49”x40” (at the Galleria Borghese)

La Mort de Marat (The Death of Marat), Jacques-Louis David, oil on canvas, 1793, 64”x50” (at the Royal Museums of Fine Arts in Brussels)

Ophelia, John Everett Millais, oil on canvas, 1851-1852, oil on canvas, 30”x44” (at the Tate Britain in London)

For those who are keeping track, that's a body count of three (although I guess there's no actual Goliath body in the Caravaggio one, is there? So maybe that one doesn't count...?).

Boy, I was a weird kid.