More Matt Furie Madness










Head over to Matt's website to see more recent work.

Someone needs to tell Cartoon Network to give Matt his own animated show!

The Secret World (scene from videogame)
- source

Dungeons And Dragons Covers
Cover illustration from Advanced Dungeons and Dragons "Manual of the Planes" I think this might be my new desktop.

Cover of Dungeons and Dragons Rule Book, 1980

Queen of the Demonweb Pits

The Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth

I downloaded twenty or thirty some gigs worth of Dungeons and Dragons books last year that I intended to poke through and extract interesting images from. I still plan to do that and it will be an epic post when it happens, just not sure when I'll get around to it.

Jack The Giant Killer (1962) Clip
Sure, by comparison these stop motion creatures are crude next to anything by the hands of Ray Harryhausen, but they're still fun to watch!

And youtube user davidsytvid has put a lot of time into uploading a great variety of old science fiction and horror films. One of my favorites on the list is "Island Of Terror" starring Peter Cushing. Check out the plot.. "A small island community is overrun with creeping, blobbish, tentacled monsters which liquefy and digest the bones from living creatures. The community struggles to fight back."

Konrad Von Gesner - Details From "Historia Animalium" (History Of Animals) 1551-87










"Historiae animalium ("Histories of the Animals") published at Zurich in 1551-58 and 1587, is an encyclopedic work of an inventory of renaissance zoology by Conrad Gesner, a doctor and professor at the Carolinum, the precursor of the University of Zurich. It is the first modern zoological work that attempts to describe all the animals known, and the first bibliography of natural history writings. The five volumes of natural history of animals consists of more than forty five hundred pages.

The Historiae animalium was Gesner's magnum opus, and was the most widely read of all the Renaissance natural histories. The work was so popular that Gesner's abridgement, Thierbuch ("Animal Book"), was published in Zurich in 1563, and in England Edward Topsell translated and condensed it as a Historie of foure-footed beastes (London: William Jaggard, 1607). Gesner’s monumental work is a record that attempts to build a connection between the ancient knowledge of the animal world and modern science. He then adds his own observations to formulate an all-inclusive description of the natural history of animals.

Gesner’s Historiae animalium is based on the Old Testament, Hebrew, Greek, and Latin sources. The encyclopedic work is a compilation from folklore and ancient and medieval texts. The work compiled the inherited knowledge of ancient naturalists like Aristotle, Pliny and Aelian. Gesner was known as "the Swiss Pliny." For information on mythical animals he relied heavly on the material from the Physiologus. His research style was based on four principles: observation, dissection, travel, and an accurate description of the animals. These viewpoints from actual experience were new to Renaissance scholars. They had usually depended on information obtained solely on previous Classical authors for their reference material.


Though in his large work Gesner sought to distinguish facts from myths, his encyclopedic work also included mythical creatures and imaginary beasts, intermixed with the strange newly discovered animals of the East Indies, those of the far north and animals brought back from the New World. The work included extensive information on mammals, birds, fish, and reptiles. It described in detail their daily habits and movements. It also included their uses in medicine and nutrition. " - quote source

Illustrations from this work were previously mentioned here a few years ago.

Mythical Monster (Werewolf?) Devouring Woman
Artist/date unknown.

A Little More From Ulisse Aldrovandi's Monstrorum Historia





























So ends, for now, the best of the best of my hunt through the hundreds of bizarre images across Aldrovandi's books.

Illustrations From Ulisse Aldrovandi's Monstrorum Historia (1642) and De piscibus libri V. et de cetis lib. unus. (1613)






























































All works were found at the digital collection of the University of Strasbourg.

And previously mentioned here.