Botticelli's Inferno
You might have noticed the drawings Botticelli made for Dante's Inferno in the gallery I linked to in the previous post. I've collected all 27 of the drawings displayed on the site and linked them on here. I'm a fan of the more imaginative interpretations of Hell and Botticelli's unfinished drawings are among some of the best. Click on the numbers below to view Botticelli's illustrations of Dante's Inferno.

"Botticelli often concerned himself during his lifetime with illustrations for Dante's Divine Comedy. He executed the drawings from the cycle illustrated here over a relatively long period of time, from about 1480 to 1500. The identification of these illustrations with the Dante cycle which Botticelli is known to have done for Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco, his great patron from the Medici family, seems not improbable.

For some reason unknown to us, the drawings were never completed. Only four of the surviving 93 sheets - nine having been lost in the course of time - are coloured, although this was presumably the original intention for all of them. The drawings are now in the collections of the Staatliche Museen in Berlin and the Vatican Library." - quote from here.

1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 - 6 - 7 - 8 - 9 - 10 - 11 - 12 - 13 - 14 - 15 - 16 - 17 - 18 - 19 - 20 - 21 - 22 - 23 - 24 - 25 - 26 - 27

View some of Botticelli's colored drawings from Dante's Divine Comedy here and here.
Click on the top 3 links here to view most of the remaining drawings from this series. Unfortunately the images are small, but at least you can enjoy the 27 drawings from the Inferno linked above in better detail.

Here is a book available for purchase that has collected all of Botticelli's drawings for Dante's Divine Comedy.

Suloni Robertson



These paintings are illustrations for Dante's Inferno, more of which can be seen in this gallery. These along with works by William Blake, Gustave Dore, Botticelli and others have been used for a project titled "Danteworlds." The following quote sums up what this is about... "Welcome to Danteworlds, an integrated multimedia journey--combining artistic images, textual commentary, and audio recordings--through the three realms of the afterlife (Inferno, Purgatory, Paradise) presented in Dante's Divine Comedy."

Click here to view Danteworlds.

More of Suloni's artwork can be viewed here. Check out the creatures.

Gustave Dore's Illustrations of Don Quixote





















For anyone unfamiliar with the works of Dore it can be difficult to know where to start. His incredibly productive life resulted in a huge body of work. But you might start with his illustrations of Don Quixote published in 1863.
Click on the image above to see one of my favorite prints from the collection. The following scene of the giants carved in half is another fantastic scene from the book.





















And on the subject of Dore, here is another of my favorite works from him which I think is taken from his illustrated version of Orlando furioso.





















View more works here and here.

Jon Vermilyea
Some really insane illustrations on this site. The Masters Of The Universe drawings are both hillarious and disturbing.

Site found thanks to Lizz Hickey.

Ralph McQuarrie





Carrying on with the pulp Science Fiction artwork, here is a selection of paintings by Ralph McQuarrie. This is the artist responsible for most of the imagery found in the original trilogy of Star Wars films. Looking through his paintings it's unfortunate to see how much of his more fantastic imagery wasn't used in the films. The giant albino spider thing would have been great to see on film, or that giant troll creature in the Ewok village.

You can find more artwork by McQuarrie in this flickr gallery.

There is a large art book collecting much of Ralph McQuarrie's paintings coming out later this year. For details on this book and how to obtain it, click here.

Johnny Bruck

These two alien inspired paintings were made for Perry Rhodan, a science fiction series published in Germany since 1961. Looking at Bruck's bibliography I noticed he was resposible for painting 1,800 covers from the series.

The following gallery has a selection of interior illustrations with many bizarre creature designs such as the one below.





















More artwork by Bruck can be found on this thread which concerns duplicated covers.