The Last Day of Pompeii by Karl Briullov

The Last Day of Pompeii by the Russian painter Karl Briullov was painted in 1830-1833. It is located in the State Russian Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia. However, the painting had not been located there originally. Prince Anatole Demidov, who had commissioned the piece of art, donated it to Nicholas I of Russia. The Russian Emperor had the painting displayed at the Imperial Academy of Art, so that students could view the picture and learn from it. When the Russian Museum opened in 1895, the painting was moved there, so that more people would be able to view it. Also, the painting had been exhibited in Rome and in the Louvre in Paris.

The painting is very large - 15 1/4 feet by 21 1/3 feet - no wonder the artist took three years to complete the painting.

An interesting fact is that the artist portrayed himself as one of the characters of the painting. Can you find him??? You probably don't think so - unless you kow exactly what he looks like. Here's a hint - look for a dude with art supplies. Give up? In the left part of the painting there is a man with a box on his head. In the box are paintbrushes and other supplies. He seems to be the only person not panicing. But then again, why? He's not actually experiencing the terror, unlike the other people he drew.

The painting must have been awfully difficult to draw, since he had to have pictured all of the people and how they react to what's going on around them. The artist did visit the remains of Pompeii, and made many sketches, but I don't think that there was as much left of Pompeii as you can see in the picture. And you cannot fully recreate everything that is happening; I doubt somebody would agree to stand for several hours in the same pose holding another person. And I especially doubt that the artist found a dead bird lying around and decided to take it with him to add to the painting. (The bird is at the bottom of the stairs, to the right of the three people huddled together. It's hard to see in this image... so you should come to Russia to look at the dead bird.)

"The Coronation in Saint-Denis" by Peter Paul Rubens

The Coronation in Saint-Denis by Peter Paul Rubens is part of the Marie de' Medici cycle, a series of 24 paintings. They were commissioned to the artist by Marie de' Medici, the second wife of the French king Henry IV. Marie had ordered the paintings for a gallery in the Luxembourg Palace in Paris. The whole series is now located in the Louvre. Rubens received the commission in the autumn of 1621, and the contract and terms were negotiated and agreed upon by early 1622. The artist was supposed to have two years to work on the whole series, so that the completion would coincide with the time of marriage of Marie's daughter, Henrietta Maria. Twenty-one of the paintings were to be about Marie's own struggles and triumphs in life, the other three were to be portraits of her.
These paintings are simply undescribable - you can stare at it for hours on a computer screen, but it's not even close to seeing it in real life. I had the great fortune to see it in the Louvre, and it's certainly something not to be forgotten. First of all, they are huge - they are all about 12 feet tall, but they vary in width. This one in particular is about 21 feet wide this is one of the largest paintings in the series.. It's surprising that the artist managed to finish 24 paintings (all of which are very large) in only two years, considering the extraordinary amount of detail in each one. You could stare at the picture for hours and find new details all the time.

What I really like about this is how all of the flowing dresses and robes are drawn - they all look real, almost as if you could reach into the picture; step into it.
At first when I was looking at the picture, I though it was fairly average (except for the size), but then I noticed the people flying above everybody - some mythological people. When I looked at the other images, I noticed that most of them had some sort of mythologic scene in a part of the painting. I think that that is a good part of the images. That is what ties them all together, lets you know that they are all part of one series.
I think it's slightly funy that, in an image of a very important event, there are two dogs in the foreground, and one of them seems to be itching. If I were an artist, I would attempt to make something seem better than it actually is; if there was an imperfection, I would ignore it for the painting. Rubens, apparently, was an honest artist.