Marea

Giordano, 1666. 13 feet tall. The light falls from above but the darkness pulls harder. Everyone posts this as 'good vs evil' but that's not what you see when it's in front of you. It's 4 meters tall. You have to crane your neck. Michael on top is perfect. The fallen guys are a tangle of ass, wings, feet, hands grabbing nothing. They are falling and it looks like they are finally free to be ugly. That's the Caravaggio in him... he loved painting street bodies more than saints. They called him 'Luca fa presto' (Luca does quickly) because he painted insanely fast.

Monet slowly going blind... you can feel the rage in his paintings.

This is a kidnapping. Rubens painted it around 1620. In the myth, Oreithyia is just playing by the river with her friends when Boreas, the North Wind, sees her. He wants her, tries to woo her, fails, and finally becomes a storm and takes her. Most painters made this myth look seductive. Rubens made it look like what Ovid wrote. A woman being taken while people scream and can do nothing. He painted this when he was at the peak of his Baroque phase. The painting is small, about 48 × 36 cm, but it feels massive. It's in Vienna now.

This is what grief looks like when you carve it in marble. William Wetmore Story made it after his wife Emelyn died in 1895, after 50 years together. “It represents what I feel” he said. He died later same year, at 78. Both of them are buried together, right here, under this monument in Rome's Non-Catholic Cemetery. I can't even imagine how he must have felt carving this.