So cool.

World Myths & Legends in Art.

The other day, I was having dinner w/another art historian, Henry, and we got to talking about Pre-Raphaelite painting. I mentioned that there was one painting that I really wanted to see, but of course I couldn't remember anything about it. I saw a slide of it once in an art history class 13 or 14 years ago, and all I really remembered was that it was of a family, and the children were playing w/toy animals on the father's lap, and the animals were supposed to be symbolic of the nations involved in some war or other. Was it a Balkan war? I couldn't quite remember. Henry posited it that it was probably the Crimean War, which sounded just right to me, so we started digging through all the art books on the shelves trying to find this painting because he had never seen it.

No luck. I forgot about it for a bit, but just now spent some time looking for it on the internet. After a few false starts, I finally found it, and not only that, I found the coolest web site describing it. The site has a photo of the painting w/rollover features. Point the mouse at the appropriate part of the painting (not the smaller image at the top of the page, but the larger one a little down on the right) and a detail pops to the foreground. It is an excellent use of scripting language, it really is.

So, I give you Sir John Everett Millais's Peace Concluded, one of only a handful of Pre-Raphaelite paintings I'd walk across the street to look at.