Paintings

A true icon of the Brera Art Gallery, Francesco Hayez's Kiss was once used on a well-known chocolate brand's boxes to celebrate Valentine's Day. Painted by Hayez at the age of seventy, the work stood out immediately for its sensual charge in an era that was still puritanical.

If you've ever walked through a museum and stopped in front of a medieval painting featuring a baby, you probably noticed something unsettling. That baby doesn't have chubby cheeks or an innocent gaze. It has the face of a fifty-year-old man after an exhausting workday: a receding hairline, deep forehead wrinkles, and an expression that seems to say he's tired of life.

In September 1888, in a square in Arles, a man painted at night. It wasn't a casual gesture: he had forbidden himself from using black. Not a single drop. For him, darkness wasn't the absence of color, but deep blue, violet, green. The result was "Café Terrace at Night," one of Vincent van Gogh's most recognizable paintings.

Long before horror films coined the term "gore," painting had already explored that uncomfortable territory where death, violence, and the grotesque coexist. From medieval visions of hell to Romantic nightmares, some of history's most celebrated artists chose not to look away from what most people prefer to avoid: the wounded body, decaying flesh, the exact instant of death.