A collection of artifacts from across Europe, spanning its diverse histories and cultures. This category reflects the continent’s role as a cradle of art, innovation, and conflict through the ages.
Created as part of Rodin’s long and controversial engagement with the French novelist Honoré de Balzac, the sculpture captures not a flattering likeness, but an intense search for intellectual presence and creative force.
This elegant, fragmentary venus piece captures the graceful contrapposto pose and idealized nude female form characteristic of classical Greek sculpture, specifically inspired by Praxiteles's renowned Aphrodite of Knidos (ca. 350 BCE).
The scene has been interpreted as representing either a gathering of gods inculding poseidon for a divine council on Mount Olympus or their departure for the wedding of Peleus and Thetis, a mythological event frequently depicted in Archaic art.
In Roman art, “barbarians” were a recurring motif used to define Roman identity through contrast. Clothing such as trousers (braccae), beards, long hair, and the soft conical Phrygian cap marked figures as foreign and non-Roman.
Wheat and wormwood appears to be a botanical study, but its layered symbolism and refined execution invite the viewer into a deeper contemplation of nature’s invisible forces.
With its bold interplay of mirrored forms, luminous colors, and a precisely divided composition, the The swan no.12 invites contemplation of harmony, transformation, and the tension between opposing forces.
The painting's central forms and color harmonies evoke the "white stone" phase of alchemical transformation, symbolizing spiritual purification and the union of opposites en route to enlightenment, much like an inner journey toward the philosopher's stone.
In this painting from the swan series, the circle, divided yet whole, suggests that opposites are not endpoints but processes seeking unity.
Set against a light beige ground, The seven pointed star feels like a secret diagram of the universe: intimate in scale yet infinite in implication.
When the last brushstroke was set on No. 7 of the US series, the High Masters informed her that her commissioned work was finished, and she largely ceased creating large esoteric paintings thereafter.
Painted in a restrained palette of black, white, beige and subtle metallic glints, the work feels both ancient and startlingly modern – a meditative mandala that invites contemplation of duality, balance and the path of the buddha toward enlightenment.
Though created during her conventional, realistic phase, this self portrait feels like a threshold: the last calm moment before she stepped into the unknown.