A rowboat, a white figure, a coffin and a rock of cypresses: Arnold Böcklin's Isle of the Dead became the most reproduced dark picture of its day.

A god eating his child on the wall of a dining room, a severed head painted on a parade shield, skeletons tending a garden: eight paintings that have unsettled viewers for centuries, and what their painters meant by them.

A burial in the snow, a ruined Gothic church and a grove of dead oaks: Caspar David Friedrich painted The Abbey in the Oakwood as the dark companion to The Monk by the Sea.

William-Adolphe Bouguereau was twenty-five when he painted Canto XXX of the Inferno — Schicchi biting Capocchio, a winged demon hovering above. The 1850 canvas is the outlier of his career and a fixed image in dark academia. Reading the painting, the canto, and where it belongs on the wall.